The Falklands argument has the curious quality of a pub row that has gone on so long everyone has forgotten who spilled the first pint, but everyone remains absolutely certain they were in the right. Recently, however, a man from another pub has wandered over, announced that the rules are about to change, and made it clear that they will depend less on law than on his current mood.
Enter Donald Trump, who has toyed with the idea of withdrawing American support for Britain’s position on the Falkland Islands, not because of any fresh insight into 19th century sovereignty, but as leverage in unrelated disputes. Principles, it seems, are now available on a flexible tariff. One half expects them to be listed alongside steel.
Start with self-determination, that noble principle which the United Nations holds aloft like a slightly dented trophy. All peoples, it says, have the right to decide their own future. A fine idea, until it collides with another fine idea, namely that borders should not be casually redrawn every time someone produces an old map and a wounded sense of history.
Into this stroll the Falklands, population modest, sheep plentiful, opinions remarkably consistent. When asked in 2013 whether they fancied remaining British, they replied with the sort of emphatic clarity usually reserved for questions like “more wine?” The answer was yes, and by a margin that would make a Soviet election official blush.
The British position is therefore disarmingly simple. These people live there. They like the current arrangement. End of story.
Argentina, by contrast, insists this is not the story at all. The islands, it says, were improperly taken in 1833, and the current inhabitants are essentially a historical afterthought. Self-determination, in this telling, is admirable in theory but inconvenient in practice.
The difficulty is that Argentina’s case rests on a rather slight foundation. The “Argentine population” of the islands in the early 1830s turns out to have been a small, unruly settlement under Louis Vernet, who was not Argentine in any meaningful modern sense at all but a Hamburg-born merchant operating out of Buenos Aires under contract. His colony included a mix of Europeans and gauchos and was already unravelling before the British arrived. Calling it a nation in exile is generous. Calling it a functioning colony requires a certain imagination.
Meanwhile, back in South America, Argentina itself exists because a European colonial system was dismantled and replaced with something new, the borders largely frozen under the convenient doctrine that whatever lines existed at independence would do nicely, thank you. Entirely sensible. If one started reopening every historical grievance, half the globe would be returned to its previous occupants and the rest would be in litigation.
So we arrive at the pleasing spectacle of a country founded on the practical decision not to revisit the past arguing that, in this one instance, we really must revisit the past. Not all of it, obviously. Just the helpful bits.
At this point it is worth glancing east, where Vladimir Putin has developed his own enthusiasm for self-determination in Ukraine. There, too, history is invoked, borders are declared provisional, and referenda appear at convenient moments. The results are not just decisive but remarkably aligned with the presence of armed men and the absence of meaningful choice.
Further east still, China takes a close interest in Taiwan. Here, self-determination is treated rather like an optional extra that has been quietly removed from the base model. The population votes, certainly, but not on the question that matters.
Lest Britain grow too comfortable on its moral perch, it is worth recalling that it once took a similarly dim view of colonial preferences. When the American colonies decided they had had quite enough, the response was not a seminar on political rights but the American War of Independence. The idea that the United Kingdom might still have a claim on the United States is now treated, quite rightly, as absurd. Time, recognition, and the settled will of the population have done their work.
All of which is mildly inconvenient for Donald Trump, whose occasional enthusiasm for revisiting other people’s borders sits uneasily alongside the settled outcome of his own country’s.
For comparison, consider the Channel Islands. Closer to France than to England, once tied to Normandy, and under the British Crown for centuries. No one in Paris is losing sleep over Jersey. No resolutions are passed. No impassioned speeches about historical injustice echo through the corridors of diplomacy. Time has done its work, and no one now pretends otherwise.
Which brings us back to the Falklands. Britain says it re-established control in 1833, pointing to an earlier presence in the 18th century. Argentina says it was an outright seizure. Both are, in their own way, tidying up the narrative. The historical record is messier, as it so often is.
But here is the awkward point. In modern international law, what happened in 1765 or 1833 matters less than what has happened since. Continuous administration. A settled population. And, awkwardly for Argentina, that population’s very clear preference.
None of this makes the legal argument vanish. The United Nations still calls it a dispute, and diplomacy requires a certain polite fiction that the matter is open. But in practice, the centre of gravity has shifted from historical grievance to present reality.
So the argument continues, fuelled by history, pride and a distinctly selective attachment to principle. The islanders go on voting as they please. Britain goes on pointing at them. Argentina goes on pointing at old maps. Washington treats the matter as a bargaining chip. Moscow produces a referendum. Beijing produces a doctrine.
And somewhere in the background, self-determination sits looking slightly embarrassed, watching maps waved, ballots staged, and histories edited, and wondering why it is so often invoked only after the answer has already been decided.
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