The United States Has Never Recovered From the Falklands War

An Argentine soldier is seen on his way to occupy the captured Royal Marines base in Port Stanley, Falkland Islands, on April 13, 1982, days after the Argentine military dictatorship seized the Falkland Islands, starting a war between Argentina and the United Kingdom. DANIEL GARCIA/AFP via Getty Images

No one can blame the Falkland Islanders for preferring British rule to Argentine rule in 1982. The military junta that ruled Argentina in the early 1980s was a violent far-right dictatorship, whose leaders and collaborators are still being held accountable in Argentina today. Under military rule, leftist dissidents were intimidated, tortured, and simply murdered. The sharp contrast between what was essentially a fascist regime in Latin America and a European social democracy (albeit one whose social safety net was in the process of being dismantled by Thatcherism) read clearly to many U.S. policymakers in the 1980s. As the Reagan administration moved the United States firmly into the British corner during the war, there was genuine bipartisan support. It was then-Sen. Joe Biden who introduced a Senate resolution supporting the British position. As Biden explained: “The Argentinians must be disabused of the notion … that the United States is truly neutral in this matter.”

What read less clearly to U.S. policymakers was the extent to which U.S. support for Britain during the Falklands War was seen as a betrayal, not just in Argentina but across Latin America. While it never directly involved U.S. troops, the United States supplied Britain with critical fuel, intelligence, and ammunition for the Falklands campaign, contributing significantly to Britain’s eventual military victory. However, the U.S. decision to support Great Britain, a NATO ally, against Argentina, an Organization of American States (OAS) member and signatory to the 1947 Rio Treaty, represented a significant break from more than a century of U.S. policy prioritizing hemispheric unity against extra-hemispheric powers. The United States’ approach to the Falklands conflict unfortunately confirmed some of the worst assumptions Latin Americans have about the United States and its role in the region.

Members of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo human rights organization hold portraits of their missing children as they protest the disappearances that occurred under Argentina’s military dictatorship in Buenos Aires in 1982. DANIEL GARCIA/AFP via Getty Images

Indeed, the United States struck a neutral tone at first, not wishing to totally alienate its South American anti-communist ally. The Reagan administration at various points actually proposed a cease-fire in the South Atlantic, often alongside Peru, that could have stopped the loss of life and led to negotiations between Britain and Argentina. In phone conversations with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher brusquely shot down those proposals. Yet despite Thatcher’s indignation at Reagan’s half-hearted diplomatic efforts, the fact of the conflict is the United States provided crucial material support to British forces as they engaged the Argentines and paid a high reputational cost in the global south for doing so.

As a result of the U.S. alignment with Britain during the Falklands conflict, Argentina essentially flipped sides in the Cold War. Betrayed by its anti-communist allies, Argentina turned to the global south for diplomatic support. Cuba, in particular, became a crucial source of support for Argentina. As the war raged, Argentina’s foreign minister paid the first official diplomatic visit to Cuba since the 1959 revolution, going from nonexistent relations to Castro’s “unconditional support” almost overnight. (Fidel would later say that he had supported the Argentine claim to the Falklands since 1948.) The Cuban ambassador to Argentina even expressed his desire to fight in the conflict personally. Even as the Cubans were fighting the South African apartheid government on the other side of the South Atlantic, they saw Argentina first and foremost as a fellow Latin American state fighting colonialism. Regional solidarity had trumped ideology. It’s a tremendous irony: The reactionary anti-communist military junta of Argentina found its most lasting allies during the Falklands War in communist Cuba and the developing world’s anti-colonial movement.

Although Argentina’s diplomatic flip did nothing to improve its fortunes on the battlefield, it did reveal that, outside of Western Europe and the Anglosphere that lined up behind Britain, the Falklands War did not read as a show of Britain’s Churchillian heroism, a familiar tale of English speakers standing up to fascist aggression. Instead, for much of Latin America and the rest of the global south, the Falklands War read as another battle in the global decolonization struggle. After all, was Argentina’s use of force really that different from India’s 1961 forceful seizure of Goa, which was also roundly condemned by Western leaders, or Egypt’s 1956 seizure of the Suez Canal, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower wisely prioritized U.S. standing in the global south over European allies? The United States’ support of Britain during the Falklands conflict thus saw the United States fall into the same trap it had fallen into while backing the French in Vietnam: prioritizing European allies at the expense of our own standing in the global south.

U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Argentine Foreign Minister Carlos Saavedra Lamas drive through the streets of Buenos Aires on Dec. 7, 1936. Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy paid off big when, after Pearl Harbor, almost all Latin American nations joined the allied war effort, with Brazil and Mexico directly contributing combat troops overseas. The experience of WWII led directly to the foundation of the inter-American system, culminating in the creation of the OAS and the signing of the 1947 Rio Treaty that states an “an armed attack by any State against an American State shall be considered as an attack against all American States.” The postwar inter-American system paid off for the United States most dramatically when the OAS backed the United States against Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis, arguably the greatest-ever national security threat to the United States. Some Latin American states, including Argentina, even contributed ships and aircraft to the U.S.-led naval blockade around Cuba.

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This was the inter-American system that the Reagan administration’s support for the British during the Falklands War disrupted. The U.S. had itself already intervened in Latin America several times since WWII. The Dominican Republic was invaded in 1965, democracies were overthrown in Chile in 1973 and Guatemala in 1954, and U.S. intelligence and special forces helped Bolivian troops capture and kill Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara in 1967. But if Argentina—which maintained good relationships with apartheid South Africa, threw its own leftists out of planes, and actively assisted in U.S. efforts to train and equip right-wing military dictatorships throughout the region—could be betrayed by the United States in favor of a European power, then who was safe?

This is the underrated, but lasting, legacy of the Falklands War. The 1980s saw the legitimacy of the inter-American system that grew out of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy and the Second World War sunk alongside the Argentine Navy.

A woman and a Falklands War veteran hold an Argentine flag bearing a drawing of the Falkland Islands on the 40th anniversary of the conflict with Great Britain on April 2, 2022, in Buenos Aires. Ricardo Ceppi/Getty Images

Mexico’s withdrawal from the Rio Treaty was just the beginning. The past several decades have seen reduced U.S. influence in Latin America. Though a good relationship with the United States remains a priority for most Latin American states, the U.S. is also no longer the only game in town. Argentina in particular has been seen as moving closer to China, the latest extra-hemispheric rival whose influence in Latin America concerns Washington. Argentine President Alberto Fernández also traveled to Moscow in early February 2022, meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin shortly before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin recently called Fernandez again, officially to congratulate Argentina on its World Cup victory but also clearly demonstrating Russia’s lack of diplomatic isolation in the global south.

Latin America’s frustration with Washington not taking its views into account has also recently burst into the open, as during the Summit of the Americas in 2022 when many Latin American states, including Mexico, Argentina, Honduras, and others publicly pushed the Biden administration on failing to include Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. (Fernández, who did ultimately attend the summit in Los Angeles, used his speech not only to condemn the exclusion of several states from the summit but to raise the Falklands as well.) Latin American leaders such as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have also been publicly critical of the United States’ position on Ukraine. Like Ukraine and Cuba, the status of the Falkland Islands is another issue where Washington’s policy and the rest of the hemisphere’s are starkly out of step. While military action by Argentina against the Falklands is unthinkable today, Latin American diplomatic support for Argentina’s claim shows no sign of ebbing.

Argentine President Alberto Fernández walks past U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at the ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles on June 9, 2022. JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

For the United States, this actually represents an opportunity. In shaping the Good Neighbor policy, Roosevelt invested considerable energy and made meaningful concessions in order to create a united front across the Western Hemisphere against extra-hemispheric aggression. The strategic goal was clear: to preclude the ability of any hostile extra-hemispheric power to intervene in the Americas. Roosevelt showed that this is most successful when the United States does not pursue a heavy-handed policy of intervention in Latin America but instead seeks good relations with Latin American governments—even and especially when this involves concessions on other U.S. positions and priorities.

Though barely noticed in the United States, the Falklands War marked an end to that era of hemispheric unity against extra-hemispheric rivals. This is all more than historical trivia. Today, that is hemispheric unity the United States must rebuild. The Falklands could be one place for the United States to demonstrate that it values Latin America’s views and priorities, not just our own. The United States could begin by acknowledging that it chose European allies over its American neighbors back in 1982. And while British sovereignty over the islands is not worth contesting today, the Latin American position on the issue is worth respecting, not ignoring.

Constructive U.S. efforts over the status of the Falkland Islands today should be focused on ensuring that both British subjects and Argentine citizens can productively share in and coexist on the islands. This could include supporting reconciliation and memorial efforts that involve Argentines, expanding Argentines’ ability to live and work in the Falklands, encouraging Britain and the Falkland Islands government to permit direct flights from Argentina to the Falklands (a persistent sore spot that has also impacted the Falklands’ ability to remain connected to the South American mainland), and developing structures that will allow Argentina to share in the Falklands’ resource wealth. Getting British acquiescence to such policies is something the United States can likely deliver—and that Russia and China can’t.

The Falkland Islands are clearly not a place of great significance for the United States’ own vital interests. Yet in order to improve its standing in Latin America and in the rest of the global south over the course of the 21st century, the United States will have to do a lot less lecturing about our own priorities and a lot more listening to things like the Falklands. Forty-one years later, the Falklands dispute is a rare opportunity to resolve a wedge between the United States and Latin America and to help unite the Western Hemisphere once again.