It is unlikely Argentina, and far-flung holdovers of the former British empire, were on the US president’s mind at the time. But the tide of international events in the past three and a half years have turned Trump’s vindictive mindset to the advantage of Javier Milei, the boisterous rightwing Argentinian president. Trump’s notorious fixation with payback was almost entirely the trigger for Milei’s televised address to his fellow Argentinians on Thursday, as he stated his intention to reopen his country’s claim to a set of windswept islands in the south Atlantic – known to Britain as the Falklands, and to Argentina as the Malvinas.
The centuries-old dispute over the islands’ sovereignty has lain dormant since 1982, when the two countries fought a brief, but bloody, conflict that began after Argentina’s ruling military dictatorship invaded the territory. Britain reclaimed them after troops in a naval taskforce dispatched by the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher – ironically lionized by Milei as a political exemplar and inspiration – stormed the territory and eventually forced Argentina’s surrender. An uneasy peace has reined in the generation since, although Argentina, which returned to democracy the year after the conflict, has never renounced its claim to the isles – despite the adamant insistence of their less than 2,000 inhabitants that they remain British.
This week, however, Trump suggested he is reconsidering US support for Britain’s sovereignty over the Falkland Islands. Why would the president go out on a limb to threaten this fragile peace? Milei jumped on Trump’s comment that he was “reviewing” the US’s longstanding neutral stance on the territory’s sovereignty, which amounts to a de facto recognition of Britain’s control.
Fueling Trump’s animus is grievance that Britain, under former prime minister Keir Starmer, declined to support the US president’s decision to go to war on Iran, another irony given that country’s deep-rooted suspicions of Britain and its imperial past. The president’s obsession that allies declined to help him in a war he never consulted them on runs deep and wide – from Westminster to Seoul – and has the potential to upend US relationships around the globe, if unchecked. And Milei’s attempt to capitalize on Trump’s vengeance underlines the potential for ripple effects of this war to reach waters far beyond the Gulf.
In what has become a repetitive refrain, Trump laid bare his sense of wounded affront in an interview with a rightwing British cable channel on Thursday. It is a sorry pass for the “special relationship”, fostered through alliances in two worlds wars and deepened during the cold war and subsequent conflicts. Yet Britain is hardly alone in feeling the heat of a wrathful Trump.
Vengeance has been targeted in recent months at numerous other allies, now regarded with more hostility by the White House than traditional adversaries such as Russia and China. Annual joint military exercises with South Korea – a vital ally of Washington since the Korean war broke out in 1950 – were suddenly scaled down and cut short by six days last month, on Trump’s orders, because of his irritation that the Seoul government declined to join the fight against Iran. He has repeatedly threatened to bomb or “blow up” the tiny Gulf kingdom of Oman, which has had friendly ties with the US for 200 years, if it impedes his efforts to reopen the strait of Hormuz, which Iran has closed to most commercial shipping.
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