Santiago. The presence last week in Argentina of US General Laura Richardson, head of the Southern Command, and the offer made by President Javier Milei to allow the installation of a military base in Ushuaia, in southern Patagonia, attempt to counteract the presence of China in the region, says Chilean academic Mladen Yopo, specialist in international issues.
And there is also Milei’s intention to position extreme right-wing leadership against left-wing governments, adds Yopo, doctor in Political Science and Global Politics researcher at SEK University.
“It is not the first time that an alignment with the United States has occurred; former president Carlos Menem in 1990 sent a destroyer and a corvette to the first Gulf War. It is an idea that has always circulated in sectors of Argentine politics, it is ideological issue,” he says.
There are also practical things: Argentina wants to buy 24 F-16 fighters from Denmark, but it must have the approval of the United States, and seeks to repower its battered armed forces.
As for China, during the years of Kirchnerism, a space observation base was authorized in Neuquén, which can have a dual use, that is, “it has a geopolitical element of the global struggle between the powers. Milei, which has a crusade With the Chinese issue, it counteracts that by offering an integrated base to the United States, with passage to Antarctica, something geostrategic.”
Richardson has been to several countries in the region, Chile among them, “because China has put everything into the American area of influence,” but he also seeks to stop the incursion of countries like Russia and Iran that provide weapons assistance.
According to Yopo, despite Milei’s aspirations, “the United States will never consider Argentina as a strategic ally, because its strategic ally in the face of dilemmas such as the sovereignty of the Malvinas Islands is the United Kingdom; it will never abandon it because it is much most important in the global confrontation”.
After the defeat in the Malvinas in 1982, the army was weakened, a situation that continues to the present; like Milei “has a messianic concept of being the champion of certain regional ideological struggles, that implies having an army that backs up his rhetoric with strategic capabilities.”
In Buenos Aires, in front of General Richardson, Yopo says, “Milei was very threatening when he said that the Argentine and American people have in common that when they adopt the ideas of freedom, they can undertake the most important territorial expansions in their history, the height of its ambition and its vitality; that is, it proposes a conception that is ancient imperialist and expansionist geopolitics, and that today is relatively obsolete and is even in bad taste to use.
But “it is a phrase that must be considered, not because it will have the strategic capacity – in the region by far the first army is the Brazilian one (it builds a nuclear-powered submarine and another five conventional ones with France) – but it does step on it. “a bit of a blow to Brazil, which, as a regional power, has always opposed US intervention, except during dictatorships where there was a similarity marked by the doctrine of national security.”
As for Chile, Yopo says, it would not like a US base in Ushuaia, in the Beagle Channel, because it would bring global issues into the neighborhood, and “these can generate unpredictable situations; when there is a military presence and there is a dispute, the The possibility of error is always present.
“The Chilean armed forces must be looking at this possibility with some concern, because despite the evolution in strategic analyses, the military will never leave aside the hypothesis of conflict with neighboring countries (Argentina, Bolivia and Peru),” he states. .
#Milei #repower #army #offers #military #base #expert
– 2024-04-12 00:14:17
