The Global Fight for Freedom

A banner unfurled at the World Cup ignites a firestorm, three words of compassion unleash the knives, and tyranny fills the void of an air base we abandoned.

This week, three governments meet the consequences of their own retreats.

Editor’s Note: This week’s episode marks a return to form. One long essay, then two short ones. The first is a slow read; the rest go quick and easy.

Headlines

1. The Empire Apologizing Itself Away
2. The Nazis Banned Political Parties Too
3. France Left. Washington Followed. Putin Stayed.

Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.

On April 10, 1982, 150,000 Argentines packed the Plaza de Mayo to cheer a general — the same general whose police had beaten protesters in the same square eleven days earlier.

Argentine troops had just seized the Falkland Islands, and General Leopoldo Galtieri, head of a junta the country despised, was suddenly a national hero. He stepped onto the palace balcony and dared Britain to take them back. “If they want to come, let them come,” he shouted. “We will give them battle.”

He was certain they wouldn’t come. Ten months earlier, Britain had announced it was scrapping HMS Endurance, a lightly armed patrol ship and the only Royal Navy vessel in the South Atlantic. The junta read the withdrawal as a lack of will to defend the islands.

But Margaret Thatcher did not lack will. After telling the Commons the islanders were “British in stock and tradition,” the Iron Lady assembled a fleet of 127 ships from a navy of 73,000 men and sent them south.

Strength determined the outcome. A British submarine sank the cruiser General Belgrano, and the Argentine navy went home for the rest of the war. Seventy-four days after the invasion, the garrison at Stanley surrendered.

The cost was 649 Argentine dead, 255 British, and three islanders.

Both countries were remade by the outcome. Galtieri was gone within three days, the junta collapsed, and Argentina held free elections the following year. Thatcher won a landslide and governed for seven more. British strength had secured the islands and, by breaking the junta, created the space for Argentinian democracy to flourish.

Thatcher understood what her successors have since forgotten.

Throughout history, great powers have taken what their strength allowed, and nations have kept only what they could defend. Sovereignty rests on capability, and a claim you cannot defend is a claim you will lose.

Britain has spent decades dismantling that capability — the fleet, and the economy that pays for it — and replacing it with three substitutes: dependency upon allies, guilt about its former colonial empire, and an errant faith in international law.

But in great power competition, weakness always invites aggression. Buenos Aires has noticed London’s weakness — and so has Donald Trump.

Messi and the Malvinas

During stoppage time of the World Cup Semifinal against England on July 15, Argentine soccer legend Lionel Messi crossed hard and floated a perfect pass to Lautaro Martínez, whose header found the back of the net. Argentina 2, England 1.

After the shock victory, two Argentine players unfurled a banner and waved it at the stands:

“Las Malvinas Son Argentinas.”

The Malvinas [Falklands] are Argentine. Downing Street’s answer was a meager quip: “The World Cup might not be ours, but the Falkland Islands definitely are.”

Seven weeks later, Argentinian President Javier Milei added his own assist, announcing a bill sanctioning the British and Israeli companies drilling the Sea Lion field off the islands. Sea Lion holds 1.7 billion barrels, more oil than any field in British waters.

Milei had been emboldened by his ally, Donald Trump. A leaked Pentagon email in April listed reviewing American recognition of Britain’s Falklands claim among ways to punish NATO allies that sat out the Iran war.

Listen to the Kelpers

In 2013, an international observer group surveyed Falkland Islanders, known locally as “Kelpers”. It asked whether they wanted to remain an Overseas Territory of the UK. On a 92% turnout, 1,513 residents said yes. Only three voted no.

These pages defend self-determination. They also deal in reality: the wishes of a few thousand islanders weigh nothing against what great powers decide to want.

But the Western press deals in politically correct fantasy, and its culprits have been assigned. The UK’s The Economist, which interviewed Milei days before the speech, grudgingly called his outburst “a mark of weakness.”

The British Telegraph focused on Milei’s sagging poll numbers, calling it an “iron law of politics: when an Argentinian leader is facing re-election, they turn up the heat on the Falkland Islands.”

Fair points, but Trump’s petty vindictiveness and Milei’s obvious opportunism aside, there is an “iron law” neither The Economist nor The Telegraph is willing to grapple with. Great powers take what they can, and the UK ceded its power long ago.

A Look in the Mirror

The Royal Navy that sent 23 warships south in 1982 now has 13 operationally available. No major British warship has visited the Falklands since 2017. The lone guard ship is HMS Forth, which carries a single 30mm cannon. The amphibious vessels needed to retake the islands were cut in the last defence plan.

Overall, defense took about 5% of the British economy when the fleet sailed in 1982. It takes 2.3% today.

The economy that funds the fleet has stalled too. In the decade before the financial crisis, Britain nearly matched American productivity growth. In the seventeen years since, it has grown at a fraction of the American rate — a fifth before the pandemic, a third after — and British output per person has slipped from 81% of America's to 70%.

And those 1.7 million barrels matter to Britons. British households pay more for electricity before tax than any others in the developed world, nine million in England now spend over a tenth of their income on energy.

That is how a government abandons the interests of its citizens.

British politicians’ propensity for self-blame compounds the issue. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband is now defending the Falklanders’ right to pump oil to serve Islanders’ and Britons’ interests. But he forbade Britain to pump in the North Sea as Energy Secretary. His government now calls Falklands sovereignty non-negotiable, but surrendered the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, agreeing to pay it £101 million a year to rent back the airbase it gave away — because Britain had no “realistic prospect” of defending its legal position.

The UK’s Bitter Reality

The South Atlantic has real strategic value, and China is already there. Its army runs a deep-space tracking station in Patagonia under a contract that bars Argentina from interrupting its work.

Beijing backs Argentina's claim to the islands, clearly untroubled by the UK’s repeated appeals to “international law.” It wanted the port at Ushuaia as well — the gateway to Antarctica, where a ban on mining comes up for review in 2048. Milei handed that job to the U.S. instead, months before his polls sank. The Economist left that part out.

Here is the bitter reality for the UK. An Argentina with oil, lithium and an Antarctic port is worth more to a United States engaged in global geopolitical competition with China than a Britain that cannot even spare a frigate.

These pages will always defend the right of a people to choose who governs them, and the Kelpers have chosen Britain. But they have less sympathy for a once great power that disarmed itself, apologized for its own history, and now asks the world to be fair.

The Economist calls Milei’s outburst a mark of weakness. The weakness is in its own hometown.

Sources: The Economist (UK), The Telegraph (UK), , Time, Naval Technology, House of Commons Library (UK), CSIS, LSE British Politics and Policy

“Wir schaffen das.”

With those three words, Angela Merkel waved off criticism of her controversial 2015 decision to open Germany's borders to the approximately 1 million migrants — primarily Syrian — who entered the country.

“We can handle this.”

It was a noble, compassionate gesture — one I cheered at the time.

But eleven years later, Saxony-Anhalt 2.1 million residents have rejected it decisively. Saxony-Anhalt is one of Germany’s poorest states, built from the old East German dictatorship.

On September 6, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won 44% of the vote there — its best result anywhere, ever, and the largest win for a party this government calls extremist since 1945. Cue the avalanche of Nazi “marching” metaphors from the Western media.

But trace what happened after Merkel’s dismissal. The CDU, the SPD, the Greens all adopted it, then waved off a decade of consequences. In Solingen, a Syrian immigrant cut through a “Festival of Diversity” with a kitchen knife, killing three. Ansbach. Chemnitz. Dresden. Bielefeld. Syrian knives keep finding new cities. Non-Germans now account for 42.9% of the country’s violent-crime suspects. And half of Germany’s Syrians draw income support, compared with 4% of native Germans.

As the AfD rose in opposition to mass immigration, the establishment parties’ answer was prohibition. Intelligence services have branded the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch “confirmed right-wing extremist” since 2023. In February, a Cologne court blocked the same label nationally, ruling the evidence showed suspicion, not proof.

The AfD earns much of the opprobrium. It wants pride flags stripped from public buildings — a blatant restriction on free speech. Party leader Björn Höcke has twice been fined for repeating a banned Nazi slogan. Days after the vote, the AfD’s co-leader demanded Germany lift sanctions on Russia.

There is a line between opposing unchecked mass migration and inflaming racial tensions, and the AfD blurs it. But extremism rarely rises on its own; it rises when the mainstream chooses ideology over the people it governs, and compassion over reality. Joe Biden’s own advisers warned him of border chaos. He ignored them, and America got more Trump.

Three months before the Saxony-Anhalt vote, SPD chair Saskia Esken compared resisting the AfD to standing against a 1935 Goebbels speech. 44% of Saxony-Anhalt didn’t hear a proposal. They heard their concerns belittled.

Germany’s parties built a “firewall” to “save democracy” from the AfD. By banning it, they built the tyranny they warned against.

Sources: Axios, VG Köln (Germany), The Next Move (Garry Kasparov’s Substack), Bundeskriminalamt (Germany), Bundesagentur für Arbeit (Germany)

Gunfire erupted just after midnight in the hangars of Diori Hamani International Airport in the capital city of Niamey on August 29. By morning, mutinous officers held a handful of Russian soldiers, the streets outside the presidential palace, and most of Air Base 101.

Just two years earlier, the base had been American. The last U.S. troops left Niger in September 2024 under a withdrawal the Biden administration meekly negotiated after General Abdourahamane Tiani's junta revoked the military accord, calling the American presence a violation of Nigerien sovereignty.

Russians had taken a hangar on Base 101 that spring, a thousand American troops still beside them. Washington abandoned Air Base 201 outside Agadez too, a $110 million drone base American taxpayers built for a war their government quit. Russia inherited both.

Tiani never truly reclaimed sovereignty. He leased it to another flag. His loyalist forces needed roughly 200 troops from Putin's Africa Corps and Russian drones to retake Base 101.

The officers who rebelled came from the garrisons fighting Islamic State Sahel Province and al-Qaeda's Sahelian franchise. They complained of thin rations, broken equipment, and the favoritism that keeps Tiani's Presidential Guard fed and far from the front.

The irony: Tiani seized power from an elected president in 2023 citing “the degradation of the security situation.” Niger's terrorism deaths then rose 94% in a year, the largest increase on earth. Now, he blames the mutiny on France, the Sahel dictators’ favorite culprit.

A month ago, these pages warned of the tentacles of an authoritarian alliance reaching across the globe. Russia’s tentacles now grip the Sahel, but with mixed results. Four months earlier, JNIM drove a car bomb into the residence of Mali's defense minister, killing him, his wife, and two grandchildren. Kidal fell to the jihadists the same day. Encircled, Africa Corps negotiated a humiliating exit two days later.

Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger each expelled the French as an affront to national dignity, imported Russians to replace them, pledged to fight the jihadists, and now blame Paris for the wars they are losing.

The Sahel buries half the world's terrorism dead. France left, Washington followed, and now Putin happily fills the vacuum.

Primary Sources: Critical Threats, Stars and Stripes, Global Terrorism Index, Africa Briefing (UK, reporting from Niger)

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