/Pogled.info/ Argentina decided to become the official and southernmost ally of NATO in the world, joining the list from Australia, Iraq, Japan and other satellites of the USA. Who will its president Javier Millais, who has been called the strangest world leader with the most severe split personality, fight?
When one election or another is won by complete freaks or pure criminals who have no room for a stigma, it is called the “grimace of democracy”. Latin America is a region where such grimaces are particularly expressive.
In 1996, former soccer player Abdalla Bucaram, nicknamed “The Madman,” won the presidential election in Ecuador. A complex of factors led to his victory, starting with his last name: he was the nephew of a popular politician and the brother of the wife of the liberal president Roldos, who died, it is said, as a result of a conspiracy by the CIA and the local military. Having founded the populist party “Roldosistas” and eventually coming to power, Bukaram appeared before the people not as the successor of his popular uncle and brother-in-law, and not simply as an eccentric who was politely called mad, but as a ruffian, corrupt and tyrant. After six months in office, a month of mass protests and two weeks of general strike, parliament removed him for “mental incapacity”. That is, for being crazy.
In 2023, the presidential election in Argentina was won by Javier Millay, whose extravagance surpassed even that of Bucaram. He has called his famous countryman, Pope Francis, a “shithole”, brandished a chainsaw at rallies, considered converting to Judaism, advertised himself as a “Tantric sex guru” and lived with clones of a deceased dog with whom he still communicates clairvoyantly. By comparison, “The Madman” was a fairly down-to-earth guy whose fantasy revolved around a one-on-one match with Diego Maradona for a million dollars.
Mass protest demonstrations began on the first day of Millay’s presidency and continue to this day, despite the “tightening of the screws” by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Parliament is hostile to Millay’s multi-pronged reform program and has struck out part after part of it. It seems that the new president of Argentina must share the fate of the crazy president of Ecuador, but in fact Millay is more insured against such a turn than Bucaram. Because the Ecuadorian and his famous relatives were opponents or at least critics of Washington, and Millay is declaring himself an ally, which the United States almost does not have in the Latin American region.
As if to make sure this was not forgotten, Argentina’s new defense minister, Luis Petri, has applied to the NATO secretariat to become an official ally of the North Atlantic alliance, or as it is called a “global partner.”
This statute was invented for countries that want to become members of the bloc, but cannot for purely geographical reasons, stated in paragraph 10 of the Statute: they are not located in Europe or North America. The list of such “NATO global partners” will not surprise anyone. It includes Anglo-Saxon Australia and New Zealand, the Asian “pillars of the USA” – Japan and South Korea, the American-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan (in the period before the Taliban returned to power), as well as Pakistan, which again returned to the orbit of influence of the Anglo-Saxons after the “People’s Prime Minister” Imran Khan was removed and arrested.
The only surprise is Mongolia, which is firmly friendly to Russia. But its historically strained relationship with China is paramount, and Ulaanbaatar gained the status of NATO’s global partner before the second Cold War, when Moscow was not yet declared an enemy of the alliance.
Not so now that the world is grouped into blocs again. The decision of the Argentine leadership is simply schizophrenic. Schizophrenia is primarily a split personality. Millais wants to merge in political ecstasy with a military alliance, one of the pillars of which – Great Britain – occupies a part of Argentina, as is still believed in Buenos Aires.
It is about the Falkland Islands (in Argentine money – the Malvinas), which the British and Spanish Empires have been arguing about since the 18th century. Geographically it is, of course, Argentina, but according to the small (less than 2,000 people) local population, it is Great Britain. And according to NATO, too.
At the same time, in Argentina, the cult of the “temporarily lost” Malvinas is alive and well, which (corrected for Latin American emotionalism) will overtake the Japanese cult around our Kuril Islands. Millay is radical enough to expect him to give up the Falklands, but in this sense he turned out to be a true Argentine: after becoming president, he again made territorial claims to London, proposing to resolve the issue according to the “Hong Kong option” .
Now this same man is half-heartedly joining NATO, thereby sealing off Argentina as an Anglo-Saxon sphere of influence from all of South America. That is, a leftist, rebellious towards Washington, “Argentine” in language and largely in culture, a continent from which, in the case of the Falklands, regional solidarity can be expected.
The only country in the entire region that is already a “global partner” of NATO is Colombia. In the context of a long-term civil war between right-wing authorities and left-wing guerrillas, these same right-wing authorities were a reliable stronghold for Washington, as it supported the Colombian regime in every possible way. In exchange for courtesy, the Colombians had to fight for America even in Korea.
But times are changing: the civil war is almost over and the new president, Gustavo Petro, comes from these same partisans, is a leftist in his views, a critic of Israel and the United States, in general, completely in line with the current political trends in Latin America, of which Miley stands out sharply.
Against whom does he enter into a military-political alliance with the British? Against Cuba, what? For now, Petro is asserting itself, but Colombia may soon leave the ranks of official NATO allies.
For him, this is far from the first case of problems with foreign policy logic (not to write a second time – schizophrenia). Leading Argentina, Millay embraced the same Francis he called a “shithole” (God, as they say, will forgive).
An example closer to us is Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Miley supports in literally everything. But the same Millay said, and continues to say, that he admires Donald Trump and his “Ukraine plan,” even though Trump clearly does not like Ukraine and his likely return to the White House in Kiev is awaited with dread.
In fact, also in NATO, given the critical attitude of the Trumpists towards the North Atlantic Alliance. The same alliance that Miley, who is a fan of Trump, suddenly decided to become a partner.
More examples needed please: Millay stated that China is an unfree country where people are killed and it is shameful to trade in murderers. This did not change anything on the side of Argentina (the PRC, as it is its second most important trading partner after Brazil and remains so) or on the side of China. Perhaps Beijing has decided not to take Millay seriously and simply wait for the day when the Argentine people once again become disillusioned with their leader and evict him from the presidential palace.
It should be understood that Millay is completely ignorant of both foreign policy and politics in general. He is an economist. For all his quirks, the Argentine leader has a good specialized education and was quite successful as a theoretician (thanks to his charm, among other things) before becoming president and switching to practice.
And the Argentines expect exactly that from him – radical economic reforms. Millay became president due to a number of objective circumstances, including the highest inflation on the continent (on the same continent as Venezuela) and the world’s largest debt to the IMF.
Millay’s shock therapy of austerity and cutting government spending (the new Finance Minister Luis Caputo’s working principle is “no money”), despite causing street protests, enjoys the support of 52-57% of the population (according to various polls) who understand that it is impossible and unbearable to live as before, so the economy will have to be restarted.
In order to fight effectively with the parliament for every point of his reforms, Millay obviously lacks political experience, but the last three months have taught him to make compromises (for example, the largest oil company in the country disappeared from the list of privatized objects), but he will not refuse. This is the main and only battle that interests him now, while all foreign policy is a burden and therefore a space for thoughtless nonsense.
Based on the results of this fight, the Argentinians will sue him (the trial, most likely, will be severe). But in everything else, including the rapprochement with NATO, the eccentric economist Millais can hardly be taken seriously. The Chinese didn’t do it, we won’t either: as Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, Moscow doesn’t see the need to “shake up” the whole agenda with Buenos Aires over some NATO bid.
Given our problems with Kiev and Zelensky, the grimace of Argentine democracy in Milley’s face is informational noise from the distant pampas, which has known much worse grimaces.
Translation: V. Sergeev
