Argentina’s in the news. So let me say a bit about Argentina. I’ll try to keep it under 1,000 words. Let’s see how it goes.

The first thing I want to emphasize is that Argentina isn’t “strategically important” to the United States, as some macro-market commentators suggested this week and last. If it is — strategically important to America — I’d love to hear how.

With apologies to Argentina, which I realize is an incredible place, the country could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t make a shred of difference to the US “strategically.”

The second thing I want to emphasize is that the Trump administration’s engaged in a kind of 21st century version of the interventionism which typified US policy vis-à-vis Latin America during the Cold War. And that’s not a good thing.

We’re back in the business of propping up right-wing governments and blowing up (literally in the case of the Venezuelan “drug” boats) left-wing governments. However noble our intentions (and they aren’t noble), it won’t turn out well. Interventionism never does.

This is part and parcel and Donald Trump’s anachronistic foreign policy which divides the world into spheres of influence governed by a US-Russia-China triumvirate. He’s soldered that onto a resurrected Monroe Doctrine and, to reiterate, the implementation’s starting to look quite a bit like the sort of mid-20th century interventionism which was directly responsible for some very bad outcomes, including heinous atrocities, across Latin America.

This summer, Trump wielded US sanctions and tariffs in a failed bid to rescue Jair Bolsonaro, a man openly nostalgic for Brazil’s military dictatorship. Now, the US Treasury is pledging support for Javier Milei in Argentina, where things are going off the rails financially. Again. Again again. Again, again, again. As it turns out, the best way to fix a basket case isn’t by letting one run the country.

I’m not sure how much detail the average reader needs (or wants) here. Milei’s a self-styled fanatical libertarian trying to overhaul a serial defaulter with a long, rich history (and yes, “rich” is a misnomer) of leftist government.

In the simplest terms: It wasn’t going to work even if Milei weren’t hell-bent on being a cartoonish eccentric. But he is. And that means a project already doomed by the stark juxtaposition between what Milei’s trying to do and where he’s trying to do it is rendered completely unserious by the clownish nature of the man himself.

I said all of that two years ago, by the way. To wit, from a “Milei or Melee?“:

Brash politicians peddling quick fixes to intractable domestic problems, and particularly domestic economic problems, are, almost by definition, charlatans. The tale of the audacious demagogue who exploits widespread domestic disaffection to hijack a nation’s politics with combative, incendiary rhetoric is as old as the hills. It’s a playbook run again and again by opportunistic firebrands who, more often than not, lead their countries down the road to some kind of ruin. The good news for Argentina’s Javier Milei is that it could scarcely get much worse for the country, a serial defaulter with no peers and the butt of every macro joke that’s not about Venezuela.

In the same piece, I wrote that Milei’s economic agenda, “whatever the merits, faces high hurdles.” That was an understatement. Austerity’s not popular, after all, and while people will put up with it for a while, they won’t forever. Not even in the name of fighting inflation.

Predictably, Milei stumbled into various sorts of controversies, some very serious (e.g., corruption allegations involving his sister) others… well, also serious but at the same time funny (he pumped a crypto token that ended up collapsing). In part as a result, his approval rating slipped below 40% ahead of provincial elections held earlier this month.

A more experienced political would’ve hesitated before making existential pronouncements about those elections but Milei, like his friend Elon Musk during the run-up to Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court vote earlier this year, framed the ballot as life or death. Literally. He actually said that. He called local legislative elections for Buenos Aires a “life-or-death battle.”

That’s something you don’t want to say unless you’re pretty damn sure you’re going to win. Because if you lose a “life-or-death” political battle, what are you politically? Milei didn’t just lose, his bloc lost by 13ppt.

That rather unfortunate result spooked markets, things started to spiral and before you knew it, Scott Bessent was on “X” talking about using US taxpayer assets to bail out Milei and his chainsaw.

“Argentina is a systemically important US ally in Latin America, and the US Treasury stands ready to do what is needed within its mandate to support [the country],” Bessent said Monday, declaring “all options for stabilization on the table… includ[ing], but not limited to, swap lines, direct currency purchases and purchases of US dollar-denominated government debt” using the ESF.

Again, Argentina isn’t a “systemically important” US ally. It just isn’t. Certainly not financially and really not geopolitically either. Milei has no sway with anyone, anywhere other than perhaps at the IMF in true “If I owe you $1 that’s my problem, but if I owe you $42 billion that’s your problem” fashion.

In the same statement, Bessent touted “expansive” opportunities “for private investment” in Argentina which, Scott promised, “will be Great Again.” The Trump administration, he went on, “remain[s] confident that President Milei’s support for fiscal discipline and pro-growth reforms are necessary to break Argentina’s long history of decline.”

One wonders, given the Trump administration’s demonstrated penchant for interventions on behalf of right-wingers in Latin America, whether voters in Argentina will be allowed to have the final say in the event the country decides it’s had enough of Milei’s libertarian “anarcho-capitalism” and moves to further undercut his capacity to implement the program and/or vote him out altogether down the road.

Milei’s already accused the opposition of a conspiracy in relation to recent events, and it should be noted that in 2023 he suggested, without evidence, that the election might be fraudulent. Until he won. At which point he said the vote was legitimate.

Victoria Villarruel, Milei’s No. 2 with whom he’s been at odds for over a year, once lampooned a mural in honor of the estimated 30,000 people killed during the country’s 1976-1983 dictatorship, calling the work “graffiti.” Villarruel, you’re reminded, is the niece of Ernesto Guillermo Villarruel, a captain in the dictatorship who managed a secret detention center. He was accused of crimes against humanity.

Word count: 1,071, not including these last two sentences. Not too bad considering I’ve never been into the whole brevity thing.