Trump redefines the alliance with his partners and opens a door to Milei on the Falklands

For decades, the United States has acted as the country that guaranteed its allies safe navigation on the seas, a stable dollar, and property rights. In exchange, they bought weapons and energy from Washington and gave it cheap financing by acquiring huge amounts of Treasury bonds. With Donald Trump this is over. The president of the United States wants people to continue buying from him, but he has raised the price of friendship. He plays for absolute power and is prone to bad moods and script changes.

Javier Milei has known how to take advantage of one of those moments. On Monday, Trump declared that the US was reviewing Washington's traditional position on the Falklands. That is, theoretical neutrality before sovereignty, but de facto support for the British presence on the islands. The day the president made those statements, Milei knew that a door was opening, that he had received permission to increase the volume of his claim over some islands that the United Kingdom and Argentina have been disputed for years.

Trump has had a sweltering summer. And the victims of this heat have been Washington's historical allies. He has reduced military maneuvers with South Korea so as not to upset Kim Jong Un, with whom he says he has "a very good relationship." It has deteriorated the alliance with Seoul, a democracy and symbol of prosperity in Asia, to the benefit of a totalitarian and warmongering power, a nuclear bully.

For Canada, Washington has wanted to limit its ability to enter into trade agreements with other countries and eliminate the protection of French, the country's official language. Spain could be added to the list of victims this summer, in the (plausible) hypothesis that Morocco had launched the human avalanche on Ceuta, something that the Alawite 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 US president does not forgive the British for not buying more weapons and for not joining the war against Iran. For this reason, it destabilizes coexistence with Elon Musk's messages, which distort the reality of the islands, which he places 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 hurt the economy). This Friday, the United States trade representative, Jamieson Greer, lamented in the Financial Times: "Why don't they [the British] liberalize a little and accept products manufactured to American standards. Why don't they use the freedom that Brexit gives them?"

With his statements about the Falklands, Trump has added a setback to Burnham, who has arrived at 10 Downing Street full of good intentions. In the assumption of a (relatively) orderly world like the one that the United States assured before the arrival of Trump, the United Kingdom could be forced to make some formal change in the regime for the exploitation of its waters, some formula that could appease the Argentine nationalist fever.

But in the new international disorder anything can happen. Especially when the geopolitics of oil are involved, as is the case.

Argentina today is a country in which extraordinary things happen, a fetish country for Trumpism in which technological mega millionaires buy hectares of land for their exploitation; where political power projects a law for companies without humans at the helm and approves stratospheric incentives for foreign companies that operate in new technologies.

The US administration has a preference for Milei. In the 2025 midterm elections, when his popularity dropped, the US guaranteed a loan of 20 billion from the IMF and granted a financial line of credit for the same amount that stabilized the peso and helped his victory. Today, with the Malvinas, Washington lends another hand to the ultraliberal president just when his electoral expectations are faltering again.

Argentina and the United Kingdom clashed militarily over the sovereignty of the islands in 1982. In a few years of the rise of globalization, where business was king, 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 restrained, ended up imposing themselves. But it was a world in which violence declined. Today it cannot be said that Trump is a man skilled in avoiding wars.