Argentina Could Be a Superpower

I found this to be a pretty vapid article.

Spending multiple paragraphs talking about Argentina’s invulnerability to invasion from Africa and Australia (and Antarctica? Come on now) makes me think the author has spent too much time playing Risk. No serious reader would consider these to be possibilities. Also, the major border with Brazil really undermines the whole “largely geographically invulnerable” and “weak neighbors” theses. Writing “Argentina has natural barriers (the Atlantic, Pacific, and Andes) that protect it from invasion on several borders. It shares a difficult to defend border with Brazil.” could have replaced maybe a quarter of this article.

Some of the geographical similarities with the U.S. are interesting but seem oversimplified - farmland and rain are treated like RPG stats where every unit is fungible. Again this supports my theory that the writer is a fan of grand strategy games.

The “Political Harmony” section is also odd considering Argentina’s history - I guess it is just considering wars with other states and not internal turmoil/unrest? Why hasn’t the supposedly unifying Río de la Plata trade system prevented internal violence and instability?

Overall, I think this article could have been condensed into the opening few paragraphs of the author’s teased follow-up article that apparently actually gets into the question raised in the title. It suffers from what geopolitics writing seems to invariably suffer from: treating history like a wargame where nations are the discrete actors instead of treating it as the result of a single international commerce system that transcends borders and which most national governments have little power to contradict given their reliance on global trade.

One thing I think this article overlooks is that Argentina was a superpower, at least before the Panama canal was built. Before that, pretty much all shipping between the Atlantic and the Pacific had to go south around Argentina and Chile. Buenos Aires was one of the best stops along that route, and so it became one of the richest places on earth. After the Panama canal was built most of this traffic dropped off, and so did Argentina's fortunes. It's just so far away from everywhere that it has never been as geographically significant since.

Argentina already is a regional power and always has been (ABC powers and whatnot), but to become a superpower or great power there are a whole host of other aspects with regards to power projection needed that Argentina lacks.

That said, being a great power or superpower or even a large regional power is orthogonal to having a high standard of living.

For example, by most standards, Brazil is a significantly larger and more powerful nation than Argentina, yet the median Brazilian remains much poorer, less educated, and less healthier than the median Argentinian based on developmental metrics.

Argentina is by most standards a fairly developed country which converged with the living standards of much of Southern Europe decades ago, but hasn't been able to take full advantage of the fairly strong human capital advantage it has due to structural issues that stem from the origin sins of the country itself. I recommend AJR's analysis on the Argentina if you want to deep dive into it.

Maybe you wait for all the dust to settle and then like not people realizing their entire economy is in shambles before addressing their future potential as a superpower. . Superpower requires lots of money. Something Argentina does not currently have. Their entire business structure and government structure is not changing. They are being bailed out and whenever you enable somebody to fail they become dependent.

Could they be a superpower? Yeah. But it's more likely some small country in Africa does first with an investor and AI.

Related:

Argentine peso weakens to fresh low despite US interventions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45651516

Let that be a warning to the US. There is no manifest destiny.