The Limits to a Trump-Milei Alignment

Foreign Affairs

The Limits to a Trump-Milei Alignment

There are fundamental tensions between American and Argentine national interests.

One of the foreign leaders that most euphorically greeted Donald Trump’s comeback to the White House was Argentina’s President Javier Milei. He traveled to Florida November 14–15 to participate in the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting, where he delivered a characteristically combative speech; the highlight of the trip was his meeting with the American president-elect. Milei prolifically shared on social media the pictures of his meetings with Trump and their common friend and supporter billionaire Elon Musk. 

On the face of it, Trump and Milei look like a match made in heaven. Both relish in taking on the liberal establishment, and both seem to be on a mission to destroy the institutional bases of its power. In fact, The American Conservative’s own Joseph Addington in a recent article praised Milei for attacking the entrenched vested interests, such as those of the trade unions, and drastically slashing government spending, including by reducing the number of ministries by half. Milei’s ties with Elon Musk (who has praised his record) and the former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, the two men appointed by Trump to improve “government’s efficiency,” may ensure that Washington looks to the libertarian in Buenos Aires for inspiration, even though the powers of the Argentine president are constitutionally vastly superior to those of the U.S. president. 

A question: can this convergence serve as a basis for a geopolitical alignment between Washington and Buenos Aires in ways that advance American interests in the Western Hemisphere, particularly by staving off challenges from extra-regional adversaries like China? If the answer is “yes,” it is a heavily qualified one: There are powerful structural reasons that would limit the scope of the emerging entente.

First, the common ground. Both the incoming Trump administration (judging by early appointments) and Milei share hostility to the left-leaning governments in Latin America. The first Trump administration adopted harsh sanctions against what his national security adviser John Bolton (eventually fired by Trump for his unbridled hawkishness) defined as a regional “troika of tyranny”—Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. The appointment as the secretary of state of the hawkish Florida Senator Marco Rubio, himself a descendant from the anticommunist Cuban exiles, augurs a return to the hard line (not that Biden has softened Trump’s first-term policies in any significant way).

Milei is equally belligerent towards these regimes. In fact, he went so far as to fire his foreign minister Diana Mondino (not exactly a dove) after Argentina voted at the UN General Assembly against the continued U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba. In doing so, Buenos Aires merely followed its long-standing position, shared by an overwhelming majority of nations, and opposed only by the U.S. and Israel. Regardless, Milei declared that “Argentina’s place is next to the U.S. and Israel, not “the other side”—the irony of a libertarian supporting a trade embargo notwithstanding.

The more moderate left-leaning governments in Latin America were not spared Milei’s ire either. He publicly called Luiz Inacio da Silva, known as Lula, the president of Brazil—Argentina’s main trade partner—“corrupt” and a “communist”.  

Rubio is a long-time critic of Lula, whom he accused of cozying up to China, both bilaterally and through formats like BRICS, a group founded by Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa with the ostensible aim to promote a more multipolar international dispensation. 

Any talk of multipolarity, of course, is an anathema for neoconservative primacists like Rubio. It is conceivable that the new administration in Washington will try to leverage Milei’s Argentina to balance Brazil in the Western Hemisphere.

Ideological convergence, however, can only go so far when weighed against the hard national interest. Even if the default assumption is that the new Trump administration is indeed likely to adopt aggressive policies towards Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, it may also learn from the past when such policies failed to produce regime change in any of these countries. Instead, they merely worsened the economic conditions there which pushed more people to migrate to the U.S. 

There is no denying of the crucial role the perception of uncontrolled immigration played in the defeat of the Democratic Party in this year’s presidential and congressional elections. So the possibility that Washington would adopt an America First approach and negotiate some hard-nosed migration deals with these regimes instead of doubling down on the failed “maximum pressure” policies cannot be entirely discarded.

Milei floated the idea of a free trade agreement with the U.S. That would undermine the Mercosur—a regional customs union of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay—as, according to the club’s rules, its members are barred from pursuing separate trade deals. For Brazil, Mercosur is far more than a mere trade bloc—it’s a mainstay of its regional power, a tool for realizing the more multipolar world it seeks. Consequently, dealing a blow to it would make sense from a U.S. primacist perspective. 

But Trump is not known for its enthusiasm for free trade. In fact, his economic policies emphasizing near-shoring, reindustrialization and trade protectionism resemble much more those of Milei’s Peronist foes than Milei’s—a fact not lost on Cristina Fernandez, a former Peronist president (2007–2015) and an astute politician, who in 2019 praised Trump’s economic policies. Milei’s pro-free trade enthusiasm is likely to be curbed by Trump’s America First economic vision. 

And that brings us to potentially the most serious stumbling block—relations with China. Washington sees Beijing as its only plausible peer competitor. Yet years of American neglect of South America have led the region to a growing entanglement with the Asian giant. 

Milei started out as a fierce China critic, denouncing it at one point as an “assassin” and vowing to privilege relations with the U.S.-led “democratic world.”  He revoked his Peronist predecessor’s application to join the BRICS. The Biden administration, however, never reciprocated and failed to show any interest in engaging with Milei, so the anticipated investment from that democratic world never materialized. Meanwhile, China, instead of reacting hastily to Milei’s rhetoric, adopted a long-term, strategic view. As a result, Milei himself has come around by recognizing China as a valuable partner that doesn’t meddle in Argentina’s internal affairs.  

As a consequence of this newfound pragmatism, Argentina renewed its $5 billion tranche of currency swaps with China, which is needed to stabilize the exchange market and pay for some of its maturities to the International Monetary Fund. (The agreement was first implemented in 2009 and survived governments of all ideological hues in Argentina). Apart from that, China is the second-largest trade partner for Argentina—behind only Brazil—and is heavily involved in the construction and financing of large-scale infrastructure projects, such as dams. To consolidate the relationship further, Milei plans to attend the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States summit with China in Beijing in January 2025.

So, despite a degree of ideological convergence and warm chemistry between the two leaders, it would seem likely that both Trump and Milei would pursue their own versions of MAGA—making America and Argentina great again—aligning where possible, but pursuing separate paths where necessary.

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