06/15/2011
In 1833, the British Crown took permanent possession of the Falkland Islands. In the 1840s permanent British settlement began. The Falklands have had a British population and been British ever since, although the Argentine government has always claimed the Falklands for Argentina.
In 1982, desperate for a martial diversion from their misrule and lulled by imprudently announced British defence cuts, the Argentine juntainvaded and occupied the Falklands. The Argies were not welcomed by the Islanders, to put it politely.
Fortunately, the planned British cuts had not yet happened, so the Royal Navy and the other British services were able to pull together a task force in short order, sail south and liberate the Falklands only two and a half months after their occupation.
Operation Corporate was not a textbook campaign; some British casualties and ship losses probably could have been avoided. Nevertheless, it was a very well planned and executed campaign, drawing on and adding to the very long legacy of naval excellence the Royal Navy for so long embodied. The result reflected the relativeprofessionalism of both sides.
After some initial vacillation, thanks to Secretary of State Alexander Haig apparently, the U.S. government under the Reagan administrationdid the right thing and supported the British, both diplomatically andmaterially. In 1982, the U.S. government was still pretty American and thus understood the importance of supporting America’s most reliable ally — as well as America’s national ancestor. But times and circumstances change; recently not for the better.
In 2011, the president of the United States is a gent of somewhat hazy provenance named Barack Hussein Obama, and the London Telegraph reports that Obama’s U.S. government has now abandoned its support of the British position on the Falklands: that the islands are British and their sovereignty is not negotiable. Instead, the United States is supporting an oft-repeated Organization of American States declaration that the sovereignty of the Falklands must be subjected to negotiations with Argentina as soon as possible. In effect, the United States has taken Argentina’s side and is now officially supporting a position whose logic ultimately would require the transfer of the Falklands to Argentine control, against the clear wishes of the Falkland Islanders themselves, who are entirely British and wish to remain under British rule. What ever happened to self-determination? As Nile Gardiner notes in the Telegraph, the Obama administration’s sellout of the British puts America on the same side of the Falklands question as such stalwarts of freedom as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega.
Adding insult to injury, the State Department of Obama and Hillary Clinton now refers to the archipelago in question not by its name, the Falkland Islands, but by what the Argentines choose to call it, Las Malvinas.
No U.S. government has offered such a gratuitous rebuff to the British since President Eisenhower pulled the plug on the British and French intervention in the Suez crisis of 1956. At the time of Suez, Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles could at least point to the risk of a Soviet response. There are no such strategic imperatives at play around the Falklands. Why, then, has the Obama administration engaged in this seemingly pointless betrayal?
There has been considerable speculation that there may be material oil reserves under the seas surrounding the Falklands, and that oil prospects are the real reason for the Argentines' determination to take over the Falklands. It’s more about black gold than wounded pride. Maybe so and, if so, maybe the Obama administration is responding to pressure from American oil companies hoping for preferential treatment should the United States broker a British surrender of the Falklands to Argentina. Maybe so, but I don’t think so.
If there is a motive other than simple reflexive leftism for the Obama administration’s change of sides, it is not about oil but about people. No, not about Falkland Islanders or Argentines, but about two fellows, one living, one dead, and both named Barack Hussein Obama. When a Briton or an American who is at all clued in about the Falklands ponders that place, what comes to mind? An overseas British dominion, a settled place with a British population. When the younger Obama thinks about it, what comes to his mind? Probably the British-colonized Kenya of the 1950s, when the older Obama was in his high days of anti-British leftist agitation. What is playing out here is Obama’s resentment of the British, his African obsession with the presumed evils of European colonialism on the Dark Continent and elsewhere. As Obama himself has shown in his book, and as Steve Sailer elucidated in his gloss on it, the younger Barack Hussein Obama doesn’t like the British any more than the older one did. Indeed, even though he is half-white himself, Obama doesn’t seem to care much for white people of any nationality. Obama is slapping the Brits, not gratuitously, but to avenge perceived slights his father suffered at British hands.
Is Obama turning on the British out of anti-white animus? That may be as well, but as noted above, I think it is more personal. But if anti-white animus is an element of this deplorable change in American policy, that would be ironic indeed. The current CIA Factbook reports that Argentina’s population is 97% white, making it a far more white country than the United States — or even Great Britain now! But I guess all those white Argentines would be called Hispanics — honorary non-whites — if they moved to America …
If the American change on the Falklands is indeed motivated by Obama’s family history, then America has a president of the United States who makes foreign policy not as an American, but as an African.
Brave new world, indeed. Is that acceptable to Americans? Would any Republican presidential candidate dare ask that question? If not, why not?
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