defence · 19 min
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In April 1982 Britain sent a force of more than 120 ships to retake the Falkland Islands: two carriers, more than a dozen destroyers and frigates, and the auxiliaries and requisitioned merchantmen to keep them going. It managed this without suspending any of its other commitments around the world. The operation took seventy-four days and cost 255 British and 649 Argentine lives, and the whole planet saw that the United Kingdom could still project military power across the Atlantic.
Today, in 2026, the Royal Navy has sixty-three commissioned ships, of which only twenty-five qualify as warships: ten submarines, two carriers, six destroyers and seven frigates. In 1996, fourteen years after the Falklands, the fleet still held seventeen submarines, three carriers, fifteen destroyers and twenty-two frigates. Over thirty years the combat fleet has been cut in half, while Britain's global commitments have stayed more or less where they were.
If London had to repeat 1982 tomorrow, stripping every harbour and walking away from every other commitment, the Royal Navy could scrape together one carrier, two destroyers and five frigates. Four more frigates sit at Fareham Creek waiting to be towed to a Turkish breaker's yard, with nothing ready to replace them. River-class patrol vessels of under two thousand tonnes, carrying a single gun, now cover duties in the Falklands, the South Pacific and home waters that used to fall to frigates and destroyers, because the warships simply aren't available.
In March this year the crisis stopped being theoretical. Iran hit RAF Akrotiri, the British base in Cyprus, with drones, and the Royal Navy couldn't get a destroyer there in time; HMS Dragon took several days to reach the region. France sent its nuclear carrier, the Charles de Gaulle. Neither British carrier took part in the operations against Iran, since both were struggling with chronic mechanical problems. A retired Royal Navy submariner told The Times it had been a mistake to buy two giant carriers instead of concentrating on the smaller ships that actually sustain a country's naval capability.
Over the last two decades of Argentine policy on the Falklands, the governments that talked loudest about sovereignty were, paradoxically, the ones that did most to destroy any capacity to back the claim.
When the military junta invaded the islands in 1982, Argentina had an air force of more than four hundred aircraft, modern fighters among them, and a navy with a carrier, a cruiser, recent submarines, destroyers and frigates. It lost the war with all that equipment in hand, through poor operational planning, improvised logistics and, above all, by underestimating how willing the British were to fight. Defeat, on top of the crimes of the dictatorship, wrecked the public standing of the Argentine armed forces.
What followed was worse than the defeat itself. Defence spending fell from 4.4% of GDP in 1983 to less than 1% in the Kirchner years and stayed there for more than a decade. The Kirchner governments went further than budget cuts, though, and turned the armed forces into an internal enemy. Néstor Kirchner took office in 2003, and one of his first symbolic gestures towards the military was to take the portraits of the dictators down from the walls of the Military College. He reopened the Dirty War trials, purged the senior leadership of all three services and, by decree, limited the role of the armed forces to "external aggression", defined as narrowly as possible. Cristina Kirchner finished the job with another mass purge in 2012 and cuts that left aircraft without spare parts, ships without maintenance and soldiers without basic kit.
The figure that sums it up came from Macri's own Defence Minister. Argentina lost seventy-two aircraft in the Falklands War; under Kirchnerism it lost more than a hundred, to neglect. The aircraft factory in Córdoba had fifteen hundred employees and went ten years without building a single plane. When the Mirage III was retired in 2015, Argentina lost its supersonic intercept capability, and it stayed that way for a full decade. The largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, the eighth largest on the planet by territory, with a constitutional claim of sovereignty over disputed land, could not intercept an aircraft violating its own airspace.
The sinking of the submarine ARA San Juan in November 2017, with forty-four crew on board, was the most tragic symbol of that decay and the logical outcome of decades of budgetary abandonment. Kirchnerism claimed the Falklands with its mouth while disarming the country with both hands. Twenty years of speeches at the United Nations and plaques on street corners, with patriotic holidays thrown in, didn't shift a single fact on the ground, since nobody negotiates seriously with someone who has nothing to back up his words.
Discussion of the Falklands tends to leave out geography, and in particular the position of the southern tip of South America, which matters more every year. The Strait of Magellan is the main natural waterway between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Most of it is Chilean, though the eastern mouth is shared with Argentina, and Ushuaia and Río Grande are the southernmost cities of the continental world. Further down, south of Cape Horn, the Drake Passage is the narrowest point of the circumpolar Antarctic ocean. Whoever holds a solid presence here controls access to Antarctica, a continent whose natural resources are frozen, literally and legally, by a treaty whose environmental protection regime can be reopened from 2048.
And 2048 matters. When the Antarctic Treaty rules come up for renegotiation, the strength of each country's claim will depend on where it stands in the region, and Argentina, Chile, Britain, Norway and others all hold overlapping territorial claims in Antarctica. Physical presence, scientific bases, logistical capacity and naval projection will count for more than any legal document. The Falklands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, all under British administration and all claimed by Argentina, are logistical platforms for projecting that presence. Three thousand two hundred residents and a million penguins, yes, but before anything else they are geopolitical infrastructure.
London understands this perfectly well. The Mount Pleasant base, opened in 1985, is there less to defend the islanders from an Argentine invasion than to hold a strategic position in one of the few regions of the world that could still be carved up again in the coming decades. The garrison today is about twelve hundred personnel, four Typhoon fighters, a tanker, a transport aircraft, a Sky Sabre air defence system and a single patrol vessel, HMS Forth, a two-thousand-tonne ship with minimal armament. It is a deterrent, built to make any aggression politically expensive, and nobody would expect to win a war with it. Its viability depends entirely on Britain being able to reinforce it quickly from the home islands, and with the Royal Navy in its current state that assumption gets shakier every year.
With the Strait of Hormuz closed by the war with Iran and the Suez Canal still disrupted by regional instability, alternative sea routes carry more weight. The Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn won't replace Panama, of course, but treating the southern tip of the continent as irrelevant to global geopolitics is a luxury no one can afford anymore. The Trump administration's National Security Strategy draws the hemisphere all the way down to Antarctica, and not by accident.
On 5 December 2025 the first six F-16 AM/BM Fighting Falcons touched down at Río Cuarto Air Base in Córdoba. Milei was there to meet them, and for once the presidential rhetoric wasn't overblown, since this was the most significant military acquisition in half a century. Twenty-four fighters bought from Denmark for about three hundred million dollars, plus an American weapons package worth another three hundred and ten million that included AIM-120 and AIM-9 missiles, reconnaissance pods and electronic warfare kits. After a decade without supersonic capability, the Argentine Air Force had modern fighters again.
The more interesting part of the story is how the F-16s got there. For forty years Britain enforced a systematic blockade on sales of Western armaments to Argentina, and London did more than refuse to sell; it leaned on its allies to refuse as well. It vetoed replacement Mirages from France, blocked a possible transfer of Saab Gripens from Brazil because of their British-origin avionics, killed the sale of Israeli Kfirs and made life difficult for the Korean FA-50. The method was simple and it worked. Most Western combat aircraft use Martin-Baker ejection seats or BAE systems, both British, and as long as those components were on board London held a veto. In the nineties Carlos Menem managed to slip thirty-six second-hand A-4 Skyhawks past the blockade through a crack in the American door, but that was the exception.
What made the Danish deal possible was a technical detail, though a decisive one. Danish F-16s use the American ACES II ejection seat, made by Collins Aerospace, rather than the British Martin-Baker, so on that front London had nothing to veto. The embargo had always been political as well, and that is where Operation Peace Condor comes in. Washington pushed the deal forward, negotiated with London, and the United Kingdom eventually went along. After forty years of automatic deference to British preferences on anything touching Argentine armaments, the United States decided it no longer cared to pay that price to spare the feelings of an ally it was, at the same time, starting to treat as an increasingly awkward partner.
The F-16s came with a broader package: eight Stryker armoured vehicles, also American, and talks on air surveillance radars, helicopters, space cooperation, cyberdefence and, something Argentines ought to notice, maritime operations in the South Atlantic. The Department of Defense described Argentina as a country in transition from "peripheral ally" to "central security partner in the Western Hemisphere", a phrase with more geopolitical weight than any speech at the UN.
Nobody is suggesting that twenty-four F-16s give Argentina the means to retake the Falklands by force. The F-16 MLUs it received are similar to those operated by the Chilean Air Force, which gives the two countries technical parity across the Andes for the first time in decades, but against the British Typhoons stationed at Mount Pleasant they are a generation behind. Initial operating capability for at least one squadron is expected by 2027, with the rest of the aircraft delivered in phases through 2028, so this will be a slow build.
Tactical parity is the least of it, anyway. A country with credible armed forces sits down at the table from a different position than a disarmed one, and the signals coming out of Washington are not what they were five years ago. For the first time in forty years, London could not stop its main ally from arming its adversary in the South Atlantic.
On 3 January 2026, in a night operation in Caracas, American special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Codenamed Resolución Absoluta, it was the most aggressive act of US power projection in the Western Hemisphere since the invasion of Panama in 1989. A few hours later, at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump came out with a line that any Argentine who thinks about the Falklands should pay attention to: "The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot. They now call it the 'Donroe Doctrine.'"
The Monroe Doctrine, formulated in 1823, declared that European powers should not extend their influence into the Western Hemisphere, and for two centuries it was an abstraction American presidents brought out when it suited them and put away when it didn't. Trump made it operational policy. His National Security Strategy, published in December 2025, includes a "Trump Corollary" stating the intention to "reaffirm and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere", and the document says the United States will "deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position strategically vital forces or assets" in the region.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio summarised it with his usual subtlety: "This is OUR Hemisphere". Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth added: "America can project our will anywhere, anytime. Welcome to 2026."
And the facts have kept pace with the words. Besides taking Maduro, Trump revived his campaign to acquire Greenland, threatened tariffs against countries that stood up for Danish sovereignty, redefined the Gulf of Mexico, and left intervention in Colombia and Cuba on the table. The Atlantic Council, one of the think tanks closest to the US national security establishment, published an analysis recommending that the hemisphere be defined "from the Aleutian Islands to Greenland and the North American Arctic down to Antarctica, with Central America, South America and the Caribbean in between, and the Pacific and Atlantic approaches included".
If that is the operational definition of the hemisphere, the Falkland Islands are inside it, and there isn't much room to argue. Territory administered by a European power six hundred kilometres off the Argentine coast, with a military base hosting twelve hundred personnel, four Typhoon fighters and a patrol vessel, is by the logic of the Donroe Doctrine the very kind of extra-hemispheric presence Washington says it wants to remove.
The Monroe Doctrine was formulated in 1823, ten years before Britain expelled the Argentine authorities and population from the Falklands in 1833, which means the British occupation, strictly speaking, violated the spirit of the doctrine Trump now says he wants to restore. When the British landed at Puerto Soledad and lowered the Argentine flag, the United States was a young country without the strength to enforce Monroe. Two hundred years later, it has more than enough.
Trump has not mentioned the Falklands and there is no sign he will, so none of this is a prediction. There is, though, something subtler and, over the medium term, more important, which is an American strategic framework that, applied with any consistency at all, makes the British military presence in the South Atlantic harder and harder to justify to Washington, which until now tolerated it without asking questions (to Buenos Aires it was always illegitimate).
Milei seems to have grasped this. In his opening address to Congress on 1 March he talked about building "the century of the Americas", about Argentina holding the critical minerals the West demands, and about its strategic location, with access to two oceans and close to Antarctica. "We are a natural link in the strategic value chain of the West," he said. The Falklands didn't come up in that part of the speech, and they didn't need to.
The window opening for Argentina makes more sense once you look at what is happening between the United States and Britain, which in diplomatic terms is a disaster. The so-called "special relationship" between Washington and London, forged during the Cold War on shared intelligence, nuclear cooperation and cultural affinity, is at its lowest point since Churchill coined the phrase in 1946. The tensions predate Iran, but Iran pushed them to breaking point.
In February 2026, when the United States struck Iranian nuclear facilities, Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused to let American forces use British bases, RAF Fairford and the facilities at Diego García among them. He partly relented in the end, but Trump considered it too late, and his response was public and brutal: "He ruins relationships. We are very surprised. This is not Winston Churchill that we're dealing with."
He said it at a White House cabinet meeting on 26 March, and it was more than an insult; it amounted to notice that, in this president's eyes, the special relationship isn't particularly special any more. Trump also called the British carriers "old, broken toys", a humiliation the Royal Navy had never received from an ally in its modern history.
Iran is only the latest chapter in a list of grievances that is long and still growing. Trump repeatedly criticised the cession of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, calling them "that stupid island" and accusing the United Kingdom of being "very, very uncooperative". Starmer publicly opposed Trump's Greenland campaign, which brought on the threat of a 25% tariff on British goods. The United Kingdom refused to join Trump's "Board of Peace", and in November 2025 London suspended intelligence-sharing with Washington on drug vessels in the Caribbean because it considered the American strikes on those craft illegal.
The Chagos affair has a direct parallel with the Falklands that hardly anyone has picked up on. The Chagos are an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, home to the joint US-UK military base of Diego García. In 2024 the British government ceded sovereignty over the islands to Mauritius, which Trump condemned as "great stupidity and total weakness"; the cession infuriated Washington because it put the future of a shared strategic base at risk. If Britain has already given away one disputed territory that hosted a joint base with the United States, it is hard not to ask how much the Falklands really matter to London, given that they are farther away, cost more to defend and are of no strategic value to Washington.
So Britain has fewer ships than in 1982 and, on top of that, fewer friends in Washington than at any point in the postwar era. For a country that relies on the United States for the credibility of its nuclear deterrent, for the maintenance of its Trident submarines and, to a large degree, for the legitimacy of its place in the world, that adds up to an existential crisis in slow motion.
Argentina is going through the opposite. Nothing in the bilateral history of Argentina and the United States resembles the relationship between Javier Milei and Donald Trump. The ideological affinity is real and out in the open, but the relationship has also produced concrete, measurable results: a twenty-billion-dollar swap line to stabilise the Argentine peso ahead of the 2025 midterm elections, direct purchases of pesos by the US Treasury to support its value, a trade framework signed in November 2025, help with the F-16 and Stryker deals, and a favourable ruling in the YPF case that saved Argentina sixteen billion dollars.
Milei travelled to the United States fourteen times in his first two years in office, and Trump called him his "favourite president". He was the first foreign leader to meet Trump after the 2024 election, and he publicly backed the capture of Maduro while most of the world was condemning it. In his March address to Congress he described Trump as a "key ally" and spoke of "building the century of the Americas".
It is an asymmetric relationship, as any between a superpower and a developing country is bound to be, and Milei needs Trump a good deal more than Trump needs him. That doesn't change the main point. Washington's willingness to weigh Argentine interests even when they collide with British ones is new, and the F-16s show it as clearly as the description of Argentina as a "central security partner".
Argentina also has things Washington wants: lithium, copper and rare earths, the critical minerals of the energy transition and the technology industry; Vaca Muerta, one of the world's largest unconventional gas reserves, at a time when the war with Iran has pushed energy prices up; and access to two oceans, proximity to Antarctica and a location that, within the framework of the Donroe Doctrine, makes it a natural anchor of the southern hemisphere. What I don't know is whether Buenos Aires has the strategic vision to turn this goodwill into something more durable than photo opportunities and press conferences, or the discipline to tie the Falklands question, even obliquely, to the agenda of hemispheric cooperation.
None of these conditions existed in 2024, or in 2020, or in 2010, or at any point since 1982, and they may well be gone by 2028. The window depends on Trump, whose mandate runs until 2029 but whose attention is famously erratic; on Milei, whose term ends in 2027 and whose position at home is far from secure; on relations between Washington and London not mending, which a change of government in either country could bring about; and on the Royal Navy not getting the budget injection it has been promised for decades.
None of this means Argentina should, or could, take the islands tomorrow. That fantasy is as self-defeating now as it was in 1982, when the Junta mistook opportunism for strategy. What lies ahead is serious, sustained work, preferably done quietly, in which twenty-four F-16s are only a start. The worst deficit is naval, and that is where Argentina needs to put money now: submarines, corvettes, maritime surveillance systems, Antarctic capability, a sustained defence budget of 1.5 to 2% of GDP, and a state policy that outlives this government and the next. Military cooperation with the United States has to stop depending on personal chemistry and become structural, with regular joint exercises in the South Atlantic, coordinated Antarctic surveillance, shared naval presence and an infrastructure of cooperation dense enough to survive any change of administration. And Argentina has to play the cards it actually holds (critical minerals, energy, control of maritime routes, Antarctic logistics) in such a way that, when the Falklands question inevitably comes up, Washington answers in Argentina's favour out of self-interest, with no need for sympathy.
Being right is not enough. Argentina has been right about the Falklands since 1833. It was right when Britain was the world's leading naval power and stayed right as Britain lost that position, through the years its own governments spent disarming the country, and while the islanders voted the way they voted. A right without the power to enforce it is a statement of intent, not a foreign policy. What has changed is the balance of power, and that is what can turn the right into reality.
Macri tried dialogue and pragmatism, but he had neither the relationship with Washington nor the military capability for that dialogue to amount to more than courtesy. Now, for the first time in forty years, the conditions for a serious claim are starting to line up, though they won't line up on their own; it will take resolve, investment, patience and a strategic seriousness Argentina has rarely shown in its history. Letting the opportunity slip would be, I think, an act of historic negligence.
The Falklands are won back with aircraft, ships and alliances, and with the cold patience to play the long game; speeches at the United Nations and plaques on street corners have had twenty years to prove themselves. In 1982, Britain sent what was needed. Today it could not send half of it.