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How Prosperity Transformed the Falklands
- ur-whale 6y agohttp://archive.is/53ykK http://archive.is/53ykK
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> At the end of 1980, a minister from the Foreign Office visited Stanley and proposed to an apprehensive audience in the town hall that the Falklands be given to Argentina in a long-term “leaseback” arrangement, similar to the one that Britain and China had for Hong Kong. Glad Britain ended up taking a different route with the Falklands than what they did with Hong Kong.
- DevKoala 6y agoArgentina is not a dictatorship atm. You are glad that a super power became more powerful here.
- aksss 6y agoArgentina was a dictatorship when this question was being decided (1980) and still was when Argentina decided to invade (1982).
- peruvian 6y agoIronically, that dictatorship was set-up partly in thanks to the US.
- 627467 6y agoHow is that ironic? Almost all dictatorships in history have overt or not so overt approval from major powers of the time.
- aksss 6y agoYeah I'm also curious - you mean ironic in the context of this discussion regarding the fate of the Falkland Islands and the United Kingdom, or in some more broader (unrelated) way with regard to the United States as a democracy? Or something different? Genuinely curious, not piling on.
- kjs3 6y agoIt's not ironic, it's irrelevant if an unfortunate part of US history. But if you want to derail the conversation to your pet anti-American diatribe, it's a great intro.
- ponker 6y agoIt’s somewhat ironic in that the US and UK are close allies but the US’ ongoing experiments with regime change created mutiple wars for the UK. Not that the UK hasn’t done its own regime change experiments.
- kjs3 6y agoNo, it's not ironic. And it has nothing to do with the Faulklands war. It's just an opening for people like you to pipe up in conversations where it's irrelevant and say "you know, it's ironic (even though it's not) that the US does bad things...", because you want to bring up the fact the US does bad things. We get it. It's true. But it's a derail to insert it when it is neither ironic or relevant.
- aksss 6y agoIt would be ironic in the sense of unintended consequences perhaps, but assumes the US was "intending" to avoid an FI invasion in making its decisions about propping up the Junta. In reality, concerns about the FI were probably miniscule in the foreign policy calculus exercised by the US at the time. Those policy decisions started during the Ford administration. The invasion happened over two decades later, literally a few months after a new general took over the government (i.e. quite suddenly). When the invasion happened the US dropped all support of Argentina and threw their resources behind the UK. The motivation of the US foreign policy decision in late 50's must be seen in the context of the Cold War. In Argentina at the time, the US saw the alternative government as a communist/marxist regime with Soviet support/presence. How many other communist regime changes in the second half of the 20th century do you recall that did NOT adopt expansionist policies under the banner of "reunification"? We can imagine the US thinking the risk of Argentinian expansion was higher with a communist regime than with the Junta, but likely the US was more concerned about who controlled Cape Horn, the vast territory in South America that Argentina already controlled, the proximity to the US, etc. Plus, there was already significant concern about existing marxist movements taking other SA countries (meaning expansionism probably wasn't a huge concern so much as the development of a bloc of discrete soviet satellite states). Argentina was considered a bulwark to those movements. So the FI, safely under UK's wing, probably wasn't a primary motivator of US policy towards Argentina at the time. Maybe there's some other unseen connection between the US and the FI invasion that you or other commenter can point out (e.g. did the US actively consider the fate of the FI in the 50's when they decided to prop up the Junta? Did the Carter administration know there were plans to invade when it softened support for Argentina which Reagan then reversed and enabled such an invasion? Those kinds of may make a better case for a connection and irony in the context of the Falklands War but it would be news to me). Seems like a pretty irrelevant and tenuous comment otherwise.
- pjc50 6y agoOne of the things I've never seen a proper history of is how badly the UK failed to win international support. Yes, the area south of the Equator is explicitly excluded from NATO. But the UK got nothing whatsoever from anyone, except maybe a bit of technical assistance from France against the Exocet missiles. And yet the failure of the US to assist didn't impair the rather one-sided "special relationship".
- willyt 6y agoPrime Minister Thatcher was strongly advised to seek a diplomatic solution by the UK military leadership at them time and there was considerable international pressure to do so. It was militarily a very risky operation at the very limit of our capabilities.
- gandalfian 6y agoLook at the Portuguese fighting retreat from their India colonies twenty years earlier and ask what was the point of the violence? Look at the west's war in Vietnam and ask what was the point? Look at the Falklands and ask???
- 082349872349872 6y agoI'm surprised The Onion hasn't updated their classic article https://www.theonion.com/u-s-to-give-every-iraqi-3-544-91-let-free-market-cap-1819567206 https://www.theonion.com/u-s-to-give-every-iraqi-3-544-91-le... for current estimated expenditures. An alt-history counterfactual theory: if the US had not supported the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan might've joined the Warsaw Pact and then had a peaceful revolution (like almost all the rest) around 1989, with all the attendant advantages for a better version of this century. The following claims to be 1980's afghanistan, but I can't tell if the Boney M soundtrack was original or not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZRZLwLXU3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZRZLwLXU3E (Boney M was apparently popular in Afghanistan, but other videos with the same dancer are to more indigenous tunes) maybe better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrxgwM8h7ek&t=30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrxgwM8h7ek&t=30
- 627467 6y agoInterested in knowing who considers the UK a superpower in 1980s, never mind in 2020s... Argentina is a regional power. That a population of a tiny island much closer to a single country than to any other landmass nearby would prefer to stay effectively isolated and dependent on a "foreign" power, says for to the appeal of being part of Argentina than to whatever deal the UK has been offering to the Islanders. Nothing like HK at all where majority of population actually doesn't mind (accepts) mainland rule
- alexpotato 6y agoThe UK was, and still is, a nuclear power so I would argue it's closer to super than non. Plus, there is a great quote about the US vs the UK regarding nuclear weapons: - Everyone respects the US because they were the biggest NATO military and had nuclear weapons - Everyone feared the UK because due to their island mentality, if push came to shove they wouldn't hesitate to use those nuclear weapons whereas the US was seen as forever hesitant to use them again.
- pjc50 6y agoOfficial doctrine is that they're a second strike weapon; if they're used, then that implies that most of the UK's major cities are already smoking craters.
- lmm 6y ago> Interested in knowing who considers the UK a superpower in 1980s, never mind in 2020s... I don't know about "super", but they're one of maybe four countries with a credible second-strike nuclear capability, one of six that operate full-size aircraft carriers, maybe sixth on the list of global reserve currencies, G7 member...
- 082349872349872 6y agoIt surprises me that although the Falklands War (and its anti-ship missiles) was last century, people are still eager to build full-size aircraft carriers. (I will start taking scots' independence noises seriously after someone puts forth a concrete proposal about what to do with HMNB Clyde.)
- BurningFrog 6y agoArgentina is a seriously dysfunctional country though.
- fiblye 6y agoHow so? I don't know much about Argentina, but I figured it was doing pretty well compared to most Latin American countries.
- livre 6y agoIt's only doing pretty well compared to Venezuela if you consider inflation rates[1]. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG?most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG?most_rec...
- outworlder 6y agoI'd be more interested on what the local population thinks about this. AFAIK, most want to be under UK control.
- anikan_vader 6y agoThe 2013 Falklands referendum was quite decisive. As the article mentions, only 3 people (0.20%) voted against retaining their status as an overseas territory of Great Britain. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Falkland_Islands_sovereignty_referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Falkland_Islands_sovereig...
- Simon_says 6y agoI've visited. The Falklands are more patriotic British than England is.
- BurningFrog 6y agoThe Falklands can be defended against Argentina. Hong Kong can not be defended against China.
- willyt 6y ago> The Falklands can be defended against Argentina. Barely. The Falklands was touch and go, Britain was only one or two Exocets away from losing. To bomb the runway at Port Stanley, the Vulcan bombers required in flight refuelling 4 times. And the tankers that refuelled them had to be in flight refuelled themselves. The whole thing was cobbled together with string and duct tape and it only just worked.
- phenkdo 6y agoI somehow doubt this,..even if the UK aircraft carrier were sunk, the British armed forces had _plenty_ of capabilities to bring to bear. While It wasn't quite a US Vs Iraq situation, it was very lopsided in terms of training, equipment, morale and finances.
- smackay 6y agoYears of downsizing of the British Navy and the reduction of the merchant fleet to cheaper flags of convenience left the UK with a very poor capability for a maritime invasion. The Task Force that sailed to the Falklands was a rag-tag group of various ships including supply vessels used in the North Sea. Had the Argentinians pilots that attacked the fleet had been a little more successful I seriously doubt the British would have had the capability to launch another one.
- phenkdo 6y agoAll of that is very likely true, but I was arguing that the Argentine military was no match, not even close to a match to the UK Armed forces. The outcome was never in doubt, just casualty counts on both sides.
- sbassi 6y agoGood for them for not being linked to Argentina anymore, if they where an Argentinean province they would be in default, with unemployment, and with high poverty rate.
- jxramos 6y agoWhat's the backstory on Argentina being an economic drag that it would be detrimental to be connected with them?
- lmm 6y agoA combination of cost disease and the resource curse. Argentina was prosperous and its professional class gradually became an entrenched bureaucracy that skimmed off a lot of productivity (similar to e.g. Italy today); over decades its economy became more and more dependent on oil exports, even as its oil production became less and less efficient along with everything else in the country. As long as the oil price was high it didn't matter, but when the oil price dropped all their chickens came home to roost.
- gus_massa 6y agoOil? Our main export is grain (soy, corn and others). We have been importing oil even while the barrel was at $150.
- diegof79 6y agoWow, you must be confused with Venezuela. While Argentina has oil, its production is very low and it never was a driver of the economy. And about the comment of “its professional class gradually became an entrenched bureaucracy”, I don’t know where you get that conclusion, but is far from the historical facts. Argentina had a good economic situation at the beginning of the 20 century. But it also had a lot of inequality. That inequality created a lot of political instability. That instability led to violence: when the people that was “out” of the elite took the power, people at the elite did strike back... it continued for years in cycles of stability and violence, and a cruel dictatorship (google for Dirty War). Related to the Malvinas/Falklands war... that war was the last resort from the military dictatorship to gain popularity, but they were very stupid and blind... and sent many young unprepared soldiers to die. A good outcome from the war, was the debilitation of the dictatorship and the return of democracy in 82. So what this has to do with the economy? After these cycles the country ended with tons of debt. Also our economy relies a lot in the agricultural export. During the turmoil of the 60s/70s many industries (and scientific research) died and the recovery took years. Since the return of the democracy we went through two big crises (89 and 2001). Our economy still relies in agricultural exports. The professional and worker class pays the debt every day in the form of high inflation, high interest rates, and low credit availability.
- martinald 6y agoOne major problem with the Falklands is woeful internet access. Population is too low to make a submarine fibre connection viable, so it's connected by expensive and slow satellite backhaul. Assuming Starlink continues to go to plan, it would be a huge boon for remote places like this and probably very transformative to its economy.
- BobTheBuilder2 6y agoHave you ever thought that maybe people go to such places to get away from the constant interaction with an internet browser?
- mastax 6y agoYou can get away from the internet anywhere in the world.
- toofy 6y agoBut it is much more difficult to get away from the expectation that you’re always on.
- renewiltord 6y agoIndeed, where there is fibre, men fear the fearsome spectre of Gecko: beady eyes light the dark as it stalks in their footstep. The last true realm of Man is the Falklands. Driven back from their former glory, they now make a last stand.
- peteretep 6y agoAlso you’d need to land it in Argentina which would have issues
- wbl 6y agoYou could run it to Uruguay.
- bikeshaving 6y agoThe prose in this article is pretty, and characteristic of the New Yorker style. Sometimes I want to articulate what exactly the New Yorker style is, but I don’t read enough anymore to pick out its distinguishing features. I think the extended simile here is very common to New Yorker pieces: > the islands are oddly similar to the Shetlands or the Isle of Skye—the bleak, rocky landscape; the blustery rain; the nearness of the sea—as though a piece of Scotland had broken off into the Atlantic and drifted eight thousand miles south, past Ireland, then Portugal, past Morocco and Mauritania and Senegal, down past the coasts of Brazil and Uruguay, and come to rest just a few hundred miles north of Antarctica. In short, it takes a mundane detail like the similarity of landscapes and climate between the Falklands and Scotland, and adds an interpreted fantastic explanation of it by simile (landmasses moving across the Atlantic). It can feel excessively twee and almost corny when you identify the technique, but I appreciate it nonetheless. I wonder if readers have identified other notable examples of the New Yorker style from this article or elsewhere.
- ponker 6y agoIt may be New Yorker style but it’s also the style of a lot of pre-1950 travel writing. Travel writing at the time assumed that the reader would never visit the destination being written about, or for that matter any other destinations farther than a few hundred miles from home, so a lot of that older travel writing is infused with myth, simile, and prose which would today seem florid.
- Papirola 6y agoI found it interesting that in the enumeration of countries, Argentina is missing. Straight from Uruguay to Antarctica.
- paganel 6y agoMust still be upset about that Maradona goal (even though I haven't checked if the author is English, to be honest). And to partially get back on subject, I personally find those kind of enumerations that the OP mentions pretty boring and too intellectual, too mid-19th-century English writer that nobody reads out of pleasure anymore.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoWell... why... There are 3,480 Falklanders. My high-school had 3,900 students. The weather is pretty bleak. Warm season average high temp in January is 57F. Average low in June is 32F. Mostly cloudy/overcast 60% of the week pretty much year round. I.e., it's never really warm enough to do a lot of outdoor activities other than hiking or maybe horseback riding. Only 20% of days are 'wet' days, so you don't have to worry all that much about rain. Still, it's too cold for swimming or beach-going, not cold enough for skiing. Admittedly, I just skimmed the article, but this caught my eye: "Since the late nineteenth century, islanders had wanted a swimming pool because the sea was too cold to swim in, so nobody knew how, and, when boats capsized, people would drown." Make no mistake, there are many folks who prefer this climate, and the remoteness and seeming lack of immediacy that is growing in the rest of the world. I imagine you'd stay for the sameness of each day. I could see it as an unplug for a while, but living there would get, for me... dull. One thing I did wonder, though, what does a Falklander accent sound like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiHFhRyxU48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiHFhRyxU48
- BurningFrog 6y ago> living there would get, for me... dull Yeah, me too. But if you grew up there it would be HOME. Where your family and everyone you know lives. That's a lot more important than climate for many people.
- dmurray 6y agoThe article says about half the population did not grow up there.
- clamprecht 6y agoWhen Argentina and the UK were fighting over the Malvinas/Falklands, Jorge Luis Borges described the situation as, "two bald men fighting over a comb."
- fulafel 6y agoThere's a lot you can do outside if it's not sunbathing weather. https://falklandsoutdoors.com/tours https://falklandsoutdoors.com/tours
- LeoPanthera 6y agoWonderful paragraph about the war: > The islanders did what they could to undermine the enemy. Reg Silvey, the Cape Pembroke lighthouse keeper and a radio ham, rigged an aerial out of a steel-core washing line and transmitted troop information to the British. Terry Peck, a policeman, concealed a telephoto camera in a drainpipe and walked around taking photographs of Argentine missile sites. A farmer named Trudi McPhee led a caravan of islanders in Land Rovers and tractors through hostile territory at night across East Falkland to Tony and Ailsa’s farmhouse, where British troops needed vehicles to transport weapons. Eric Goss, a manager at Goose Green, convinced Argentine soldiers that the lights of British ships in Falkland Sound were moonlight reflecting off seaweed.
- redis_mlc 6y agoThe reason British troops needed local vehicles is that their helicopters were on the "Atlantic Conveyor" merchant ship, which the Argentines sunk. Since British army doctrine is to insert away from the front, they had to march around 55 miles to Port Stanley. (The US does amphibious assaults near the objective, which is high-risk: either you succeed, or get slaughtered on the beach, as in Italy and a couple of the Normandy landings.)
- walrus01 6y agoPersons interested in this weird artifact of British colonial history should also read up on St. Helena and Ascension island.
- quickthrowman 6y agoThere’s also Pitcairn Island, which has been in the news this century for some unfortunate reasons
- dugmartin 6y agoSee also Clipperton Island, a French territory off the west coast of Mexico.
- walrus01 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Pierre_and_Miquelon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Pierre_and_Miquelon
- PoachedSausage 6y agoAscension has lots of interesting techy history. BBC Atlantic Relay Station for Short Wave, NASA Tracking Station, Outpost belonging to GCHQ etc.
- libraryofbabel 6y agoIt's curious how many British overseas territories got left over from the British Empire, simply because they are too small, or never wanted independence, or both. Among others: St Helena in the middle of the South Atlantic (where Napoleon was imprisoned and died), part of Cyprus, the immensely controversial Gibraltar, various Caribbean islands, the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, and the very remote Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific. At its height the British Empire covered a quarter of the land on Earth and claimed dominion over a fifth of humanity; the saying was that the sun never set on the British Empire. Turns out, thanks to these various islands, it still doesn't: https://what-if.xkcd.com/48/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/48/
- pmyteh 6y agoAbsolutely! Though in two of those cases we held on to the territory against the wishes of the inhabitants because we wanted to keep strategically placed military bases: the Cyprus Sovereign Base Areas and the Chagos archipelago (now the BIOT). The latter was particularly egregious, as we deported all the inhabitants and have subsequently treated them terribly.
- pjc50 6y agoGibraltar is the least controversial, surely: it's been British since the Treaty of Utrecht, at the point where the map of Europe started to resemble the modern one. The population is British and wishes to remain so. There wasn't an indigenous population removed at gunpoint. Even Cyprus is more controversial. The fact that Spain would like it has no standing under international law.
- rikroots 6y agoAlso Bermuda, now the most populous of the British Overseas Territories - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda