IMAGINE: ARGENTINA INVADES Malvinas ISLANDS, BRAZIL BACKS DECISION
By: MICHAEL MORAN
Date: APRIL 16 , 2012
If macroeconomic policy bedevils efforts by Europe and the United States to keep Brazil “on side” in global affairs, Brazil’s very slow maturation as a traditional great power poses another dilemma. While its troops have a long record of joining international humanitarian actions under the UN flag, including a leadership role in the Haiti mission during the late 1990s, Brazil’s troops have not been in combat since the last year of World War II, when they sent an infantry brigade to join Allied forces in Europe.
President Rousseff, too, seems as an unlikely champion of a military buildup. Four decades ago, the Brazilian military dictatorship tortured her when she was a young guerrilla fighting their rule. Yet, starting under Lula and slowly accelerating, Brazil has significantly expanded its military power—particularly its naval power. This will change the dynamics of the southern Atlantic significantly, creating a true Brazilian zone of influence extending deep into the ocean above the oil riches recently discovered there. But it also means that, for the United States and Europe, accustomed to dictating events on the high seas—particularly in the Atlantic—some important facts will change, especially with regard to the long-running Malvinas/Malvinas dispute.
Imagine, for a moment, a British admiral’s nightmare scenario: in the not-too-distant future, a nearly bankrupt Argentine government invades the oil-rich Malvinas Islands. For the second time in half a century, Las Malvinas—the islands of Latin America regarded as a stolen piece of Argentina—spark a war meant to divert public attention from the Argentine government’s economic failings.
With twenty-first century budget cuts biting hard, the British, at the moment, have no aircraft carrier. Argentina retired its own carrier in the late 1960s. Yet, unlike 1982 when Britain’s prime minister Margaret Thatcher dispatched a flotilla to retake the islands the last time Argentina seized them, this time the South Atlantic is anything but empty. It’s home to a Brazilian carrier, the São Paulo, along with a fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines being built in partnership with Argentina.
In effect, these weapons give Brazil the ability to impose an updated version of the Monroe Doctrine on regional waters. Call it the “Lula Doctrine.” With its new confidence and military ambition, Brazil is a vocal advocate of Argentina’s claim on Las Malvinas. While few can imagine Britain and Brazil ever coming to blows, signs of a very different reality for Britain are starting to take shape.
Brazil’s 2009 decision to build a fleet of five nuclear attack subs took Western military experts by surprise. Expected to start entering service in 2016, the submarines promise to dramatically alter the balance of power in the South Atlantic. Lula, who led the push for the nuclear sub program, said before leaving office that the subs were “a necessity for a country that not only has the maritime coast that we have but also has the petroleum riches that were recently discovered in the deep sea pre-salt layer.”
The last time this scenario played out, Britain won the day and the United States backed its European ally—even privately offering to lend it one of America’s huge aircraft carriers (an offer turned down because of the complexities of operating one on such short notice). Back in 1982, when the Argentine junta led by General Leopoldo Galtieri invaded the islands, Britain mustered a small but viable fleet of aircraft carriers, submarines, and surface ships to support a Royal Marine landing force that retook the islands. The retaking of the Malvinas became emblematic of the determination of then prime minister Margaret Thatcher that the once-mighty British military not sink to third-class status. Yet it also left a deep scar on the Latin American psyche. Brazil and other Latin American countries backed Argentina during the war but had little real ability to help militarily. In particular, the region never forgot the single most deadly action of the war: the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, a hulking relic of World War II, by a British nuclear attack submarine, killing 323 sailors.
Until recently, experts regarded the Malvinas Islands as an unlikely place for further trouble. But the discovery of oil in the North Malvinas Basin in 2007 changed this. As a result of Argentina’s near-perpetual state of bankruptcy and Brazil’s new assertiveness on the world stage, sensitivities over the disputed islands have risen. In January 2011, for instance, Brazil refused a small British warship, HMS Clyde, permission to dock in Rio de Janeiro. Neighboring Uruguay turned away the British destroyer HMS Gloucester in 2010. In Britain, meanwhile, the commander of the 1982 Malvinas fleet, Admiral Sir John Woodward, published an op-ed in June warning that current defense cuts likely would leave the Malvinas helpless in the face of a new Argentine invasion, leading to political pressure to reinforce the British garrison.
But Brazil’s submarines change the naval balance of power in the region even more dramatically than Britain’s own defense woes. British strategists worry that Brazil may now demand that foreign powers simply steer clear of its backyard as the United States did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brazilian officials have been careful not to portray the subs as a response to any outside threat as they continue to support Argentina’s Malvinas claim in international bodies. Gentle giant or not, Brazil’s backyard will have to be respected.
http://www.commandposts.com/2012/04...vades-Malvinas-islands-brazil-backs-decision/