The World's Horizon Gets More Fun, Finally

Watching the Obama administration's fumbling efforts at crisis management, diplomacy, and foreign affairs generally has become both boring and frustrating. Not since the equally brainless, clueless days of the Ford and Carter administrations has the horizon of foreign relations been so flat, so unbroken by anything resembling real challenge and real success.

Now, where the mists of the South Atlantic meet the fogs of Argentinian politics we can see the emerging outlines of something which combines the old and the new, the foreign and domestic, the regional and the global in a very interesting way. The place in the center of the new crosshairs is the Falkland Islands. The reason is oil.

The American owned drilling rig Ocean Guardian is en route to the Falklands. To err on the side of accuracy it is headed to a spot in the ocean roughly one hundred miles northwest of Port Stanley and thus well within the exclusive economic zone of the British dependency. It is believed that as many as sixty million barrels of oil may be found under the seabed. (By comparison the North Sea oilfield has produced roughly forty million barrels to date.)

The Argentinian government tore up the draft agreement with the UK which would have provided for joint development of the oil resources in this long disputed region. This 2007 action has been followed by the Argentinian Congress passing legislation last December attaching the Falklands to the province of Tierra del Fuego. In addition the Buenos Aires government has taken the matter to the International Court at the Hague.

Argentinian nationalism runs high, very high--and not just when an illegitimate, bloody military junta is running the show. Making matters more pressing for the administration of President Christina de Kirchner is the dismal state of the Argentinian economy. Considering how dependent the country is upon financial assistance and support from the US and the international financial agencies, it is not too wide of the mark to say the Argentinian economy's situation is desperate. Of course, desperate times cry for desperate solutions.

A whole bunch of petrobucks now and into the next few decades must look very, very appealing to the lads and lassies of Buenos Aires about now. The ForMin has not only reinvoked the ancient (and equally insubstantial) claim of sovereignty over the "Islas Malvinas" but threatened to take all necessary measures to prevent "illegal" operations there.

In the real world the Falklands are not the ripe and undefended plum the Argentinian generals took them to be back in 1982. Now the islands are well defended. Now, again unlike the years preceding the Argentinian invasion, the British government is and has been quite clear in its determination to maintain sovereignty over the islands.

It boggles the mind to consider that Buenos Aires might actually be considering the "military option" in the Falklands. It is far more likely that the de Kirchner government is attempting a bit of crude international blackmail.

The hard pressed Argies must be hoping that a bit of bluster, a tad of threat, a bit of an appeal to the "international community" will result in the UK offering a better deal than it had before in terms of splitting oil revenues. The de Kirchner crowd must be betting that the wobbly Brown ministry facing a very demanding uphill battle in the next elections will be more willing to bribe than hang tough.

Beyond those factors the strategists of Buenos Aires are more than likely convinced that the British public lacks the political will it demonstrated back in 1982. The highly evident war weariness shown by the British public regarding Afghanistan as well as the acrimonious investigation into the Blair ministry's decision to join the US in the invasion of Iraq have served to convince the Argentinians that the British will be quite willing to genuflect before the illusory winds of war in the South Atlantic.

If matters escalate in the slightest the Obama administration will have one more unexpected foreign policy challenge. The question will be simple: Does the US in 2010 act as it did in 1982, complete support of a key partner? Considering the fact that British troops are fighting and dying along with US Marines in Operation Moshtarak and that Britain is a strong adherent of the no-nukes-for-the-mullahs position, the answer would seem to be self-evident.

But, considering the parallel universe so often inhabited by the Obama administration, the forces of the real world may not be so compelling. When one takes a close look at the administration's approach to foreign affairs in which no country is seen as an "enemy" and very few, if any, as "friends," in which the purpose of economic sanctions is not to coerce a government into compliance with US policy demands but only to convince the government to come back to the negotiating table, the probability of taking an unreservedly pro-London position is small.

It is far more likely that President Obama will emulate Rodney King and wail, "Can't we all just get along." In pursuit of this goal the President and his freight haulers will seek victory through appeasement, peace through abnegation.

At that point it is to be hoped that the British will remind Mr Obama of their own experience with feeding raw meat to a wolf in the hopes the beast will turn vegan. It was called Munich. And, World War II.