Argentina Is Making Progress, But Not There Yet

The aircraft carrier USS George Washington sailed through the South Atlantic last week to conduct the first joint U.S. naval maneuvers with Argentina in more than 30 years. During much of that time, governing leftist peronistas gave bases to China,...

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The aircraft carrier USS George Washington sailed through the South Atlantic last week to conduct the first joint U.S. naval maneuvers with Argentina in more than 30 years. During much of that time, governing leftist peronistas gave bases to China, supported Venezuela’s communist regime, and allowed Iran to develop local terrorist networks as they drove the country to bankruptcy.

Argentina’s new libertarian president — who was elected by a landslide in a country suffering 200 percent inflation — is changing course. His foreign minister, Diana Mondino, just signed an agreement for “High-Level Strategic Dialogue” with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to develop security and defense ties. “I want a free capitalist world, but it must be protected from those seeking to prey upon it,” President Javier Milei recently told the Free Press.

The Biden administration has had to overlook Milei’s vitriolic attacks on socialist globalism, his disparagement of LGBTQ wokeism, and his open admiration for Donald Trump to seize the chance to roll back Chinese, Russian, and Iranian encroachments on the Western hemisphere, which have reached alarming levels and seem increasingly coordinated.

“A realization by the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon that Washington could completely lose control of the hemisphere unless they took advantage of the opportunity to renew ties with Argentina allowed national security concerns to prevail,” says Fabián Calle, of the Argentine Council for International Relations who is an adviser to the new government.

The State Department has been downgrading relations with right-wing leaders — such as El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who it threatened to sanction over his brutal but effective crackdown on the country’s Maras criminal gangs — while pandering to communist dictators in Venezuela and Cuba and courting iconic “center” leftists like Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The result is that Nicolas Maduro has reneged on promises to permit competitive elections in Venezuela and his brand of criminal socialism is spreading to other countries; Lula is parroting Iranian propaganda, claiming that Israel murdered 12 million Palestinians in Gaza; and Cuba just announced this week that it’s welcoming a squadron of Russian warships including a nuclear submarine on a port visit to Havana.

A series of top U.S. defense and intelligence officials have traveled to Argentina for high-level discussions. Commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Laura Richardson, who has been highly outspoken in denouncing China’s growing presence, has made two trips to arrange the delivery of security assistance for Argentina’s neglected armed forces. CIA Director Nicholas Burns has flown to Buenos Aires to meet with Milei and FBI director Christopher Wray arrived on board a giant Air Force C-17 Globemaster.

This is progress. Chinese construction of a port in Tierra del Fuego to dominate the strategic waterways connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific has been stopped. Gen. Richardson repeatedly warned in congressional statements, that the facility would have “dual use” as a military base for China to hinder the only crossing point between the two oceans for aircraft carriers which are too large to cross the Panama Canal. Negotiations are currently underway to switch the Argentine port concession to the U.S.

Milei has also gone ahead with the acquisition of 24 American F-16s to rebuild Argentina’s air force, orphaned since its defeat in Falklands War in the 1980s. The peronistas wanted to buy outdated Chinese J-7 fighters in what Florida congresswoman Maria Elviria Salazar denounced as a “pact with the devil”.

The FBI has been allowed to impound an Iranian Boeing 707 cargo jet covertly operated by the IRGC through a Venezuelan air charter company, which had been conducting hundreds of flights between the Middle East and Latin America, according to Argentine security officials. It was grounded in Argentina in 2022 through U.S. enforcement of sanctions that blocked the aircraft from being refueled.

The pilot was identified as a member of the Quds force, as were the remaining seven Iranians on board, some of whom carried Venezuelan passports. They were returned to Venezuela before Milei took power, preventing the type of rigorous interrogation that may have determined their mission. But Argentine security officials told The American Spectator that the secret IRGC flights involved “ logistics” for Hezbollah cells forming throughout the hemisphere. Argentina was the target of major Hezbollah bombings in the 1990s. Efforts to cover up Iran’s involvement in the bombings that demolished the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community center are believed to have led to the 2015 murder of a special prosecutor investigating the case.

But Milei has stopped short of an important U.S. objective involving the dismantlement of a Chinese deep space ground station in Argentina’s southern Patagonian province of Neuquen. The station is equipped with a 65-ft antenna and controlled by a company linked to the PLA, which heavily restricts access to Argentines or any outside personnel. While presumably built to guide a projected Chinese lunar expedition, it could also guide hypersonic missiles over the Antarctic for a sneak attack on the U.S., interfacing with Chinese satellite tracking stations in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba.

“I’m surprised that the government of Argentina permits the Chinese armed forces to operate in Neuquen. We don’t know what Chinese soldiers are doing with that telescope,” U.S. ambassador to Argentina, Mark Stanley, recently told the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación, as Burns and Richardson pressured Milei to close the space station or take control of it.

Construction of the satellite base was authorized by former president Cristina Kirchner, a corrupt Gucci socialist who fancies herself the natural heir to the legacy of 1940s populist leader Eva Peron (played by Madonna in the Broadway musical hit Evita). Argentine intelligence officials told The American Spectator that Cuba influenced Kirchner’s anti-American ideology, leading her to tell the Argentine Congress in 2021 that “Argentina’s future is with China and Russia.”

Milei’s government is understandably fearful of Chinese retaliations. China can easily destabilize Argentina’s fragile economy and is already threatening to close its interest-free credit line or SWAP system, which Beijing uses to leverage political control over vulnerable economies.

Argentina would be unable to pay the $8 billion owed since the peronistas emptied the country’s reserves to finance their profligate public spending, which left Milei with a deficit of $15 billion. China could also reduce key export revenues by cutting its imports of Argentine soybeans, 80 percent of which currently go to China.

Milei wants to engineer a free-market-based recovery with incentives to attract private investment while drastically diminishing the abusively bloated state sector and diversifying away from commodities and politically driven trade deals. He was recently touring Wall Street and Silicon Valley to sell his plan.

But it could be short-circuited if China exacerbates economic hardships being caused by austerity measures, resulting in mass street protests led by cells of Venezuelan agents who have taken over peronista social organizations and labor unions, according to intelligence officials. Venezuelan-supported violent protests have brought down conservative governments in Chile, Ecuador, and Colombia over recent years and could be coordinated with Iranian-sponsored terror attacks in Argentina over Milei’s strong support for Israel.

The U.S. may have to bail out Milei and American conservatives should make sure that the administration does whatever it takes to turn Argentina into a positive testing ground for America’s ability to pull distressed friends out of Chinese quicksands.

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