I found this to be a pretty vapid article. Spending multiple paragraphs talking about Argentina’s invulnerability to invasion from Africa and Australia (and An

I found this to be a pretty vapid article. Spending multiple paragraphs talking about Argentina’s invulnerability to invasion from Africa and Australia (and Antarctica? Come on now) makes me think the author has spent too much time playing Risk. No serious reader would consider these to be possibilities. Also, the major border with Brazil really undermines the whole “largely geographically invulnerable” and “weak neighbors” theses. Writing “Argentina has natural barriers (the Atlantic, Pacific, and Andes) that protect it from invasion on several borders. It shares a difficult to defend border with Brazil.” could have replaced maybe a quarter of this article. Some of the geographical similarities with the U.S. are interesting but seem oversimplified - farmland and rain are treated like RPG stats where every unit is fungible. Again this supports my theory that the writer is a fan of grand strategy games. The “Political Harmony” section is also odd considering Argentina’s history - I guess it is just considering wars with other states and not internal turmoil/unrest? Why hasn’t the supposedly unifying Río de la Plata trade system prevented internal violence and instability? Overall, I think this article could have been condensed into the opening few paragraphs of the author’s teased follow-up article that apparently actually gets into the question raised in the title. It suffers from what geopolitics writing seems to invariably suffer from: treating history like a wargame where nations are the discrete actors instead of treating it as the result of a single international commerce system that transcends borders and which most national governments have little power to contradict given their reliance on global trade.