Unlike most countries, Great Britain has fought side-by-side with America in its overseas battles, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the bloody war in Korea. But that may be less likely in the future, since the Obama Administration keeps slapping England in the face. In yet another slap at Britain, the Obama administration has sided with Argentina and Venezuela in a declaration on the Falkland Islands by the Organization of American States (OAS). The declaration demands that the United Kingdom negotiate with Argentina over control of the Falkland Islands, a British territory in the south Atlantic inhabited by English-speaking people. The declaration is slanted in favor of Argentina’s claim to the islands, such as by referring to the islands not as the “Falklands” (the name used by the islands’ inhabitants) but as the “Malvinas.” That’s the term the Argentine government uses for the islands when it demands them from Britain. No one who actually lives in the islands calls them that.
The people of the Falkland Islands wish to remain British citizens. But Argentina’s military dictatorship invaded the Falklands in 1982, only to be repulsed by the British Navy, which defeated Argentina in the Falklands War. Handing the islands over to Argentina would violate the islanders’ right to self-determination.
Argentina is now run by the Peronist Party, whose founder, Juan Peron openly sympathized with America’s fascist enemies in World War II (Peron’s Argentina deliberately gave shelter to fleeing Nazi war criminals). Argentina’s recent Presidents, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, have nationalized private pensions and plundered the private sector to pay for big government and welfare schemes. The OAS declaration “comes in the wake of increasing aggression by the Kirchner regime in the past 18 months, including threats to blockade British shipping in the South Atlantic.”
England’s legitimate claim to the Falklands is so obvious that when Britain went to war with Argentina in 1982, even the ruler of neighboring Chile rooted for the British.
Residents of the Falkland Islands have eminently sound reasons for wanting to remain in Britain, the birthplace of parliamentary democracy, rather than Argentina, which has been run by dictators like Peron or military governments for much of its history. The Islanders do not even speak Spanish, the Argentine language.
The Obama Administration’s decision to do this is not a one-time mistake based on simple ignorance, but rather reflects political obstinacy and contempt for a key ally. It is not for the first time it has joined in such a declaration against our British allies. It did it before, in 2010, and has learned nothing from the criticism it received at the time.
Obama earlier insulted the British, by dissing both the late Winston Churchill, who led Europe’s fight against the Nazis, and Britain’s then-Prime Minister. Obama staffers then compounded the offense by deriding Britain as being no more important than any of the world’s 190 other countries. (That’s right. The country that invented parliamentary democracy and whose troops fought and died with ours in Korea and other bloody wars against totalitarian regimes is deemed no more important by the Obama Administration than a tiny county like Nauru, which has only 14,000 people and survives through money laundering and selling passports to non-citizens).
