The Prime Ministerial tenure of Andy Burnham was not 24 hours old before the report came that he would allow American use of United Kingdom bases – most crucially in Diego Garcia – for “defensive” strikes on Iran. The qualifier is so expansive as to be meaningless except in the realm of legal technicality: the United States’s war against the Islamic Republic rests in no small part upon British goodwill. It is not, of course, the first time that Britain has lent its capabilities to war in the Middle East in which the Americans are involved. The Royal Air Force was active in downing Iranian drones sent against Israel and Qatar, at the least, at various points in 2024, 2025, and 2026. The RAF joined the United States Navy in strikes on Yemeni positions in spring 2025. And the RAF flew intelligence-gathering missions over Gaza to aid in the search for hostages there.
One may or may not agree with overall British policy on the Iran war specifically – I happen to believe that it is in Britain’s interest to participate – but it is simply an empirical fact that Britain has largely been supportive of America’s wars in the past few decades. Keep this in mind.
The Argentinian record is considerably less robust. Argentina lent four naval vessels to the 1991 war with Iraq, and it has lent rhetorical support to the 2026 war with Iran. Thus ends the record.
America has forgotten how to do statecraft
This observation is, on its face, somewhat unfair to Argentina, which does not have a relationship with the United States to parallel the long-running Anglo-American concord, and certainly does not have meaningful strategic interests anywhere in which America goes to war. Americans ought not penalize Argentina for possessing a different history and different imperatives than America and Britain. Yet it is an observation that must be made, not for the purpose of diminishing Argentina, but for illuminating a unique strand of geostrategic error that has wormed its way into American civic discourse.
That error is the belief that the United States ought to recognize the Falkland Islands – British possessions inhabited by British citizens for longer than the United States has possessed Texas – as part of Argentina. The world was unsurprised by the banner unfurled by the Argentinian team after its defeat of England in the World Cup semifinal. What was surprising was that a handful of Americans also claimed that “Las Malvinas son Argentinas.”
This discourse, such as it is, has come about thanks to a handful individuals on X, although it is not entirely exclusive to them. Most prominent is Marc Zell, the Chairman of Republicans Overseas Israel, who believes the United States should recognize the “Malvinas” as Argentinian in retaliation for British refusal to directly participate in the Iranian war. The sentiment was accompanied by several signals: among them a Reuters report, published April 24, alleging the existence of a Department of War memorandum which contemplated “punishing” Britain for its Iran war stance with a recognition of the Falklands as Argentinian. Whether or not the memorandum was real – and even if it was, speculative options are not policy – the reality is that for a minority of the American right, suddenly, an endorsement of Argentinian irredentism on the Falklands seems like a very good idea.
It is worth exploring why, exactly, this is happening – not because the United States Marines are about to liberate Port Stanley from two hundred years beneath the English boot, but because the mere existence of this idea, preposterous as it is, illuminates several distinct phenomena shaping American civics.
Foremost among them is a general collapse in historical awareness, figuratively erasing anything that happened more than five minutes ago. This is unique to neither Americans nor to the American right, being more properly understood as an affliction across Western societies. But what was once more or less localized to the left of the political spectrum – it was “progressives” tearing down statues and working themselves into acts of damnatio memoriae, not conservatives – has now found expression on the right.
This new cohort does not, at the least, join its counterparts in hatred of history: it simply lacks a connection to the past. Thus every response to every event becomes an exercise in presentism. Sure, Britain may have bled with the Americans on battlefields from Normandy to the Imjin to Basra to Helmand, and often at American behest, but what have you done for me lately? Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” presuppose the memory, and in its absence there is nothing to call back. What we see here is less a malevolence than ignorance. Several generations now have been diminished by a poor humanities education, which has then been exacerbated by the atomization of media. It isn’t that the American advocates of “Las Malvinas” are contemptuous of Anglo-American friendship, but that they have no functional idea that it ever existed.
Also visible is the rise of self-described “realists” within the American right’s foreign-policy and national-security sphere. We should be careful in our description here, because it is not the case that most “realists” endorse Argentinian claims to the Falklands, and still less that they are opposed to the Anglo-American alliance. “Realism,” which can offer sound analysis when soundly applied, is not the problem here. Instead, a mode of thinking has emerged that, in analytic recourse to the logic of the map, has adopted spheres of influence and nearness as a dispositive. This is a clique of false “musts”: Russia must dominate Ukraine, China must have Taiwan, America must have Greenland, all on the grounds that – look at the map! – this large territory is next to this small one. (Such positions should be distinguished from arguments from interest, which make the cases of Ukraine, Taiwan, and Greenland versus their respective neighbors considerably more complicated.) A “realist” argument that Argentina must have the Falklands slips quite easily into this framework, although it can never quite account for how the desire of 46 million Argentines is perennially deterred by the Falklands’s RAF Mount Pleasant.
Another expression of “realism” at hand is the contempt, widespread on the American right, for British decline, and especially British military weakness. (Marry this sentiment to “decolonial” anti-British sentiment on the American left, and one gets a distressingly large cohort.) This is practically a genre all of its own, and the pity is that it has ample substantiation to it: Britain is poor, Britain has no air conditioning, Britain is giving away its other islands, Britain has no Royal Navy left to speak of, et cetera. The response of a friend to these facts is to exhort and support Britain to revive, as best one can as a foreigner. But these ersatz “realists” are not friends, and so their response is to apply the logic of the Melian Dialogue to the case of the Falklands: the weak suffer what they must. That they are simultaneously working through the experience of the Delian League in so doing does not seem to cross their minds.
Further buried within the “Malvinas” enthusiasm is a peculiarly American species of republicanism. This anti-monarchism is almost unique to America, save for elements within Ireland. This rests upon what might be described as a folk interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, in which America assumes a holy mission to apply the US Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4 (guaranteeing a republican form of government to the American states), to every country in the Western Hemisphere. Add in the expulsion of the Europeans from the Americas – the four remaining are France, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Britain – and this constitutes a popularly understood but fictitious version of the Doctrine.
President James Monroe, in issuing his doctrine in 1823, stated that “[w]ith the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere.” The United States has never undertaken a mission of expulsion of the Europeans from the Americas; nor has it ever labored to ensure that the nations of the Americas are all republics. Geoff Shullenberger, managing editor at Compact, tweeted out on July 17 that he “applaud[s] MAGA’s revival of the original, decolonial Monroe Doctrine. From Greenland to the Falklands, old world monarchies are no longer welcome on our continent of republics.” As narrative it is positively Jeffersonian, but it is not so – and never was.
The “Malvinas” niche within US policy is amplified by the rapid ascent of Latin America as a region of interest in the policymaking of the second Trump Administration. Many good people and sound minds labored in policy obscurity for years, and are now applying their ideas in spheres from Venezuela to Cuba and beyond. But after a generation in which the ambitious and the accomplished gravitated mostly to the Middle East and China, the bench is not deep. America’s strategic tradition in the Western Hemisphere is not well remembered and there is a lot of rediscovery of first principles at hand. American advocates for Argentina versus the Falklands may be unpleasantly surprised to learn that Argentina can easily dredge up other claims against other neighbors. They may further discover, given events, that encouragement of territorial adjustments in the Americas is a beginning without an end. This of course applies well beyond Argentina. “Malvinas” enthusiasm is in this sense a species of amateurism, facilitated by the historical ignorance that itself does so much damage.
Finally, Americans are indulging in a yield-the-Falklands boomlet because of a phenomenon readily familiar to Latin America: a personalized civics. The Mexican intellectual Jorge Portilla, in describing the personalization of political life, once said that “[w]e Mexicans do not believe in liberalism as much as in Juárez, in order and progress as much as in Porfirio Díaz, [and] in land reform and in the labor movement as much as in Zapata and Cárdenas.” This increasingly characterizes much of American civic understanding. In this framework, the Falklands are not a matter of Britain versus Argentina, nor right versus wrong. It is Javier Milei (charismatic, pro-America, pro-freedom) versus Keir Starmer (dull, anti-American, socialist). But it is one thing for the nation to be symbolized by a man: it is something altogether different, and more primitive and base, for the nation to be a man.
Every single one of these factors, from the ignorance of history to the misapplication of “realism” to the politics of personalism, is the result of a single truth: America has forgotten how to do statecraft. Within living memory, the United States presidency was held by a man with the strategic acumen to fight and win two wars within four years, conclude the unfinished business of the Second World War, oversee the dissolution of a rival empire, and manage a wholesale reordering of Europe without a general war. But the American people found George H.W. Bush out of touch, and they sent him packing. What the Japanese aviator Mitsuo Fuchida called “victory disease” struck the Americans. Stupendously rich and strategically secure, no one folly of war or peace shook us, and as we forgot the basics of statecraft, we slid unknowingly into the moment at which, suddenly, the consequences are at hand.
It is one of the signal purposes of the second Trump Administration to revive and restore that capacity for statecraft. In the case of the Falklands, the prime mover to that restoration is Trump himself, who is probably the most Anglophilic American President in generations – “Americans have had no closer friends than the British” he said in welcoming the King to America – and has never endorsed any theory of inexorable British decline. We also see it in the ideologues within his Administration’s ranks, who know that the hour is late and are having rushed debates that should have been had across the past quarter-century. In that light, the mania for pushing a British surrender of the Falklands is a lagging indicator, not a leading one. The great fortune of its proponents is that they will not succeed, as “even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth.”
Of course, the Falklands are not America’s to give. They never were. The United States is the hegemonic power of the hemisphere, but it is not yet a late-stage Athens of the Delian League. America, though, must rediscover who its friends actually are. This is where memory becomes essential, and the remembrance of shared battlefields and common causes. Realism is essential, yes. History, properly understood, is simply realism across time. It is the accumulated evidence of nations showing who they are, in prosperity and in straits. Britain has long since shown America who she is. Strategy and policy should proceed from that. For an American to espouse a Falklands surrender is, in ignoring those fundamentals, not to betray Britain, but America.
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