The madness of decolonizing the Falklands

The U.S., Israel, and Argentina are speaking a strange and silly language about the Falklands to punish Britain. In 1774, Britain sailed away from the Falkland Islands and left a plaque behind, declaring the place still to be British even in the physical absence of its people; a bit like leaving your beach towel on an empty sun lounger, claim staked, and wandering off for a while. A few decades later, Spain withdrew too and left a marker of its own. For a time, the archipelago was a scatter of rock and tussac grass in the South Atlantic with nobody living on it but the wind, two rain-soaked European notices asserting ownership. No one had been dispossessed, simply because no one was there. Every human being who has ever lived in the Falklands arrived by boat. As colonization goes, this was as tame as you could ask for in the litany of imperial European crimes. Two-and-a-half centuries later, those remote islands have suddenly become the most-useful real estate in international politics—for punishing the British. Argentina, US, Israel On Monday, Argentina said it would file a criminal complaint against the companies drilling oil north of the islands, among them three arms of the Israeli firm Navitas Petroleum. Within hours, Israel's national security minister demanded that his own government recognize Argentine sovereignty over them, to bloody the nose of Britons who were about to take action against settlements in the West Bank. By the afternoon, Britain had moved to ban trade in goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Itamar Ben-Gvir, who calls the Falklands "Argentine territory under occupation," is proposing a retaliation against London that would hand a diplomatic prize to the government now trying to prosecute an Israeli company's multibillion-dollar oil project. On Tuesday morning, the U.S. ambassador to Israel had warned of an American response with a "huge impact on British businesses. " GOP Representative Randy Fine suggested that his home state of Florida should cease doing business with British firms over the Israel sanctions. The stars are aligning over the South Atlantic. Just days earlier, President Donald Trump had floated reviewing America's position on the Falklands, still angry about British hesitance to join him in the Iran war he opened alongside Israel. Whatever this is, it is not an alliance. Three governments have independently worked out that the Falklands are an extraordinarily cheap way to hurt Britain over grievances with Westminster, whether the islands are involved or not. And they can do it because the Falklands come pre-loaded with the lexicon of anti-colonialism—one that, on closer inspection, fits this case perhaps worse than almost anywhere on earth. To be clear, the U.S. has not recognized Argentina's claim. Not yet, anyway. Its longstanding position is neutrality on sovereignty while recognizing British administration. Trump has now put that in doubt. A leaked internal Pentagon email in April floated reassessing U.S. support for European "imperial possessions," the Falklands among them, to punish NATO allies that declined to help in the Iran war. Asked in September by GB News whether America would come to Britain's aid in a new Falklands conflict, he declined to say yes and pivoted to Iran: "Your country was not there to help me. " Nor has Israel recognized Argentine sovereignty. Ben-Gvir, himself barred from Britain under sanctions imposed last year, was speaking for himself, hours after Bezalel Smotrich called for the British ambassador's expulsion. But he is not alone in his sentiment. Yair Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister's son, had posted on social media that "the Falkland Islands belong to Argentina! " and later said he wanted to highlight "British hypocrisy" over its position on the Israel-Palestine issue. The two quarrels are converging, though Washington has not yet welded them together in public. If and when it does, and it feels more if than when, we should expect it to choose ambiguity over recognition. Trump can give the eccentric Argentinian President Javier Milei something valuable far more cheaply than simply endorsing his claim: stop sounding supportive of islander self-determination, call sovereignty unresolved, shift language and votes at the U.N. That humiliates London, rewards Buenos Aires, and still commits America to nothing. Recognition would rupture relations with an indispensable military and intelligence ally, and spend the leverage the instant it was used. The uncertainty is the asset, and it is held at very low cost. The Battle for Sea Lion Meanwhile, the real battlefield is Sea Lion, not Stanley. The oil field holds an estimated 1.7 billion barrels, has passed final investment decision, and is slated for first oil in March 2028. Buenos Aires need not seize an island to impose costs of its own on Britain. A decree published September 4 tightened enforcement of Argentina's offshore hydrocarbons law, including against investors and service providers. Proceedings were opened against 45 companies and individuals. Within days, the world's three largest oil field services firms—SLB, Halliburton and Baker Hughes—said they were not involved in Sea Lion and would not bid for Falklands work. Analysts in Buenos Aires calmly pointed out that Vaca Muerta is a far bigger business than a 50,000-barrel-a-day field in the South Atlantic, and no services giant was swapping one for the other. But the actual scaffolding of the dispute over British ownership of the Falklands is not built in the shape of an oil rig. Instead, it takes the form of a moral argument about colonialism. Decolonizing the Nonsense The anti-colonial framing does have some truth. How else would Britain have acquired islands several thousand miles to its south? Asking politely? A 1965 General Assembly resolution treated the islands as a colonial situation to be resolved under the U.N. 's decolonization declaration. The Special Committee on Decolonization, if anyone cares, still lists them among 17 non-self-governing territories. And, although the 1982 war was launched by a murderous far-right junta, the Malvinas cause has drifted leftward in Argentine politics, draped in the now-familiar leftist rhetoric of decolonization. The reason Argentines have Spanish surnames never comes up. The slogan "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" got its widest airing in 1982, as the war cry of a dictatorship that had spent six years abducting, torturing and killing its own citizens. When Bhaskar Sunkara, who founded the far-left magazine Jacobin, made that point after Argentina's World Cup banner in July—adding that no native population had ever been displaced from the islands—he was buried in abuse online for it. His crime? Being right. Marc Weller, who directs Chatham House's international law programme, states flatly that there was no indigenous or original population colonized by Britain. There is no dispossessed people to restore, which makes this the one colonial dispute in the hemisphere with no colonized party in it. An awkward fact for those whose anticolonial lamentations are usually rooted in real human suffering. And Argentina's claim is, ironically, itself one of inherited Spanish colonial title—uti possidetis, the doctrine that a new state inherits the boundaries of the empire it left. Argentina's case is not that colonial acquisition was wrong. It is that Argentina is its rightful heir. It is tempting to press further and say the British got there first. And they did beat the Spanish. But while an English captain made the first attested landing in 1690, the first settlement was French, in 1764. Britain founded Port Egmont a year later, unaware of it, and Spain then paid France to leave. There is no clean firstcomer. What is true, and sufficient, is that Britain's claim predates Argentina's existence. The strongest pro-Argentine argument does not rest on indigenity, an impossible claim given two inconvenient facts . Instead, it argues that decolonization must respect territorial integrity, Britain severed a piece of a South American state by force in 1833, and there is a legal precedent with the Chagos Islands. The International Court of Justice found in 2019 that Britain's detachment of the Chagos Islands left Mauritius's decolonization unfinished. So why not the Falklands? A scholar writing in Opinio Juris in April added a subtler objection: folding the Malvinas into Argentina's record of settler expansion is anachronistic, since the dispute predates Argentina's move south by decades. Of course, both arguments have answers. Chagos turned on Britain detaching territory from its own colony on the eve of independence; Argentina seceded from Spain, not Britain. And Argentina declines to argue self-determination at the U.N. at all—because the principle might then apply to the people actually living there, 99.8 percent of whom voted in 2013 to stay British. That is, in a word, conclusive. Decolonization for Thee, But Not for Me So, here's a puckish little thought experiment for you. If the islands must change hands because a European power took land it had no right to, why should the principle stop at the shoreline? Between 1878 and 1885, Julio Argentino Roca's Conquest of the Desert took Patagonia from the Mapuche, Tehuelche, and Ranquel peoples in a campaign many historians describe as genocidal. In Tierra del Fuego, settlers and bounty hunters reduced the Selk'nam from a few thousand to a remnant within two generations. Roca is on the 100-peso note. Tierra del Fuego is also the province from which Argentina administers its Malvinas claim, and where Milei announced last week he will build a naval base If restoring stolen land is the principle, the claim runs toward Buenos Aires. But it doesn't want to hear it. In December 2024, Milei used an emergency decree to end the suspension of evictions affecting Indigenous communities, reasoning that renewal would entrench "discrimination between Argentine citizens. " Evictions across Patagonia followed. One month earlier, Argentina had been the only country out of 169 at the General Assembly to vote against a resolution on the rights of Indigenous peoples—the same General Assembly it asks to decolonize the Falklands. No government can be the hemisphere's most determined skeptic of indigenous land claims and its loudest advocate of decolonization at once. Unless, of course, decolonization was never the principle—just a rhetorical weapon. Which is precisely what Ben-Gvir understood when he reached for it.left a plaque behind , declaring the place still to be British even in the physical absence of its people; a bit like leaving your beach towel on an empty sun lounger, claim staked, and wandering off for a while. A few decades later, Spain withdrew too and left a marker of its own. For a time, the archipelago was a scatter of rock and tussac grass in the South Atlantic with nobody living on it but the wind, two rain-soaked European notices asserting ownership. No one had been dispossessed, simply because no one was there. Every human being who has ever lived in the Falklands arrived by boat. As colonization goes, this was as tame as you could ask for in the litany of imperial European crimes. Two-and-a-half centuries later, those remote islands have suddenly become the most-useful real estate in international politics—for punishing the British. Within hours, Israel's national security minister demanded that his own government recognize Argentine sovereignty over them, to bloody the nose of Britons who were about to take action against settlements in the West Bank. ," is proposing a retaliation against London that would hand a diplomatic prize to the government now trying to prosecute an Israeli company's multibillion-dollar oil project. had floated reviewing America's position on the Falklands, still angry about British hesitance to join him in the Iran war he opened alongside Israel. Whatever this is, it is not an alliance. Three governments have independently worked out that the Falklands are an extraordinarily cheap way to hurt Britain over grievances with Westminster, whether the islands are involved or not. And they can do it because the Falklands come pre-loaded with the lexicon of anti-colonialism—one that, on closer inspection, fits this case perhaps worse than almost anywhere on earth. To be clear, the U.S. has not recognized Argentina's claim. Not yet, anyway. Its longstanding position is neutrality on sovereignty while recognizing British administration. Asked in September by GB News whether America would come to Britain's aid in a new Falklands conflict, heNor has Israel recognized Argentine sovereignty. Ben-Gvir, himself barred from Britain under sanctions imposed last year, was speaking for himself, hours after Bezalel SmotrichThe two quarrels are converging, though Washington has not yet welded them together in public. If and when it does, and it feels more if than when, we should expect it to choose ambiguity over recognition. Trump can give the eccentric Argentinian President Javier Milei something valuable far more cheaply than simply endorsing his claim: stop sounding supportive of islander self-determination, call sovereignty unresolved, shift language and votes at the U.N. Recognition would rupture relations with an indispensable military and intelligence ally, and spend the leverage the instant it was used. The uncertainty is the asset, and it is held at very low cost. Meanwhile, the real battlefield is Sea Lion, not Stanley. The oil field holds an estimated 1.7 billion barrels, has passed final investment decision, and is slated forSeptember 4 tightened enforcement of Argentina's offshore hydrocarbons law, including against investors and service providers. Proceedings were opened against 45 companies and individuals. But the actual scaffolding of the dispute over British ownership of the Falklands is not built in the shape of an oil rig. Instead, it takes the form of a moral argument about colonialism. The anti-colonial framing does have some truth. How else would Britain have acquired islands several thousand miles to its south? Asking politely? A 1965 General Assembly resolution treated the islands as a colonial situation to be resolved under the U.N. 's decolonization declaration. The Special Committee on Decolonization, if anyone cares, still lists them amongin Argentine politics, draped in the now-familiar leftist rhetoric of decolonization. The reason Argentines have Spanish surnames never comes up. The slogan"Las Malvinas son Argentinas" got its widest airing in 1982, as the war cry of a dictatorship that had spent six years abducting, torturing and killing its own citizens. —adding that no native population had ever been displaced from the islands—he was buried in abuse online for it. His crime? Being right. There is no dispossessed people to restore, which makes this the one colonial dispute in the hemisphere with no colonized party in it. An awkward fact for those whose anticolonial lamentations are usually rooted in real human suffering. , the doctrine that a new state inherits the boundaries of the empire it left. Argentina's case is not that colonial acquisition was wrong. It is that Argentina is its rightful heir. It is tempting to press further and say the British got there first. And they did beat the Spanish. But while an English captain made the first attested landing in 1690, the first settlement was French, in 1764. Britain founded Port Egmont a year later, unaware of it, and Spain then paid France to leave. There is no clean firstcomer. What is true, and sufficient, is that Britain's claim predates Argentina's existence. The strongest pro-Argentine argument does not rest on indigenity, an impossible claim given two inconvenient facts . Instead, it argues that decolonization must respect territorial integrity, Britain severed a piece of a South American state by force in 1833, and there is a legal precedent with the Chagos Islands.in April added a subtler objection: folding the Malvinas into Argentina's record of settler expansion is anachronistic, since the dispute predates Argentina's move south by decades. Of course, both arguments have answers. Chagos turned on Britain detaching territory from its own colony on the eve of independence; Argentina seceded from Spain, not Britain. And Argentina declines to argue self-determination at the U.N. at all—because the principle might then apply to the people actually living there,So, here's a puckish little thought experiment for you. If the islands must change hands because a European power took land it had no right to, why should the principle stop at the shoreline? Tierra del Fuego is also the province from which Argentina administers its Malvinas claim, and where Milei announced last week he will build a naval base If restoring stolen land is the principle, the claim runs toward Buenos Aires. But it doesn't want to hear it.the only country out of 169 at the General Assembly to vote against a resolution on the rights of Indigenous peoples—the same General Assembly it asks to decolonize the Falklands. No government can be the hemisphere's most determined skeptic of indigenous land claims and its loudest advocate of decolonization at once. Unless, of course, decolonization was never the principle—just a rhetorical weapon.