Argentina

Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner cannot claim to be the only world leader to lash out against oil speculators this week. Last Tuesday President Obama used an appearance in the White House Rose Garden to do the same. But Kirchner put her money where her mouth is. She announced she was renationalizing YPF, Argentina’s national oil company, which was privatized in 1993 and still accounts for almost all of the country’s oil production. 

In 1982, Argentina’s right wing military junta launched a sudden invasion of the Falkland Islands, the South Atlantic archipelago that has been a British possession since 1833.

Iran has a lot riding on the survival—both literal and political—of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez. If the Bolivarian revolutionary beats cancer and wins another term as president, Tehran will continue to enjoy a strategic partnership with the world’s fifth largest oil exporter. But if Chávez dies, or if Venezuela’s democratic opposition finds a way to defeat him at the ballot box, the mullahs will lose their most important ally in Latin America, an ally who has effectively turned his country into an Iranian satellite.

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have said, the relationship between Argentina and Iran just keeps getting “curiouser and curiouser.”

Analyzing Argentina’s foreign policy can sometimes be more suited to psychiatrists than journalists. Consider, for example, how President Cristina Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman have handled bilateral relations with Iran.

The last time that Argentine foreign minister Héctor Timerman made international news, he was needlessly provoking a crisis in bilateral relations with the United States over a routine military-training exercise. A few weeks earlier, Timerman had accused the U.S. government of operating “torture” schools both at home and abroad.

Shortly after Argentine foreign minister Héctor Timerman accused the United States of operating torture schools, his government decided to trigger a genuine crisis in bilateral relations.

Two recent dispatches from Buenos Aires highlight the travails of Argentine president Cristina Kirchner, whose foolish populism and economic mismanagement have created serious headaches for her government.

Last summer, pundits were writing the political obituaries of Cristina and Néstor Kirchner, Argentina’s first couple. Their coalition had suffered big losses in national legislative elections.

While most of Washington was focused on the White House “Health Care Summit” on February 25, something far more interesting was underway on Capitol Hill. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee showed up to work that day to find that a new provision—the “Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Interrogations Prohibitions Act”—had been inserted in the bill that funds U.S. intelligence activities for 2010.

The Times of London, in a story that borders on the passive-aggressive, is reporting that President Obama has refused to endorse British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands. The short skinny of this is that there's another Buenos Aires-London row over the rightful ownership of the islands (you may remember that the last such incident ended in rather poor results for Argentina), incited by a British proposal to drill off the Falklands coast. Mostly, though, it's the standard Argentinean response to poor internal economic conditions.