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It’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
by ponker 6y ago
It’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.