With predictable but for many surprising speed, the world order that followed the implosion of the Soviet Union is collapsing. Internally weakened by the cultural fatigue of the people who support it, it is threatened by the almost universal collapse of the birth rate, by the immigration of millions of people from poor areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America who hope to enter relatively rich countries that, one after another, are closing their doors to them, in addition, of course, by the neo-tsarist expansionism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the growing jihadist aggressiveness and the economic challenge posed by China.
There is also increasing concern about the impact of technological development, especially artificial intelligence, which according to the most optimistic – or pessimistic – is about to take over a multitude of well-paid tasks, depriving those who perform them of their jobs and, what in political terms is even more important, of their place in society. Needless to say, the climate of uncertainty thus generated does not bode well. On the contrary, by favoring demagogues of all kinds, it ensures that the transition that is underway will be tumultuous. Unless we are very lucky, it could be catastrophic.
However, for Argentina, which, as is notorious, did not know how to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the era that is approaching its end, the perspectives opened by the changes that are underway could be positive. Fortunately, it has already transformed into an oil and gas exporting country; Even if shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz is soon restored, Europeans and Asians will want alternative energy sources in less dangerous parts of the world than the Middle East. Likewise, the country has valuable “rare earths” that are not under China’s control. As long as its rulers manage to make the national economy viable and substantially improve the educational system, Argentina has sufficient material resources to become a pole of significant growth.
Does Javier Miel understand it? It would seem so. Although he is a born Manichaean who sees everything in black and white and who does not at all like the nuances that in his opinion only serve to undermine the will of the soldiers of good in their eternal fight against the hosts of evil, he is betting that the structural reforms he is promoting will serve to ensure that the country is internationally competitive in the coming years. You may also have noticed that, by providing an impression of clarity, your linear way of thinking has helped you dominate the national stage and have some impact on the rest of the world.
For Milei, problems that others find terribly complex are actually very simple. Its economic strategy is inspired by the conviction that there is no viable alternative to the free market and that therefore what it tells you must be strictly respected. Regarding foreign policy, in his opinion it has to be based on an ironclad alliance with the United States and Israel, two powers that in his opinion and that of others are the only ones that are determined to defend Western civilization that is threatened not only by its many external enemies but also by the internal rebellion that is being fomented by the new woke left that has made collective self-pity a powerful ideological weapon.
Milei, convinced as he is that the long national decline was largely due to the attempt, attempted by Juan Domingo Perón, to decouple the country from the United States and its allies in the years following World War II, may not have been wrong, but that does not mean that Argentine interests will always coincide with those of its favorite partners. Although it is likely that the United States will remain the most powerful and economically dynamic country in the world for a long time and that Israel will consolidate itself as a regional hegemon, when it comes to the evolution of geopolitics in the coming decades, nothing is written in stone.
Be that as it may, although for demographic reasons China’s long-term prospects are far from being as promising as those convinced that the Middle Kingdom is destined to replace the United States so that the international order will soon revolve around Beijing, its influence is expected to grow in the coming years, so that the country would do well to try to take advantage of the commercial opportunities that will surely arise.
Of course, the fact that Milei’s foreign policy depends too much on his personal relationship with Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, two leaders who are in trouble in their own countries, is a cause for concern. If, as many predict, the American Democrats manage to surpass the Republicans in the November legislative elections, Trump will find himself becoming what his compatriots call a “lame duck” whose initiatives will be systematically frustrated; It would not be entirely surprising if in such a case the most vengeful democrats wanted to punish Milei for having identified so effusively with the tycoon.
Much will depend on the outcome of the war that the United States is waging against the terrorist regime of the Iranian ayatollahs which, by blocking the transit of oil, gas and related products through the Strait of Hormuz, has managed to deal a very hard blow to the international economy which, to Trump’s surprise, has already had negative consequences for the North American economy by raising the price of gasoline at service stations. The political costs to Trump would be lower if he explained better the reasons why he chose to attack Iran, but in the opinion of the many who hate him and pray that he will be humiliated, his attempts to do so have only served to sow confusion.
For his part, Netanyahu is in difficulties for internal political reasons, including accusations of corruption and for not having foreseen the bloody invasion of his country by the Hamas jihadists on October 6, 2023, in which more than a thousand people died and hundreds were taken hostage. He has also been hurt by Trump’s decision to order him to halt the offensive against the pro-Iranian militia Hezbollah in Lebanon. For obvious reasons, the majority of Israelis want their army to eliminate it outright, but in order to prolong for a few days the precarious ceasefire with Iran, Trump chose to recognize that, as the regime’s spokespersons insisted, Hezbollah and the large area of southern Lebanon in which it has entrenched itself, in fact belong to the theocratic dictatorship.
As many have pointed out, the priorities of the American president are different from those of the Israeli prime minister who, for obvious reasons, will not settle for an arrangement that allows the current Iranian regime to survive although, in some ways, its mere existence benefits the Jewish State by allowing it to get closer to Sunni regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. If an Iran freed from the fanatic clerics, who every day commit to erasing the “Zionist entity” from the face of the Earth, were transformed into a country as pro-Israeli as it was under Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the political geometry of the Middle East would change completely.
It is not the only region in which different countries are forced to adapt to new circumstances. So does virtually everyone else. While it is tempting to attribute the disintegration of the old international order to Trump’s vandalism, it was cracking well before his return to the White House thanks to the meteoric rise of China and the decline, which at this point seems irremediable, of the old powers of Europe. The movement led by Trump has taken advantage of the fear that the United States will end up like Europe, which, according to the strategists of the current North American ruling party, is destroying itself by allowing itself to be “invaded” by tens of millions of people with attitudes that are radically foreign to it and by squandering an excessive proportion of its economic resources on social welfare programs.
Trump is far from the first American leader to criticize the governments of still prosperous European countries for their refusal to invest in their own defense because they assumed that the Americans would always protect them from any external aggressor. Europeans refused to heed the exhortations to this effect from Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, so it took concrete action by someone disruptive like Trump to force them to take such warnings seriously. All in all, although the Germans, French and British, goaded by Trump, have recently committed to radically increasing their respective military spending, it will not be entirely easy for them to do so; The main economies of the old continent are already creaking under the weight of benefactor systems created decades ago, when the demographic reality was very different from the current one but which, for electoral reasons, cannot be drastically reformed to make them sustainable.
