Remember the Falklands?

Abstract

THE SECOND OF APRIL, 1997, marked the fifteenth anniversary of the Argentine military occupation of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, which Britain had controlled since 1833.1 The ensuing war between the two countries caught everyone by surprise. By the lights of current international relations theory, it simply should not have taken place. A Third World country with largely dated military equipment, a conscript army, and virtually no power-projection capability took on a technologically sophisticated, nuclear-armed great power with a modern blue-water fleet and an experienced professional army over stakes of negligible strategic and material value. (Jorge Luis Borges likened it to two bald men fighting over a comb.) To recover and then garrison the islands cost Britain more than granting every single Islander an estate in Britain and a generous pension for life. Moreover, both states wanted - and had every incentive to maintain - a peaceful, cordial relationship. In fact, Britain had been trying for years to find some way to transfer the islands to Argentina.Before the dust began to settle, analysts scurried to explain the war. Unfortunately, those early explanations were based on inadequate information and dubious deductions from first principles. By the time useful information about the genesis of the conflict began to emerge several years after the fact, scholars and policy-makers alike had turned their attention elsewhere. Accordingly, the causes of the conflict and their implications have never adequately been understood. Eight years later, in the Persian Gulf, the United States repeated many of the mistakes Britain made in 1982 - mistakes that might have been avoided had American policy-makers better understood recent history.My first goal in this article is to correct stubborn misconceptions in the English-speaking world about Argentine motivations and to explain how and why Argentina found itself involved in a war it neither expected nor wanted. To do so I draw heavily on interviews I conducted in Buenos Aires in August 1995 with current and former Argentine officials, military officers, and analysts, including all three members of the former Argentine Junta (president and commander-in-chief of the army, General Leopoldo F. Galtieri; the commander-in-chief of the navy, Admiral Jorge I. Anaya; and the commander-in-chief of the air force, Brigadier Basilio Lami Dozo).2 I argue that Argentine leaders were motivated overwhelmingly by a sincere and powerful desire to correct what they saw as an intolerable injustice; that they mistakenly believed that Britain was attempting to force Argentina's hand on the sovereignty issue in 1982; and that they assumed that world leaders would generally share, and sympathize with, this perspective.Secondly, I reflect on the implications of the conflict for scholars and policy-makers. I look at the lessons to be learned from Argentine miscalculations, Washington's botched effort at mediation, and Britain's underestimation of Argentina's resolve. I suggest that while the policies of all three countries depended heavily on idiosyncratic perceptions of the strategic, political, and diplomatic context, they shared certain crucial features. Most notably, moral considerations were paramount in all three cases. However, Argentina on the one hand, and Britain and the United States on the other, acted on the basis of very different moral commitments which reflected differences in culture and ideology. Given their cultural and ideological affinities and the unusually close relationship between their military establishments, it was inevitable that the United States would support Britain. This undermined American attempts to mediate the dispute. Contrary to popular belief, leaders in none of the three countries acted on the basis of realpolitik considerations, or narrow material or political self-interest. However, Argentine leaders believed at the time that these considerations drove British and American policy, and British and American leaders believed that they drove Argentine policy. …