| |||
|
| President Donald Trump greets Argentine President Javier Milei at the White House on Oct. 14. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post) |
| President Donald Trump styles himself as a pragmatic, “transactional” dealmaker. His approach and values are “common sense” and anchored solely in the national interest, Trump claims — a set of priorities that are repeatedly invoked to justify various brazen initiatives, from the launching of trade wars on friends and foes alike to the gutting of U.S. funding for foreign development and democracy-building projects. But throughout his presidency, Trump has been guided by a hard-right ideology ever-present among his base and his allies. And for all the triumphal nationalism on show at the White House, there are times when it’s unclear what American interests are boosted by Trump’s agenda. That’s been the case in recent days as the Trump administration authorized a conspicuous bailout of the Argentine economy. The unusual move to initiate a $20 billion currency swap with Argentina’s central bank is aimed at stabilizing an Argentine peso that’s wobbling dangerously amid market concerns that libertarian President Javier Milei, a Trump ally, may see his aggressive reform agenda checked at the ballot box in next week’s midterm elections. In the past, the United States has participated in numerous bailout schemes for perennially crisis-stricken Argentina under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund; this would be the U.S.'s most direct intervention in another country’s economy for decades. The Trump administration is also working to arrange an additional $20 billion in private-sector financing for Argentina, doubling the financial lifeline, my colleagues reported. Milei and Trump are close ideological allies, and the Argentine leader cast an outsize shadow on the early months of Trump’s second term. Trumpworld figures like tech billionaire Elon Musk appeared onstage with Milei at right-wing U.S. events, wielding the latter’s trademark chainsaw to symbolize their shared desire for slashing the public sector. Trump admitted to reporters that the bailout wouldn’t much help the United States and may be contingent on Milei’s faction securing a favorable outcome on Oct. 26. “We don’t have to do it. It’s not going to make a big difference for our country,” Trump told reporters over lunch with Milei at the White House last Tuesday. “The election is coming up very soon. Our approvals are somewhat subject to who wins the election.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who’s driving the bailout, had a more calibrated argument. He described Argentina to reporters last week as a “systemically important regional ally” that needed bolstering in the region. Strengthening the political right in Buenos Aires would boost the fortunes of its counterparts in Chile and Colombia, he argued, where left-wing governments may get unseated in upcoming elections. “I thought the Obama administration squandered a very prominent opportunity to bring in and move Latin American countries into the U.S. sphere of influence,” Bessent said at a roundtable event with reporters at the Treasury building in Washington, explicitly describing the success of the Latin American right as a goal for Trump administration. “Governments had swung from left to right and then, through neglect, they swung back hard left again, where many of them are now, but now they’re coming back the other way.” Analysts are less convinced of Argentina’s importance. “Argentina buys just 12 percent of its imports from the United States,” noted Johns Hopkins scholar Benjamin Gedan. “Last year, U.S. goods exports to the country totaled a meager $9.1 billion, compared to $334 billion to neighboring Mexico, the last country to receive a similar U.S. rescue package, in 1995. Yet another economic collapse in Argentina would hardly reverberate in the United States, 5,000 miles away.” Some Republicans and many Democrats are angry about such a vast sum of U.S. taxpayer money being funneled into a context where Americans may never see any positive return. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) fumed about the losses sustained by U.S. farmers thanks to American tariffs, including his state’s soybean farmers who are in direct competition with exporters in Argentina. This is hardly the first time Trump and his lieutenants have put their finger on the scales in the region. Trump’s trade war with Brazil is motivated purely by his ideological alignment with convicted ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, who was recently found guilty for his role in a coup plot following his 2022 election defeat. That closeness to Bolsonaro’s camp seems to outstrip any of the solidarity that former president Joe Biden tried to cultivate with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, an inveterate Bolsonaro foe. “Trump has been unusually willing to intervene in foreign elections, endorsing allies with whom he shares a nationalist worldview,” my colleagues wrote. “He backed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of 2022 balloting and hosted Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing candidate for the Polish presidency, in the Oval Office in May, weeks ahead of his country’s close election. Nawrocki won.” Milei’s drastic program of austerity and spending cuts served as an intended shock to a notoriously dysfunctional economy, and won plaudits from a wide swath of Washington’s foreign policy establishment. But living standards for many Argentines have slumped, unemployment is climbing and salaries are not matching rates of inflation. Local elections in Buenos Aires earlier this year delivered a chastening blow to Milei’s camp, sparking the market jitters that have brought his project to such a pronounced moment of crisis. Trump’s intervention may salvage Milei’s political fortunes in the near term. But the U.S. president’s broader strategy for the region — which seems both anchored to his plans for mass deportations at home and driven by visions of hemispheric dominance, including his controversial targeting of alleged narcotraffickers in the Caribbean — aren’t endearing Latin America to the United States. “Western Hemisphere countries are being pressed to take back large numbers of migrants, intensify efforts to combat drug trafficking, and take steps to box out China,” wrote a group of experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, arguing that a more coercive U.S. approach won’t do much to check the vast inroads into Latin America made by China. “Even continued access to the U.S. market occurs under less favorable conditions than in the past,” they noted. “These efforts may produce some results desired by the Trump administration in the short term, but they will likely create more distance between Washington and the region over time, to the benefit of U.S. rivals.” | ||||||||||||||||||||