For decades, the United States has acted as the country guaranteeing its allies safe navigation on the seas, a stable dollar, and property rights. In return, they bought weapons and energy from Washington and provided cheap financing by acquiring huge amounts of Treasury bonds. With Donald Trump, this ended. The President of the United States wants them to keep buying from him, but he has raised the price of friendship. He plays absolute power and is prone to bad moods and script changes.
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Javier Milei has known how to take advantage of one of those moments. On Monday, Trump declared that the U.S. was reviewing Washington’s traditional position on the Falklands. That is, theoretical neutrality on sovereignty, but de facto support for the British presence on the islands. The day the president made those statements, Milei knew a door had opened, that he had received permission to raise the volume of his claim over islands that the United Kingdom and Argentina have disputed for years.
Trump has gotten used to punishing old allies: South Korea, Canada, or the United Kingdom
Trump has experienced a sweltering summer. And the victims of that heat have been Washington’s historic allies. He reduced some military maneuvers with South Korea so as not to upset Kim Jong Un, with whom he says he has “a very good relationship.” He has deteriorated the alliance with Seoul, a democracy and symbol of prosperity in Asia, in favor of a totalitarian and bellicose power, a nuclear bully.
To Canada, Washington has wanted to limit its ability to make trade agreements with other countries and eliminate the protection of French, the country’s official language. To the list of those affected this summer, Spain could be added, under the (plausible) hypothesis that Morocco launched the human avalanche over Ceuta, something the Alaouite monarchy would not have done without prior consultation with Washington.
Trump has applied the pirate manual that characterizes the new era to the United Kingdom. The U.S. president does not forgive the British for not buying more weapons from him and for not joining the war against Iran. Therefore, he destabilizes coexistence with messages from Elon Musk, who distorts the reality of the islands, placing them on the brink of civil war due to immigration.
Trump also torpedoes Andy Burnham’s attempts to get closer to Brussels (the British prime minister thinks Brexit has harmed the economy). This Friday, the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, lamented in Financial Times: “ Why don’t the British liberalize a bit and accept products made according to U.S. standards? Why don’t they use the freedom Brexit gives them?”
With his statements about the Falklands, Trump has added a setback to Burnham, who arrived at 10 Downing Street full of good intentions. In the assumption of a (relatively) orderly world like the one the United States ensured before Trump’s arrival, the United Kingdom could be forced to some formal change in the regime of exploitation of its waters, some formula that could appease Argentine nationalist fever.
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Javier Milei has taken the opportunity to raise the tone on the Falklands
But in the new international disorder, anything can happen. Especially when the geopolitics of oil is involved, as is the case.
Argentina is today a country where extraordinary things happen, a fetish country for Trumpism where mega tech millionaires buy hectares of land for exploitation; where political power projects a law for companies without humans at the helm and approves stratospheric incentives for foreign companies operating in new technologies.
The U.S. administration has a preference for Milei. In the 2025 midterm elections, when his popularity dropped, the U.S. endorsed a $20 billion IMF loan and granted a financial credit line for the same amount that stabilized the peso and helped his victory. Today, with the Falklands, Washington lends another hand to the ultraliberal leader just as his electoral prospects falter again.
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Argentina and the United Kingdom fought militarily over the sovereignty of the islands in 1982. In some years of globalization rise, where business ruled, a war between two first-world countries, one governed by Margaret Thatcher and the other by a military junta, seemed untimely. 649 people died on the Argentine side and 255 on the British side. Milei’s excuse now is oil, but as then, the spark of the conflict was nationalist fever. And it ended badly.
The world before Trump was not perfect. It was a world of hypocrisy and the great powers, although constrained, ended up imposing themselves. But it was a world in which violence declined. Today it cannot be said that Trump is a skillful man in avoiding wars.
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