They Can All Smell Weakness

On 4th April, The Restorationist published what was labelled a "scathing attack" on Attorney General, Richard Hermer,  It was titled, "Chagos, Gibraltar, Now Cyprus, Tomorrow The Falklands". Five months later, the Falklands are now under threat from Argentina and the "special relationship" in such a state our closest ally is threatening to review its neutrality.

While our useless menopausal class are attempting to install their own Trudeau, our country is in serious military peril from multiple sides.

Javier Milei trailed his address to the nation on 1st September, describing the "Malvinas" as a subject SAGRADO ("sacred") to Argentines and promising to speak on the violation of Argentine sovereignty. He delivered it two evenings later, and the substance was worse than Whitehall expected.

The Falklands are Argentinean. Historically and legally. There can be no argument. They are part of the Argentine territory.

Then the sentence which ought to have emptied the Foreign Office of its complacency:

The islanders on their usurped territory do not have a legitimate right to self-determination and any argument on any such self-determination is invalid.

A president of a friendly, democratic state has announced roughly three thousand British citizens possess no right which the entire post-war settlement claims as its foundation. He followed it by declaring sanctions against any oil company operating in the disputed waters, and calling the Sea Lion oil field a clear and present danger to Argentina's claim.

Downing Street replied by describing the British position as long-standing and unwavering. Sovereignty rests with the UK. The islanders' right to self-determination is paramount. The position is clear.

Clear it certainly is. Nobody abroad seems remotely frightened of it.

And this entire sequence of events is a surprise to absolutely no-one with any simplistic grasp of history, an IQ over 40, or any experience of how children interact in a playground.

If the morons in Whitehall think this will be fought as a high school pearl-clutching righteousness battle of democratic morality, they are going to be heavily mistaken and deliver the greatest military humiliation in two centuries after Singapore and Suez.

An Assessment Of British National Power

Argentina has pressed this claim since 1833 without interruption, and the claim itself carries no news value whatsoever. Milei was praising Margaret Thatcher as recently as 2024 and promising to recover the islands within a framework of peace.

He no longer argues only from history or law. He argues from an appraisal of British national strength, citing our economy, our demography, and our migration crisis, describing a country in structural decline, and concluding Argentina is flourishing and will prevail. The international winds, he says, blow favourably.

The contents of this speech aren't rhetorical insomuch as they are painful truth.

Argentina is [snipped] not affected by uncontrolled immigration, the violence this brings, and the problems of national security that today stalk Europe.

If we evaluate the structural conditions of the United Kingdom, however, they confront multiple crises of a migratory, demographic and economic character that will be difficult to solve. It is clear that they are in decline.

An Argentine president must believe Britain is incapable of imposing a cost on him. He must believe no penalty will arrive. He must have performed the calculation and discovered nothing on the other side of the ledger.

Nothing in his position looks irrational. Sarah Rogers, a senior official at the American State Department posted a photograph of herself with Milei shortly before he spoke, accompanied by the observation exciting things are happening in the Western Hemisphere.

Seven Governments Reaching the Same Verdict

Beijing does not care about the South Atlantic. Buenos Aires has no interest in the fibre-optic cables beneath Tower Hill. Islamabad and Moscow agree about very little. The common factor is a conclusion about one country, arrived at separately, on the same evidence.

Galtieri's Calculation In 1982

Argentina had wanted the islands for a century and a half without invading them. The junta's fatal step was becoming persuaded Britain would not fight. Withdrawing HMS Endurance, the defence review of 1981, and the long diplomatic drift were read in Buenos Aires as evidence about political will rather than about Treasury arithmetic.

The subsequent parliamentary post-mortem accepted, in the Lords debate on the Franks Report, the cancellation of Endurance had transmitted a signal nobody in London intended to send.

Leopoldo Galtieri did not calculate he could win a war against Britain. He calculated there would not be one.

Milei says Britain is weakening, Argentina is strengthening, the international climate is turning, and time therefore favours Buenos Aires.

Milei is making the same calculation, for different reasons.

Chagos Supplied The Method

The International Court of Justice found in its 2019 advisory opinion Britain's detachment of the archipelago from Mauritius before independence had unlawfully frustrated Mauritian decolonisation, and concluded Britain should end its administration as rapidly as possible. This is, of course, nonsense.

No settled population held a continuing right of self-determination, because Britain had removed the population. The Falklands have a civilian community which voted in 2013, on a turnout above ninety per cent, by 99.8 per cent, with three votes against, to remain a British Overseas Territory. Lord Collins restated the British position at the Organisation of American States in June: no sovereignty discussion without the islanders' agreement.

All of this is still utterly pathetic. A nuclear power hides behind a few people in a sheep field, when its message should be: come and take it.

What foreign ministries drew from Chagos concerns technique rather than law. The sequence ran as follows:

1. A decolonisation claim;
2. Then a sustained campaign through UN committees;
3. Then advisory proceedings at the ICJ;
4. Then diplomatic isolation;
5. Then negotiations;
6. Then transfer of sovereignty;
7. Then a British payment for continued use of a base Britain already owned.

The sequence worked. It is repeatable. It requires no army, no casualties, and no risk.

All it would have taken at any of these stages is any politician to say no.

African Union lawyers are reported to be examining an ICJ route for slavery reparations precisely because they judge the method to have succeeded against Britain.

The conclusion circulating internationally has nothing to do with binding precedent. It concerns the demonstrated procedure for moving London.

Argentina Exploits The Decolonisation Myth

The C-24 met again in June on the Question of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas). Argentina's supporters there are not a fringe of Caribbean micro-states and Venezuelan diplomats. Positions favouring negotiation came through the G77 and China, Mercosur, CELAC, and the South Atlantic Zone of Peace and Cooperation, alongside a long list of individual delegations.

The Argentine foreign ministry afterwards celebrated the outcome as renewed international pressure on Britain to negotiate.

Mercosur representatives argued at the same session unilateral exploitation of resources in the disputed area contradicts earlier UN resolutions, and backed Argentina's right to litigate.

The Sea Lion oil field is estimated to hold in the region of 1.7 billion barrels, with production expected around 2028. Milei has moved from complaining about it to sanctioning the companies developing it.

The dispute has consequently acquired something absent since 1982: a valuable physical object, on a published timetable, over which two states can collide. Speeches about sovereignty produce headlines. Drilling rigs, supply vessels, fisheries patrols, and marine insurance underwriters produce incidents.

Madrid, Islamabad, and Beijing Take Their Turns

Spain signed the Gibraltar treaty in July, and Madrid announced immediately afterwards its sovereignty claim over Gibraltar remains entirely intact. Its foreign ministry continues to describe Gibraltar as a "colony" whose "decolonisation" requires restoring Spanish territorial integrity, rather than applying Gibraltarian self-determination.

Britain says sovereignty is untouched, and Gibraltar's own government supports the treaty. Both propositions can be true simultaneously. Spain has banked a commercial gain and kept the claim warm for later.

Pakistan will not take back a man convicted of leading the rape of children in an English town. Islamabad's position is Shabir Ahmed renounced his Pakistani citizenship, has lived almost his entire life here, and is therefore our problem.

Ministers threatened visa restrictions. Pakistan hinted it might respond by slowing returns across the board. In 2025 Britain refused 10,853 Pakistani asylum claims and removed 445 people, roughly one in twenty-five.

The Home Secretary is amending a fifty-year-old statute to close the loophole which protected Ahmed, an achievement of precisely nothing if the receiving country still declines to open the door. There is still no returns agreement on the table.

China has been granted the largest diplomatic compound in Europe, on a site of its own choosing, containing basement rooms greyed out of the public planning documents, adjacent to cables carrying financial traffic between the City and Canary Wharf. The security services advised any threat could be mitigated. Senator Jim Banks wrote to the British chargé d'affaires warning of consequences for the special relationship. Approval followed anyway, conveniently ahead of a trip to Beijing.

Moscow Has Targets, Washington Has Leverage

Maria Zakharova told a Moscow briefing on 27th August Russia could strike British military facilities inside and outside Ukraine, describing London as one step from legal complicity in terrorism and promising catastrophic consequences. Nothing of such force had been said to Britain before.

Four days later, Trump was asked in the Oval Office whether the American position on the Falklands was under review. "I always review every position. That's just one of many." Asked whether he wanted the new British government to increase defence spending, he answered the UK has some problems but they will get solved.

The Telegraph reported the Pentagon drawing up measures to push NATO members towards a five per cent spending target, with Britain receiving special attention, including the option of opposing British sovereignty outright. The State Department had described its position as neutral as recently as April.

In 1982 Washington supplied intelligence, fuel, and Sidewinder missiles after mediation failed.

In 2026 the same alliance has identified British sovereign territory as a pressure point to be squeezed for an extra percentage of GDP.

Whether the policy ever changes is close to irrelevant, since deterrence depends on what Buenos Aires believes Washington might do, and Buenos Aires has now watched the President of the United States decline to answer the question.

Cheques And Statues For The UN

General Recommendation No. 40 was adopted on 25th August by eighteen independent experts and published six days later. It tells former slave-trading states to honour the contributions of people of African descent in public spaces, which may mean new statues, artworks, and memorials; to erect monuments acknowledging the wrongs of those who benefited from historical atrocities; to enforce hate speech law more vigorously; to review the content of school textbooks; and to adopt policies eradicating xenophobia towards migrants.

It cites the racial riots of 2020 approvingly, complaining those who attacked statues were unfairly disparaged in the press.

If anyone needs any further argument the UN is a useless organisation hopelessly politicised with poisonous nonsense, if would be hard to cite anything more preposterous.

Britain was not the first jurisdiction on earth to abolish slavery. Vermont abolished it in 1777, Haiti in 1804, and Denmark's ban on the trade took effect in 1803.

British conduct has no parallel anywhere for a different reason. Having abolished the trade in 1807 and slavery across the empire in 1833, Parliament voted £20 million in compensation, something close to forty per cent of annual government expenditure, financed by a loan the Treasury did not finish repaying until 2015.

The Royal Navy then stationed the West Africa Squadron off the slave coast for roughly sixty years, seized around 1,600 ships, freed something in the order of 150,000 people, and buried thousands of sailors dead of fever for a cause bringing Britain no advantage of any kind.

No other great power has spent such a proportion of its wealth, for so long, on a purely moral objective.

Britain's answer to being lectured on the subject was to abstain in March. Not to vote against and read the record into the minutes, which any desk officer could have drafted between lunch and the school run.

To abstain, and hope for a change of topic.

Instructions about our statues arrived five months later. They always do. A nation which will not defend its finest hour will not be believed when it claims to be defending anything else.

Could Argentina Take The Falklands?

RAF Mount Pleasant is a permanent complex hosting Typhoons, a Voyager tanker, transport aircraft, and ground radar. HMS Medway took over as the permanent South Atlantic patrol vessel in January. The islands are defended, watched, and reinforceable in a manner unimaginable on 1st April 1982, when the garrison amounted to a detachment of Royal Marines.

The Argentine air force is regenerating with Danish-surplus F-16s and has begun flying the type, with pilots working through conversion training. Over five and ten years this matters considerably. It does not produce an amphibious capability against a defended island next spring.

Everything below invasion is available immediately, and Milei has just stepped onto the first rung.

• Sanctions against oil operators.
• Pressure on their insurers and shareholders.
• Litigation.
• Isolation at the UN and the OAS.
• Disputes over fisheries licences.
• Challenges to maritime jurisdiction.
• Harassment near installations.
• Naval and aviation encounters, individually deniable and cumulatively instructive.

Nobody announces an invasion six months in advance. They establish first whether anyone intends to stop them.

Is it possible? Yes.

It's messy. But it's entirely possible.

Deterrence Is Manufactured In Foreign Capitals

Britain is assembling the conditions in which a second Falklands War becomes thinkable. Deterrence is not a count of hulls and airframes. It is a belief held inside foreign governments about what will happen to them if they move.

A country can possess overwhelming superiority and be attacked regardless, because ministers abroad have concluded it lacks the will to use any of it. Britain enjoyed exactly such superiority over Argentina in 1982 and was invaded anyway. Correcting the error cost 255 British lives.

The junta had to guess.

Milei has not needed to. He watched:

• Chagos
• Abstention in March
• A Chinese compound approved over the objections of the American Congress
• Pakistan refuse a returning rapist and pay nothing for it

He heard Moscow name British targets with silence as the reply.

He has been told by the President of the United States American backing for British sovereignty is under review and might be traded for a percentage point of GDP.

Then he stood in front of a camera and informed forty-seven million Argentines Britain is a declining power and the islands will be theirs.

He has not miscalculated.

On the evidence in front of him, he has calculated correctly.

There is s simple way to fix this.

Test a nuclear warhead near Antarctica and remind all of them who they are dealing with.