Mes amis, je m' excuse!

The other day I accused the French of being, at best, ambivalent when we went to war over the Falklands.  My frequent, and frequently wiser, commenter, DM, protested politely but I ignored him preferring the comfort of  good, old, British, anti-Frog bigotry to anything so boring as facts!  However, today, a ghost from the past arises in the form of Sir John Nott, our less than inspiring Minister of Defence at the time.  In The Telegraph he insists that France, unlike America, immediately and unequivocally came to our aid, lending us Mirage jets for our fighters to practice against, and providing crucial information on Excocet missiles so that we could buy out any of those still on the market and sabotage others.

One phrase in the story struck me:

Caspar Weinberger, the US defence secretary, supported Britain but the State Department was "dominated by Latinos".

Well, if it was Latino-dominated then, think how it must be now!  I have remarked before on how changing demographics in the USA will change their foreign policy.  Our government needs to set aside a large amount of money to cope with the influx of Falkland Islanders in the not too distant future. 

In the meantime, mes amis, je m' excuse!

 

Comments

[hank]

"latinoa"

The South American divison of the State Department which covers Argintina is staffed by forign service officers who have spent most or their careers in Latin America. They like the place or they would have transfered or quit, so natually their sysmpathys would be in that direction. The real big problem is were they more sysmpathtic to Argintina than the the US. Sometimes this is real doubtful. It drove Henry Kissenger bonkers. I bet any foriegn service has that problem, even the Foriegn Office.

[JK]

I'll add to Hank's. At the time Reagan had going a virtual US war pitting guerrilla fighters out of El Salvadore against the "nominal" Communist government of Nicaragua (the Sandinista regime). During the same time-frame, Reagan declared his famous "War On Drugs." While at that time, the most prevalently "abused" drug in the US was domestically produced marijuana, increasing amounts of cocaine were being trans-shipped out of the more properly termed South American countries of Bolivia, portions of Brazil, and Columbia.

So too, there existed the State Department holdovers (career diplomats) who had been deeply engaged during the times of Argentina's Pinochet, and Chile's Allende governments. During this earlier period, there were relatively few US citizens with the proper skill-sets and inter-government contacts, and so our covert services went about "recruiting" for the State Department.

Lacking your intimate vocabulary of Shakespeare, I'm forced to drop in one of those dreaded links. But, since it's far easier to to look up stuff on the Contras - I'll self-limit to the earlier period.

http://www.casahistoria.net/allendepinochet.htm#Allende,_Pinochet_&_the_USA

[JK]

Oops. I do wish those pesky South American dictators wouldn't have so many surnames beginning with "P."

Argentina's Peron. I'll drop in the link but paste the relevant:

"After 1950, Peron abandoned some elements of his economic nationalism. Improved relations were sparked in part by a U.S. Export-Import Bank loan and a new Argentine law in 1953 that reopened the country to foreign investment. They were given a further boost with a series of contracts between the Argentine government and Standard Oil and with the collapse of Peron's "tercera posicion" diplomacy. Change came quickly with heavy new American investments in Argentina in the 1950s and strong Argentine support for US Cold War policies in Latin America and beyond."

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-112127606/finding-alliance-rethinking-argentine.html

[David Duff]

Hank, don't get me started on the problems with the Foreign Office, or, the Office for Foreigners as I like to think of it!

JK, you're going down with galloping 'Linkitis' again!

[H]

A large sum of money? For a fraction of what the Falklands has cost us, we could have given every Falklander (?) £1m and a large farm in New Zealand. Not the principled thing, no doubt...

[David Duff]

Indeed, and if the Argies had offered to chip in part of it, well, who knows . . .