He can smell weakness. (Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty)
There is something Pavlovian about Argentine leaders: show them low approval ratings and they start salivating over “las Malvinas”. Javier Milei never used to lose much sleep over this rocky, rainy archipelago 300 miles east of Patagonia. In 2024, when his approval ratings hovered just shy of 50%, he agreed to reestablish direct flights from Argentina to the islands; a year earlier he praised Margaret Thatcher as “one of the great leaders in the history of humanity”.
Much though this angered veterans and political opponents in Argentina, it also allowed him to become a Right-wing icon in Britain. Gone were the days of “Gotcha!” and “Argie bastards”: now Thatcher’s heirs had a friend in Buenos Aires. The sideburns, the chainsaw, the herd of cloned (English) mastiffs: he was the perfect maverick. ¡Afuera! became a well-known meme and entered the lexicon: could it not be just as well applied to the ECHR, the BBC, Net Zero, and however many quangos? Soon enough, Kemi Badenoch, who would never call herself “Britain’s Trump”, began describing herself as “Britain’s Milei”: here was a figure a divided party could rally round. Nigel Farage praised Milei’s politics as “Thatcherism on steroids” and said he was thinking about buying Argentine bonds (probably not the wisest use of his £5 million). Liz Truss said Milei was her favorite conservative; he confessed not to know who she was.
But it wasn’t going to last forever. Milei was always going to get less popular, and so he was always going to make a fuss over the Falklands. As the next Argentine election gets closer, and as his approval ratings languish somewhere in the 30s, he needs something to match the chest-thumping of his estranged vice president, for whom we British remain “pirate usurpers”. So, in a speech to the nation on 4 September, he declared that Argentina must “act swiftly” and “show a united front to the world”. The pirates will be vanquished, Argentina redeemed.
It is an occupational hazard of governing Britain that sometimes Argentines will rattle their sabers. Prime ministers have learned to deal with it from time to time since 1982, usually by rolling their eyes. But this time it might be different. What makes the present Falklands flare-up unusually alarming, from the British point of view, is a sinister allusion in Milei’s speech to “winds of change in the world that are favorable to our claim”. “Winds of change”: it is an evocative phrase, famously deployed by Harold Macmillan in Africa in 1960 to describe the inevitability of decolonization. There was no escaping or denying our decline; we could only try to manage it. The Wretched of the Earth were about to have their day, and it would be futile to resist them. Even Right-wingers like Milei — and, for that matter, General Galtieri — cast their struggle for “las Malvinas” as a noble work of anti-colonialism.
That still leaves the timing of Milei’s intervention: and here it’s tempting to imagine that he can smell British weakness. That, anyway, is an appealing explanation of his conduct for critics of Britain’s Labour government at home, many of whom are feeling understandably compromised for having previously lavished Milei with praise. After all, critics of the shambolic Chagos deal can reasonably contend that it might have planted in hostile heads the idea that Britain is no longer able or willing to defend its far-flung possessions. Starmer and Burnham certainly seem to be made of weaker stuff than Mrs Thatcher.
Yet the British Right itself also bears much of the blame. They spent years sucking up to Milei — and to MAGA and to Israel, some elements of which now seem to be most receptive to Argentine revanchism. More to the point, they have done much to play up Britain’s weaknesses, as though trying to make the country seem like an enticing target. While railing against the Chagos deal, for instance, plenty of Right-wing voices prophesied that “the Falklands will be next”. Never mind that the idea that Britain’s dealings with Mauritius would set a precedent for how it would handle another Argentine attack on the Falklands was far-fetched. Most people in Britain had never heard of the Chagos Islands; and given that their main purpose is to host an American base, it is anyway questionable how sovereign we are there. The Falklands, on the other hand, have a British population, and, at least since 1982, have been part of our national identity. British blood was spilled there in living memory; Starmer’s own uncle was almost killed. A Labour government, even a weak one, wouldn’t give them up without a fight.
Likewise, in the early phase of the Iran war, Nigel Farage tried to backtrack from his initial bout of jingoism by saying that Britain anyway lacks the “capability to offer anything of any value to the Americans or the Israelis”. Our country, in other words, is too weak even to be helpfully subservient. Milei would reasonably conclude from this that Britain is spent, and that the Falklands would be easy pickings. And, more pertinently, the White House might think that there is nothing to gain from keeping up friendly relations with Britain — so that they might as well throw their lot in with the Argentines.
A decade ago, an Argentine leader playing domestic politics with the Falklands may not have mattered much. But where Macmillan’s winds of change were blowing in Africa, these days they’re more American in nature. For it is in Washington, DC that the new “political facts” are emerging. A few months ago it was reported that the Pentagon was reviewing its position on the Falklands — until now a studied neutrality — setting off fears that it might move in a pro-Argentine direction. More recently, President Trump suggested that he would be reluctant to help us, as Ronald Reagan did in 1982, in the event of an Argentine invasion. He brings to bear his typically transactional theory of foreign affairs: we didn’t scratch his back in Iran, so why should he scratch ours in the South Atlantic?
There’s a broader point here too. Where Milei’s Argentina could prove to be a good local ally to America, complementing Trump’s vision of a “Donroe Doctrine”, Britain is regarded as a sad old has-been, running on fumes. As one American diplomat remarked, “keeping South American countries on side” could be “more strategically important than pleasing the Brits out of a ‘sense of nostalgia’”. All of MAGA knows that Britain is in terminal decline: it is practically axiomatic that soon enough it will, in JD Vance’s infamous jibe, be an “Islamist” state. This being so, Trump and those around him might well reason, why shouldn’t they take the side of Argentina versus Britain — Right versus Left, Christianity versus Islam, the vitality of the New World versus the shabby decadence of the Old?
Shortly before Milei’s speech on the Falklands, Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, posted a photo of herself grinning next to him, captioned “Exciting things are happening in the Western Hemisphere”. It could scarcely be any clearer that she is not a friend to Britain. But at ARC in London a few months ago, as she waxed lyrical about Anglo-American friendship, a mainly British audience lapped up her every word. “Sarah Rogers is a political superstar and Britain’s New Right should be grateful for the undisguised passion she expresses in this speech for our national renewal”, effused James Orr, then still in post at Reform UK. When she promises to unleash the “full range of tools” against Britain’s speech restrictions, when she declares that “nothing is off the table”, even the free-speech liberals among us should hope that this would not cover inducing a hostile foreign power to invade Britain’s sovereign territory. It was always naïve to think she was invested in our “national renewal”. She appears to be much more interested in Argentina’s.
Britain is used to pinning its foreign policy ambitions on a vague and slippery notion of “soft power”. We hope to get into the good graces of other nations, and punch above our weight, by keeping everyone fed on a diet of Harry Potter and the Premier League. Our best soft-power weapon against Trump is, of course, the Royal Family; and we have been able to deploy it quite effectively. Certainly, he responds to it better than any hard power lever we might be able to pull — for example, refusing to let him use bases on our sovereign territory. The image we project to the world matters, and can have real geopolitical consequences.
But there is also such a thing as negative soft power. Sometimes it can suit certain purposes to make the country, at least under the present government, seem as degraded as possible. When Farage goes on American TV, or speaks at the Capitol, one gets the impression of Britain as an authoritarian police state, disfigured by mass immigration. Why should a crime-ridden hell-hole deserve to keep the Falklands? Milei understands this; he knows better than most what makes the MAGA movement tick. In his speech, he dwells on Britain’s pitiful state: “the UK is facing multiple migration, demographic, and economic crises with no clear solution”. These words are a product of Britain’s negative soft power. So too, and worse, is the fact that Trump might listen to them with open ears.
Thatcher was less naïve about the “Special Relationship” than plenty of today’s conservatives: she rejected out of hand Reagan’s efforts toward a negotiated settlement. The opposition, for its part, was patriotic to a fault. Michael Foot, speaking both as Labour leader and “Cato”, the pseudonymous author of the anti-appeasement polemic Guilty Men, said he “knew a fascist when he sees one” — he didn’t try to undermine Britain’s position to bolster his own.
Today, though, a dangerous game is being played. Its main effect might be a damaging one: to convince MAGA that Britain is a lost cause. That is the purpose Britain is usually brought to serve across the Atlantic: a vision of apocalypse, a cautionary tale. That, rather than any real desire to make Britain great again, is what sustains MAGA’s interest in British affairs. Britain’s decisive victory in the last Falklands War was much-needed proof of life after decades of decline on the global stage. Today, therefore, there could be no punishment more fitting, no better proof of Britain’s death, than Milei’s Argentina seizing the Falklands.
