In 1982, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent a naval task force 8,000 miles across the Atlantic to expel an Argentine invasion force from the Falkland Islands, a remote archipelago 300 miles east of the Patagonian coast. The mission was to liberate 2,000 British subjects living there.
It was successful, but the price for Britain was high—255 dead and seven vessels lost, including two destroyers and two frigates. Would any British government attempt anything so audacious today, even if it could somehow find the boats?
The Falklands has become a live issue again, now that President Donald Trump has apparently threatened to withdraw support for Britain’s claim to the territory. Javier Milei, the Argentine president, is not a military dictator like General Leopoldo Galtieri 40 years ago. But Milei is a close friend of Trump and has used Las Malvinas, as Argentinians call the British overseas territory, as a nationalist rallying cry. They haven’t forgotten or forgiven.
Now a leaked report from the Pentagon suggests that the U.S. may “review” its recognition of Britain’s de facto control of the Falklands as punishment for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s refusal actively to support American military intervention in the Strait of Hormuz. “They weren’t there for us,” said a Pentagon spokesman. Javier is ecstatic.
So would the Brits send more gunboats if Argentina attacked? It seems improbable. Starmer is no Iron Lady. Britain is not a war-fighting nation after 40 years of retreat from the international stage.
There was certainly no will to retain that other remnant of the British Empire, the Chagos Islands, last year. If that’s any precedent, Starmer and his Attorney General, Lord Hermer, might be more inclined promptly to hand the Falklands over to the Argentines along with billions in compensation. The UK Labour Party does not like to be associated with anything that smacks of colonialism.
Yet the Falklanders are not an oppressed colony, as some in the United Nations appear to believe. UN bureaucrats define the Falklands as a “non-self-governing territory.” But it is very much self-governing and fully autonomous.
When John Byron, grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, first landed here in the middle of the 18th century, there were no indigenous Falklanders to colonize unless you include the Gentoo penguins. The people of the Falklands were and are overwhelmingly British.
So Argentina’s appeal to the UN’s Special Committee on Decolonization makes a nonsense of history. Milei’s claim is based on contiguity and a claim that the Brits stole the Falklands from the Spanish. But the islands are in international waters, 300 miles from Argentina. And the Spanish, who briefly occupied the Falklands in the 1770s, were themselves full-blooded imperial colonizers busy displacing the Diaguita and Querandí societies in the land that is now Argentina. So this is really a metaphysical dispute between empires that no longer exist.
The UK’s claim to the Falklands today is based not on conquest but on the principle of self-determination. The overwhelming majority of the population voted to remain a British overseas territory in a referendum in 2013. Only three people voted against. Starmer has reacted sharply to Trump by insisting that “sovereignty rests with the UK, and the island’s right to self-determination is paramount.”
There is no suggestion that Milei wishes to send a military force to retake the Malvinas. He wants to open “negotiations” with the British over the future sovereignty and clearly hopes that a gullible UN will back their claim, if only to express historic loathing of the British Empire.
So Trump has simply opened another pointless can of anticolonial worms by equivocating on British sovereignty. It seems inconceivable that the Pentagon would be thinking this way if it weren’t the wish of the president. It is yet another peculiarly inept move by Trump, not unlike his offensive suggestion in January that the British did not fight in “the front line” in Afghanistan and Iraq. They very much did, losing 457 soldiers’ lives in the process. Trump’s ignorant comment alienated not just British veterans but most of Trump’s sympathizers on the right of UK politics.
Conservative newspapers like the Daily Telegraph were furious and are once again incandescent at Trump’s reckless threat to the Falklands, which it says “adds insult to injury.” Donald Trump’s biggest British former fan, the leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, said “there is now no way we’re even going to have a debate about the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands—it is utterly non-negotiable.” Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, says Trump’s musings are “absolute nonsense.”
The timing of Trump’s diplomatic outrage could not be worse, on the eve of King Charles and Queen Camilla’s state visit to America, which was supposed to reinvigorate the much-abused “special relationship.” And has Trump forgotten that America is still relying on British bases for refueling warplanes on their way to the Gulf?
The intervention has given the beleaguered Starmer a much-needed popularity boost. For once he looks like a national leader in refusing to allow any questioning of British sovereignty.
But the worst impact of Trump’s punk diplomacy may have been to help push the UK back into the arms of the European Union. Starmer has used the Iran War and Trump’s contempt for NATO as cover and justification for realigning the British economy with European regulations, as a prelude to further negotiations about participating in the EU single market. Trump’s vacuous musings may actually succeed in reversing Brexit. It’s hard to think of a greater own-goal.
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