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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Falklands and Military Interventionism

Bret Stephens asks a rhetorical question: At a minimum, Britain was lucky to have in 1982 a prime minister who believed that Britain could still stand for great and true things—even in a scrap over a small and faraway place. Is there that kind of leadership in the West today? Stephens’ question at the end […]

Bret Stephens asks a rhetorical question:

At a minimum, Britain was lucky to have in 1982 a prime minister who believed that Britain could still stand for great and true things—even in a scrap over a small and faraway place. Is there that kind of leadership in the West today?

Stephens’ question at the end suggests that he thinks there is not that kind of leadership, which is strange given the frequency with which the U.S. and the British have become involved in foreign conflicts over the last twenty years. Let’s also not carried away about Thatcher. Thatcher was right to want to recover British territory after it had been seized by force. The “small and faraway place” legally belonged to Britain, and it had every right to reverse an invasion of its territory. It’s hard to imagine many leaders that would shrug at the prospect of the political humiliation that would result from leaving captured territory in the hands of a foreign invader.

As Peter Hitchens recently argued in his TAC article in which he demystified the myth of Thatcher, the Falklands crisis was made possible in no small part because of Thatcher’s previous actions:

Her mighty triumph in the recapture of the Falkland Islands, which had thrilled me at the time, was the greatest disappointment. It was her government that had given Argentina the impression we no longer cared much for these remote territories. It was her government that—if it had lasted a couple of years longer—would have sold or scrapped several of the warships we used to recapture them.

She did not, as her left-wing detractors insinuate, go to war for popularity’s sake. She went to war to save her own bacon. To have given in, or to have been defeated in the war to recover the islands, would have led to her being blamed for the whole episode. Only victory, won for her by the Royal Navy she had been trying to cut to ribbons a few weeks before, would bury her own guilt in the matter. A very telling photograph shows her leaving Downing Street to face Parliament just after the Argentine seizure of the Falklands. She is bowed and tense with worry, and looks far older than she would six months later, when the war was won.

Max Hastings concurred in his recent reflection on the legacy of the Falklands War:

Her own government was responsible for the series of diplomatic and strategic bunglings which caused the military dictatorship in Buenos Aires to conclude that we were no longer either willing or able to defend the islands.

What has been so troubling in the last twenty years is how habituated to using force abroad the U.S. and Britain have become and how broadly our governments interpret their international obligations. Since 1982, there has been just one war waged by the U.S. and Britain in the last thirty years that was fought in order to retaliate against an attack, and there are very few years between 1991 and now when U.S. and British armed forces were not being used somewhere in the world to bomb or attack someone. Thirty years after the Falklands, the danger is not that Western governments are unwilling to get involved in conflicts in “small and faraway places,” but that it takes the political and military strains caused by very long wars to discourage them from starting new ones.

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