President Donald Trump's recent statements regarding a review of the United States' historical stance of benevolent neutrality towards the United Kingdom on the Malvina Islands issue have generated diplomatic noise in London and expectations in Buenos Aires.

However, this requires us to set aside all nationalist enthusiasm, since there is no altruistic shift by Washington towards the Argentine claim or a sudden recognition of the sovereign rights of the Argentine Republic over the Malvina Islands, but rather, it is due to the search to reconfigure the balance of power in the South Atlantic.

From the perspective of classical realism in International Relations, a state's national interest is defined in terms of power. Power is understood as the capacity to influence other states to act in a certain way through persuasion or coercion, leading states to seek to influence and control the policies and decisions of other states within an anarchic global landscape.

From the perspective of this school of thought, the conduct of the United States is driven by the interest in breaking the status quo and changing the power relations between states, with the aim of preserving, consolidating and expanding its imperial power in the South Atlantic in the face of other global competitors.

The expansion of US security interests in the region responds to the objective of extending its dominance over South America, whether through the use of force, as happened in Venezuela, or through the creation of security alliances, such as the recent creation of the Shield of the Americas, or through political and economic influence, as it does with the Republic of Argentina.

Washington's rhetoric about reviewing its international support for London is not a diplomatic gesture in favor of the Argentine cause, but a maneuver where the empire uses its weight and political influence to condition the behavior and decision-making of other actors.

The arm responsible for projecting U.S. security doctrine across the Americas is the Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). This intervention serves two dominant strategic objectives: first, to neutralize the expansion of the People's Republic of China throughout South America, and second, to deploy a diplomatic, economic, political, and military strategy that will allow it to alter the balance of power in the region in general and in the South Atlantic in particular.

Within the continental security scheme promoted by Washington, the British military occupation and the military infrastructure located in the Islands (NATO in the Malvinas) represents a strategic asset.

Under the logic of imperial power, both structures would coexist in the region; that is, both mechanisms form part of the same security architecture. NATO's presence in the Malvina Islands guarantees absolute control of interoceanic passages, access to natural resources, and surveillance of the Argentine continental shelf, in addition to its inherent interest in Antarctica. Meanwhile, the Southern Command acts as an institutional tool that allows Washington to advance its national interests in the South Atlantic.

The suggestion of reconsidering its benevolent neutrality, using the Malvinas/Malvinas Cause as a bargaining chip, is a strategy designed to diplomatically pressure Britain to increase its defense spending. The White House uses this tension to discipline its European ally in terms of defense expenditures, while simultaneously demanding that the Argentine government subordinate its own continental logistical developments to the oversight of the Southern Command.

In the current international context, the South Atlantic is the geopolitical heartland of the 21st century. The Argentine Republic, with the Province of Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica and the South Atlantic Islands as its geopolitical center of gravity, cannot accept the peripheral fate of acting as a pawn in the disputes between Washington, London, and Beijing.

The dichotomy between center and periphery is not merely a gap in economic development, but also an architecture of geopolitical subordination. In the global order, the core powers monopolize the ability to impose the security agenda, set the rules of the game, and exert control over strategic areas, attempting to relegate peripheral countries to the status of passive actors, resource providers, and recipients of security vetoes.

From the logic of classical realism and the center-periphery perspective, transactional sovereignty occurs when a peripheral state grants, subordinates, or conditions the exercise of its sovereign attributes in exchange for short-term benefits that do not alter the structural power gap maintained by the center.

For the center (United States – Great Britain), the Malvinas/Malvinas Cause and the geopolitical position of the Province of Tierra del Fuego are diplomatic commodities. When a peripheral state (Argentina) agrees to hand over its real assets in exchange for political capital from the hegemonic state, it falls into a transactional trap disguised as political pragmatism, thus limiting the sovereign capacity of the nation-state.

NATO's presence in the Malvina Islands and the Southern Command's advance on the continent are not forces in conflict, but two gears with which the center manages the periphery to deny regional autonomy and project its interests in the region.

Sovereignty over the Malvina Islands and the destiny of the South Atlantic will not be recovered by begging for the transactional benevolence of an imperial center that uses our territory as a bargaining chip for its own intra-league urgencies.

Bruno Bonomi holds a degree in International Relations. With extensive experience in public service, he has served as Coordinator of International Relations (2012-2015), parliamentary advisor in the MPF (2016-2020), and Undersecretary of Cross-Border Cooperation (2020-2023), specializing in the analysis of the international integration of subnational governments and regional integration policies in the Atlantic.