In politics, only those who set the sail where the wind blows win; never the one who tries to command the wind to blow where the sail is set. Antonio Machado’s maritime metaphor suggests that a savvy navigator does not waste effort forcing the wind to change direction; he reads its guidance and adjusts the sail to take advantage of it. Javier Milei grew tired of waiting for the gust to push his economic vessel, trapped in the frustratingly stagnant waters, and, after correctly gauging the pro‑populist breezes, had a tactical insight. He has resolved that, despite pleas and advice, he will not lift a finger to revive the feeble real economy, because any attempt would necessarily imply a Keynesian line of action, and he sought an old instrument from the back of the political chest.
Malvinas was, for Galtieri and Thatcher, less a genuine patriotic longing than a pragmatic domestic opportunity. Other Argentine leaders used it with less drama and tragedy, yet with identical aims; the new navigator simply joins this ancient maritime tradition of opportunists. A member of his inner circle celebrated with a brief tweet: “Milei has just won the 2027 presidential elections.” Of course it is more a hypothesis and a wish than a real news item. Yet the drastic turn, with measures that hardly anyone could object to, is a bold move, intended to forge a new agenda around a noble cause, to enthrall and unsettled his opponents, and to crave unanimity. It is a cunning play, from a president who feels cornered. The inconsistencies with the governance that the libertarian administration has pursued for almost three years — often rowing against Argentine interests in Malvinas — are numerous and have already been reported in media and on social networks in the hours following the national address. Less contemplated are other issues that lie beneath the iceberg’s tip and condition those who, overnight, became anti‑colonialists and therefore amateurs at sovereignty.
“Talso does not seem appropriate a personal and frivolous quarrel with Brazil, the principal trading partner and decisive for any diplomatic accompaniment in these circumstances,” one notes in the margins of the discourse.
Claiming national unity, within this new context, clashes with the irreducible and savage divisionism that libertarians practice. Nationalism, too, requires two things that are intolerable for an ultra‑libertarian: a strong state (not dismantled) and higher public spending. Defending a “sacred cause” does not come free. For instance, boasting of having wrecked the salaries of state workers — Milei did so thoughtlessly this very week, perhaps thinking he referred to the “ñoquis” — does not quite align with this new vision: not only did they dilute the wages of police officers, doctors, and nurses, but also those of military personnel and gendarmes, essential for ensuring surveillance and sovereignty at borders and outposts. Nor does a personal and frivolous quarrel with Brazil, the main trading partner and decisive for any diplomatic backing in these circumstances, seem appropriate. The announcements from the “Topo” who comes to Destroy the State are presented as new measures, but they only serve to push forward preexisting projects (a naval base in Ushuaia sacrificed for fiscal balance) and laws that were already underway but in a state of hibernation: they were too regulatory and protectionist.
Again: how does one transform an anarcho‑capitalist into a “patriot,” a euphemism with which the Global New Right disguises its current of pure and hard nationalism? Here lies the operational and ideological tension of guarded forecast that the León government faces, if this is not merely rhetoric. For the moment, behind all this lurk Trumpism, characterized by unreliability — volatile and highly oscillatory in its foreign policy — and the “new doctrine of national security,” promoted by Washington and studied and drafted by Mileiism in intellectual forums, a doctrine that threatens to label any dissident as “terrorist.” Milei used that same word in Chile: “We know that [the leftists] have the means to carry out psychological terrorism against the population. They even fund terrorists, giving them money to stage pickets against defenders of freedom.” Cool Pinochetism is thus. When the President of the Nation praised the economic model of that brutal dictator, a forum member of this newspaper ironized: “The government of Hitler was also excellent. It eliminated inflation in Germany in record time, carried out numerous infrastructure works, and boosted the metallurgical industry.” Oscillating on a precarious line between the sinister and the farcical, this “virtuous” maneuver, blended with elements of both tones, seems to fuel an incipient stigmatizing patrol — traitors to the homeland — against those who voice objections or reluctance to the ideas of the new “patriots.” They already possess the faith of the converts. The principal presidential adviser — whether in earnest or as a joke — tweeted an order directed at the Forces of Heaven: critics of his boss’ discourse must now be treated as “agents of the British Crown. Mark them.” Sooner or later, down that road, we will all be marked, and we will become antipatria. Everything smells like a parody, and it sits within a moment Guillermo Oliveto — a notable observer of the public mood — described on Monday thus: “Hope and illusion fade; concern and tension grow… uncertainty and fear prevail. In some cases people reach anxiety and even disappointment. In others, they still want to believe. Society is passing through the winter of its emotional state.” For Milei, however, we are in full spring, and if people feel this “emotional cold” and blame it on their most vulnerable sense (the wallet), it is not because money is lacking, but because the “damned journalism” planted that false sensation in their heads. The President, to support this warm spring he offers, wielded a volley of impressive numbers that serious economists have debunked all week. Those figures — whether deceptive or self‑deceptive — allow Milei — as in the Cristina era — to blame the media for the general malaise. For right‑ and left‑wing populisms alike, ordinary citizens are stupid and sheep: passive minds that allow themselves to be convinced of anything, even that they are faring poorly and that money does not go far enough. Then Milei added to this fantasy another more convenient theory: Macri failed because he cowered before the fourteen tons of stone, but above all because the press perceived his model day and night and generated an adverse climate. Interesting, because the most prominent commentator of that media system was precisely Milei himself, who worked to erode Cambiemos and to install the imminence of a catastrophe. This intense media performance of the Lion, with a clearly destructive objective and functioning to help the return of Peronism, occurred two or three years after he had served as the principal economic adviser in Daniel Scioli’s presidential campaign. Libertarian credibility, contrary to what they think, is ever lower, and so in these hours of manufactured patriotism we cannot know for sure whether all this is a shroud of fog or a smoke machine.