I didn’t go in to the office this morning, and eagerly anticipated a quiet Saturday at home in Great Falls, Virginia with my girlfriend Cerise and my cat Twinkle. We had, however, just finished a tasty late winter Tidewater lunch of shad roe with chard and roasted red fingerling potatoes when my POTS land line rang. It was Dr. Pedro “Pete” Tontogrande Chupacerdo y Boludo del Alcantarilla, former Juan Perón Professor of International Peace, Tolerance and Diplomacy at the University of Buenos Aries and current Primary Counselor for Political and Economic Policy at the Embassy of Argentina here in Washington, DC.
Dr. Pete: Tom! I hope I’m not intruding.
Tom: Certainly not, Professor del Alcantarilla. I’ve always been available on weekends if necessary.
Dr. Pete: Good, glad to know that. Call me Pete.
Tom: Certainly, Pete. How can I help you?
Dr. Pete: It’s this terrible situation with the British, Tom. They’ve deployed a nuclear weapon off our coast!
Tom: But how would you know? The British, just like us Americans, don’t comment on the whereabouts of their nuclear weapons.
Dr. Pete: Why not? Can you tell me that? Sounds pretty sneaky, doesn’t it?
Tom: Because, in this case, revealing where your nuclear submarines are completely defeats the purpose of them, well, being submarines. This is all about the Falk… I mean, the Malvinas, isn’t it?
Dr. Pete: Yes, of course it is!
Tom: Okay then, not to worry – I’m sure the British don’t have any atomic bombs mounted on missiles targeted for anywhere in Argentina, whether those bombs are on one of their submarines or someplace else. Most likely, it’s an attack submarine, armed with conventional torpedoes and cruise missiles with ordinary, garden-variety high explosives on board. I mean, sure, their submarine is nuclear powered, but, even if it’s lurking in the waters off the coast of your country, that doesn’t make it a nuclear weapon, does it?
Dr. Pete: That depends entirely on how you define “nuclear weapon.” Even if it doesn’t have thermonuclear tipped ICBMs on it, it still has radioactive materials on board and it’s loaded with explosive materials.
Tom: Except, by that definition, an atomic powered natural gas tanker is a “nuclear weapon.” Come on now, you must admit – hasn’t the government of Argentina gone somewhat… overboard characterizing the probable, yet still only presumed presence of a nuclear powered British submarine in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Argentina as a deployment of nuclear weapons?
Dr. Pete: Well, okay, maybe. But it’s still a big insult, anyhow.
Tom: Are you sure you Argentines aren’t just a tiny bit envious of the British, perhaps?
Dr. Pete: What? For their stuck-up attitude? For their fruity upper class? For their terrible food?
Tom: No, I meant, envious of their nice shiny fleet of nuclear ships and submarines. And maybe their extremely long range jet bombers, too?
Dr. Pete: Yeah, all right, maybe just a little. But now, Tom, it’s time for you to admit something – that the British have no right to the Malvinas!
Tom: I don’t know if I would necessarily concede that, Dr. Pete. Those islands were discovered by…
Dr. Pete: By Ferdinand Magellan in 1520.
Tom: Actually, it was one of Magellan’s captains, Estaban Gomez, who sighted, but never actually landed on, some islands that may or may not have been the Malvinas. They might well have been the Jason Islands; in fact, many historians and geographers believe that’s what Gomez really saw.
Dr. Pete: But the Jason Islands are part of the Malvinas!
Tom: Only because Argentina says so. Besides, Gomez never landed there, wherever it was. The English, on the other hand, did in fact land on the Malvinas, in 1592.
Dr. Pete: After a storm! They shipwrecked there! It’s not like they were looking for them or anything!
Tom: Well now, that’s highly debatable. Queen Elizabeth I sent Sir Thomas Cavendish out discover new lands and claim them for the Crown, and I don’t believe she specified how he was supposed to do it, either. When one of his ships became separated from his flotilla, got caught in a storm and washed up in the Falk… I mean, in the Malvinas, its captain, John Davis of Sandridge, had every right to claim them for England. And that claim was made all the more valid by virtue of the fact that the entire archipelago was completely uninhabited, with no indigenous population whatsoever. What’s more, Admiral Richard Hawkins’ flotilla visited the islands again – in style, as it were – during 1594. He raised the flag, said a few words and named the islands “Hawkins’ Maindenland” after himself and Queen Elizabeth I. Now really, what else were the English supposed to do – build a fort and start buying the place with glass beads? There wasn’t even anybody there to steal the land from – just a bunch of desolate, treeless, cold, windswept, rocky mountain tops sticking up out of the sea, that’s all the Malvinas have ever been. And if it hadn’t been for the whale oil and seal fur trades, nobody, not the English, the Spanish, the French or the Dutch would have ever cared a rat’s patoot about them.
Dr. Pete: And by the same token, then, you’re not going to convince me that the British care all that much about wool and kelp, either. There are petroleum and natural gas deposits in the Malvinas. That’s why the British fought so hard to take them back after we Argentines liberated them in 1982. And that’s why they have sent their nuclear submarines and their destroyers back to the Malvinas now – they want to steal that oil and gas from Argentina!
Tom: That can’t be a motive, though, because the UK has promised the Falk… I mean, the Malvinas, full autonomy for income derived from their mineral deposits.
Dr. Pete: Oh, yes, yes, sure – how generous of the British. But if that is true, I can’t help but wonder – the North Sea if full of oil and gas, and all of it is located off the coast of Scotland. So why doesn’t Scotland get the same deal?
Tom: Scotland doesn’t get the same deal because of the fine print in the 1707 Act of Union.
Dr. Pete: Fine print?
Tom: Print so fine, the Scots initially thought it was either mouse footprints or fly specks. But it turned out to be a rather significant part of the agreement.
Dr. Pete: What did it say?
Tom: It said, and I quote, “It is furthermore recognized by both parties that the English are, by the Divine Grace of Almighty God, better than the Scots and thus entitled to anything the Scots have if the English want it.” There is no such language, however, in any agreement between the British and the people of the Falk… I mean, the people of the Malvinas.
Dr. Pete: Gee, I didn’t know that. Okay, so the reason the people of the Falk… ahem, I mean, the people of the Malvinas want to stay under British sovereignty is that when the oil money starts coming in, they stand to get a big slice of it, just like the people of your state of Alaska do, for example?
Tom: I suspect that is certainly one important aspect driving their decision process, yes.
Dr. Pete: So how do we get them to change their minds?
Tom: I would suggest that, instead of complaining to the United Nations about British ships and submarines sailing the high seas in the South Atlantic, you should be announcing the details of the oil and gas profit sharing deal Argentina would offer the people of the Malvinas if they became part of your country. There are only about three thousand of them, you know. Argentina could make every single one of them a millionaire – in American dollars, mind you – several times over, and still have billions and billions of dollars in revenue left.
Dr. Pete: You think the Falklanders… I mean, the people of the Malvinas, would go for that?
Tom: Most of them are of either Scottish or Welsh descent.
Dr. Pete: Okay, so the ones whose ancestors were from Scotland, I presume they would welcome an opportunity to stick it to the English. But what about the Welsh people?
Tom: There’s the beauty part, Doc. Anything the English have done to the Scots, they’ve done to the Welsh first, and usually worse.
Dr. Pete. Oh, all right, I get it. We promise them that, and because of their ethnic history, these Scot and Welsh folks will take us up on our offer. And then after they officially become part of Argentina, we just find some reason, like settlement of our debt defaults, not to pay them.
Tom: No, I’m afraid that you would actually have to pay them what you promise.
Dr. Pete: Maybe we could cook the books, then? We Argentines are pretty good at that, as any international financier will tell you.
Tom: Ah, well, yeah, that might work for a while, but sooner or later, somebody in your government will start thinking that they aren’t getting enough vigorish from the scam and blow the lid off it. Then you’d have to pay up, or else.
Dr. Pete: Or else what?
Tom: Or else the British would send a fleet of their nice shiny destroyers, troop transports, aircraft carriers and nuclear attack submarines down to the Falk… I mean, down to the Malvinas, and take them back, just like they did thirty years ago.
Dr. Pete: Oh, damn it! Do you really think so?
Tom: I know so. Believe me, Pete, the only way Argentina is going to get those islands is if you make the people who live there an offer they can’t refuse – and I’m not talking Don Corleone irony here, either. Make three thousand Kelpers as rich as the average Qatari, and the Malvinas are yours, along with all the oil and gas deposits in the surrounding waters.
Dr. Pete: But we can’t screw them out of it later?
Tom: No, because the typical English person will feel like, okay, the Kelpers live there, and they have a right to cash in if they want to, Lord knows they’ve lived a pretty tough life out there in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a bunch of sheep. But if you screw the Kelpers, then that will offend the typical English person’s conceit that they have a God-given sense of fair play.
Dr. Pete: Which they don’t!
Tom: No, of course not – ask any Scot, Irish or Welsh, and they’ll tell you all about it. But the English have a fervent faith in their own moral superiority over anyone and everyone else. Consequently, if you promise the Kelpers a fortune and then screw them out of it, in order to preserve their collective delusions, the British will self-righteously send their Navy to sail down to fifty-one degrees south, fifty-seven degrees west and kick your butts all over the Atlantic basin. And, just like in 1982, they will win.
Dr. Pete: So Argentina has no choice.
Tom: Nope.
Dr. Pete: I don’t know, Tom – in order to carry out your recommended plan, the government of Argentina will have to make an honest offer, conclude a fair agreement, and then honor its commitments afterward.
Tom: And the problem is?
Dr. Pete: The problem is, as far as I know, the government of Argentina has never managed to do that.
Tom: True, but, on the other hand, the government of Argentina has never had the British Navy looking over their shoulder while they attempt to do so, either. It might be just what they need, in fact, to finally get it right for once.
Dr. Pete: You really think it might keep them honest?
Tom: It’s worked before – although not with the Argentines. Then again, there’s a first time for everything.
Dr. Pete: Okay, I’ll talk to Ambassador Argüello about it.
Tom: Good luck.
Dr. Pete: Thanks, I’ll need it. Have an nice day.
Tom: ‘Bye.