As a veteran of the White House Press corps, and occasional visitor down the years to the Casa Rosada to see a President or two, there’s a nagging thought at the end of this year, one about the fairly bizarre bromance between two Presidents, Donald Trump and Javier Milei.
Yes, the all-bestriding colossus imagery is so evident – one leader with his chainsaw, the other constantly waving a big stick (verbally or literally, just consider those attacks on boats in the Caribbean). Likewise, the marriage of convenience between two such self-centred, semi-authoritarian characters leaves you wondering how long it will last.
But hit the pause button, and remember where Milei was in the dark days of mid-October, when the polls suggested a potentially devastating loss in the midterm elections. The President’s team was scrambling to find the cash to avoid yet another Argentine crash, seen by a world beyond weary of such melodramas from Buenos Aires.
“Chainsaw out of gas?” asked The Economist magazine, these days the go-to read in many world capitals, not to mention finance houses from New York to Tokyo. “Argentina is pushing international lending to its breaking-point,” read one editorial, noting that for decades the country had borrowed without ever taking the medicine to be able to pay its debts. “Milei’s experiment wobbles” was the magazine's conclusion in early October.
To the rescue came Trump and his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. They started with US$20 billion for a credit line. Within days (or was it hours), they were talking of doubling that, to US$40 billion, a number that echoed across that rarified world of national debt because it amounted almost to the number Argentina owed its main benefactor, the International Monetary Fund.
“Argentina is a systemically important USA ally,” declared Bessent on X. “The United States will do what is needed.” Trump, hugging his buddy Milei publicly, waxed in his own form of wacky lyricism. “Argentina is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever seen, and we want it to succeed, very simple,” he declared, although he added a note in praise of his own politics-cum-ideology: “We’re just helping a great philosophy take over a great country.”
Read those words, and you think perhaps ‘Ah well, just a leader in love with himself spouting self-promotion, rambling on as ever, never thinking beyond the immediate.’ Also, when you look at the size of the US economy, well, even US$40 billion represents small change for a GDP topping US$30 trillion (to be more precise, it’s around 0.133 percent).
So here’s a thought, with Milei emerging triumphant from those elections and feeling empowered to take on the very issues – think labour law and reform – that lie at the heart of his agenda to make Argentina great again, we could quote his extraordinary address on the night he won the election in 2023: “Today is the beginning of the end of Argentina’s decadence, we’ll return to being a world power.”
Trump gave Milei’s government much more than just X billion dollars in a credit line. The United States, acting the way it did when it did, echoed a clarion call the world first heard in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, when governments fretted aloud about whether to save that industry, that bank, that sector. “Argentina, too big to fail,” declared Washington.
The sceptic in me wonders whether, given Trump’s personality and lust for sycophancy, the message could simply be: “Milei, too big to fail.” Likewise, I doubt Trump thought for a moment about any of this. But no matter, because the reasons for that wider world to examine this country anew, through that lens of too big to fail, are writ large across Argentina’s landscape. They lie surely at the epicentre of the agenda that the likes of Luis Caputo, Federico Sturzenegger and Manuel Adorni, from Milei’s inner team, consider every day.
Consider food, for example. This country is capable of feeding a billion people, a staggering number, given it represents one-eighth of humanity. As a young journalist, in later life as an adviser to the UN secretary-general, I witnessed and worked on the issue of food insecurity. Sorry, let’s call it what I saw: extreme hunger leading to famine, kids dying in front of your eyes from weeks of starvation, young mothers so emaciated they couldn’t feed a newborn. We like to tell ourselves it ain’t happening any more – sorry, go to Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Gaza; famine is still with us.
Argentina, if the country had its act together, could play such a role and return to the “high table” of important countries, with food. And yes, some very hard-working and savvy farmers, backed by state-of-the-art technology and so aware of how to get the most soya out of that field in Río Cuarto, Cordoba, could feed the world and make money at the same time.
Then let’s consider energy. This country should surely work on better titles for some of its most precious blessings, but Vaca Muerta, the huge shale oil and gas field in Patagonia, represents a calling card as our world grapples with ever-changing needs for fuel and gas. Maybe it’s not the most eco-friendly way to supply, but as that huge energy field (second-largest of its kind in our world, we are told) begins to deliver, the opportunity for Argentina and Milei’s government screams out loud. Hardly a dead cow at all.
Turn then to an arena that clearly does have Trump’s attention, in some detail. Remember that, earlier this year, he insisted on Ukraine’s government cutting a deal with his administration over that country’s rare-earth minerals ? Well, you hear in Trump’s Washington an awareness of what Argentina could have in terms of mining and minerals. A delicate subject, not least in Mendoza (my favourite province) but let’s ponder the way that Milei’s Argentina is racing to become the lead provider of lithium in Latin America, a key element to the batteries of new-age electric cars.
My Irish grandmother always taught me: “Count your blessings and never let me hear you taking any of them for granted.” Argentina has been blessed forever, and taken so many of those blessings for granted. The Milei government says it knows that has to change – the leader himself on that election night in 2023 suggested it might even take 35 years.
The President’s friend in the White House has given him a platform on which to build that return to being a world power. Argentina, too big to fail? Let’s hope failure is not an option. And let’s hope it’s not just about Milei and the bromance, but about the years this grand project of re-invention will take, way beyond any one man’s time in power.
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