Spare a thought for William Hague. Just as the foreign secretary was heading to Brazil to trumpet the renaissance of British diplomacy across Latin America, back home, in the parliamentary hothouse, his boss was letting it be known how little amused he was by the tired old song from Brazil's next door neighbour.
Hague, a pragmatic man, insisted that there was no discomfort in his seating posture. On one side, there are the inexhaustible bounties of Latin America: oil under salt-beds, mass consumer markets craving English tea and biscuits, cash-loaded magnates seeking financial counsel. On the other, there are the Argentines, nagging and bullying over the sovereignty of the Malvinas. All that would be required is the strategic nous to peel the two sides apart.
So, writing in The Times on Saturday, Hague appeared confident that his great plans for commerce and cooperation in Latin America would not be deterred. Little did it matter if Argentina and Britain compete like damsels over which has been most gloriously victimized. "I see no regional appetite for joining Argentina in its attempts to damage the islands' economy or target the livelihoods of islanders," wrote the foreign secretary.
Hague's task is obviously helped by the economic disputes that flare up between Argentina and Brazil, offering the chance to drive the wedge in whatever Mercosur says or does. Chile also remains more than sympathetic to London. But the fever that seems to be rising each day as the 30th anniversary of the war approaches is introducing unpredictable and highly emotional charges, and might elude the best diplomatic analgesic.
Argentine grievance over the islands is part of the furnishings of government in Buenos Aires, although the claim has been pursued for three decades purely by force of words and paper. No mass public mobilization on the issue has been attempted, and few credit the current Argentine military with the capacity to mount a strike. The prospect of a people's invasion, carried out by patriotic fishermen with maybe a puntero to guide them, was reportedly discussed by Cameron in a National Security Council meeting last week, although the details and general truthfulness of this plot remain unknown. It is at least fortunate that the Council agreed the best response would be for police to arrest the new arrivals rather than scramble the squaddies.
But it is Britain's force of sentiment that is rising on the steepest curve. It is a mistake of Argentine foreign policy to regard Britain's victory in 1982 as little more than a feat of arms and a late colonial con-trick: "The Empire Strikes Back," as Newsweek magazine famously trumpeted. It was much more than that: those three months in Britain marked a sharpening and hardening of the entire body politic. It was not just a victory on forsaken moors; it was the incarnation of a new spirit in government, firm, resolute and willing to offer human life for sovereign virtue.
If this is hard to believe, then it is worth consulting The Economist in the immediate aftermath of the rout in Port Stanley. "Britain has long needed its own sort of cultural revolution," the magazine declared. Thatcher herself declared in a speech in Cheltenham that "the spirit has stirred and the nation has begun to assert itself. Things are not going to be the same again."
A brilliant evocation of those times is provided by Anthony Barnett's Iron Britannia, published in 1982 and due to be reissued shortly. The author concentrates his attention on the way debate in Parliament evolved on April 3, in an emergency session called for the day after the Argentine invasion. This one sitting, in Barnett's analysis, marks the pivot in Britain's shift from an easy-going state of decline into a mobilized nation, from "phlegmatic bobby to enthusiastic commando." What then happened on the Malvinas appeared to confirm the country's thirst for military action, hard economic truth and global leadership. Thatcher's landslide victory the next year sealed the tryst.
Curiously, the effort and military prowess employed to defend the desires of a few thousand inhabitants was later used as a template for doing precisely the opposite inside Britain's own borders. Two years later, the enemy was within, and they were coal miners.
Indifferent to these ironies, the hottest heads now long to broadcast once again Britain's structural virility. Daniel Hannan, a eurosceptic Tory, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of the need to anchor foreign policy in shows of national strength. In 1982, he argues, "Argentina badly misread our character. We must leave them in no doubt that we are still the people we were."
Instead of foreign policy, this seems more like assertiveness therapy. Other members of the Tory right pour scorn on foreign aid, clamour for cuts in defence spending to be reversed, and want to know little of geopolitics apart from Business Class to Washington. Their influence over the government has already been noted in Britain's veto on EU treaty revision, and they are clearly primed to demand utter intransigence over the Malvinas.
Back in the 1980s, this belligerence did indeed serve a strategic purpose: the theatre of war was the South Atlantic, but the symbolic field of battle was the Cold War. But the new world order, whatever it might be, seems extremely ill-suited to appreciating the singular feats of British might. Knowing this, Hague is equivocal while Cameron appears to let his mouth talk while his brain is elsewhere. Or perhaps, just like many of his colleagues, he is still in thrall to the logic of national salvation that Thatcher seeded.
The more thoughtful members of the broad Tory establishment clearly believe moderation is necessary, including concessions to some Argentine demands. The very clear risk is that fishermen and hawks may combine to outsmart them.