The arrival of the ultra-liberal Javier Milei in the presidency of Argentina has not only meant a radical economic turn. It is also representing a drastic change in international politics, with an accelerated rapprochement with the United States and its allies, which took a new step yesterday. Argentine Defense Minister Luis Petri traveled to Brussels to meet with NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana, to whom he formally delivered “the letter of intent expressing the request for Argentina to become a global partner of this organization”, as Petri himself informed the X network.
NATO currently has 32 full members and nine global partners, a category that involves close collaboration with the organization in areas of common interest, such as international security and stability and currently exercised by Australia, New Zealand, Iraq, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, Pakistan, Afghanistan – whose association has been suspended since the Taliban came to power – and Colombia, the only Latin American country admitted in 2017 .
The request for entry as a global partner in NATO comes just days after the visit to Argentina of the head of the US Southern Command, General Laura Richardson, with whom Milei had an unusual deference , as he went to meet her dressed in camouflage in Ushuaia, in the southern tip of the country, where they announced the installation of a joint naval base between Argentina and the United States in the Land of Fire, in Patagonia. The following day, Milei participated in Buenos Aires in the act of donation by the US of a Hercules C-130 military transport aircraft to the Argentine Air Force.
The installation of the naval base and Milei’s gesture with Richardson – interpreted by the opposition as a genuflection before the US – caused a great controversy in a country that for much of its history has flaunted its nationalism and anti-imperialism, especially under the Peronist governments.
Later, Milei, ideologically close to the former president of the United States Donald Trump, bluntly justified his approach to Washington. “My ally is the United States, be they Democrats or Republicans. And they are supporting us. They gave us a Hercules. What happened the other day was the greatest act of sovereignty in the last forty years. Because there is a military base in Ushuaia, it supports our claim on Antarctica”, declared the president. Milei also justified the joint naval base as a “first step” to recover the Falklands, under British sovereignty. This last statement, framed in Argentina’s historic claim on these islands, probably did not go down well with the United Kingdom, a full member of NATO.
In March, Buenos Aires already signed another military agreement with Washington by which some engineers from the United States Army will be installed in the agricultural export waterway that runs along the Paraná River and that in recent years has become one of the main gateways for the maritime exit of drugs from America to Europe and other markets.
Before traveling to Brussels, Minister Petri visited Denmark on Monday, where he signed an agreement to buy 24 US F-16 fighter jets from the Danish Air Force, an acquisition subject to US approval. In fact, Milei was scheduled to go to Copenhagen and fly in one of those fighter jets, but she called off the trip because of Iran’s attack on Israel on Saturday. The Argentine president canceled his schedule and returned from the United States, where he was at the time, to return to Buenos Aires and convene a crisis cabinet and put himself at the service of Israel and the Western powers, in an overacting that also generated controversy in Argentina, in addition to numerous memes on the networks.
A close ally of the White House, Israel was one of the first countries that Milei visited after entering the Pink House. The far-right leader, who has expressed his intention to convert to Judaism, traveled to the Hebrew country in February, where he bluntly expressed his support for the Netanyahu Government in its invasion of Gaza and announced the transfer of the Argentine embassy in Jerusalem, a controversial decision that only five countries in the world have implemented, including the US.
Argentina’s unconditional approach to Washington also responds to economic reasons. Milei’s ultra-liberal project, with the support of a majority of Argentines in the elections, which consists of a wild reduction in public spending to leave the State in the minimum expression, is closely followed on Wall Street and by the Fund International Monetary Fund, with which Argentina has contracted a monumental debt of more than 41,000 million euros as a result of the loan requested during the government of the liberal Mauricio Macri (2015-2019). La Casa Rosada depends on constant renegotiations with the financial body to face periodic debt maturities; agreements that must have the endorsement of Washington, among other countries.
Milei’s drastic economic adjustment, with a reduction in public spending that includes the dismissal of thousands of civil servants and the privatization of state-owned companies, is reminiscent of Menemism. And it was precisely with the Peronist Carlos Menem (1989-1999) when Argentina experienced one of its periods of rapprochement with the USA, which was portrayed in a phrase that has passed down to posterity and was uttered in 1991 by his foreign minister, Guido Di Tella, during a visit to Washington at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB): “We don’t want to have platonic relations (with the United States): we want to have carnal and abject relations.”
