Argentina’s foreign relations during World War II remain a fearsomely complex challenge. They call for mastery of the frequently shifting short- and long-term interests of four powers: Argentina, the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. All analysis, furthermore, must be based on massive documentation—confusingly organized and punctuated still by vexing lacunas—and on Argentine sources whose availability can be most kindly described as whimsical. Not surprisingly, no satisfactory synthesis yet exists.
Now Rapoport, author of commendable studies on Argentine foreign relations, has taken us a step closer. ¿Aliados o neutrales? consists of four sets of documents, chronologically arranged, which illustrate in turn Argentine foreign policy toward the war, relations with Germany and Nazi penetration into the country, U. S. policy toward Argentina, and Great Britain’s policy toward Argentina. The documents are drawn from the British, U.S., and Argentine diplomatic archives; on the German side, only the postwar U.S. interrogations of Ambassador Edmund von Thermann and Naval Attaché Dietrich Niebuhr are used. To the nonspecialist, many of the materials will be fascinating indeed.
The book suffers throughout, however, from what David Hackett Fisher calls “the fallacy of the lonely fact.” Covering all the squirming body of conflicts and issues generated would clearly be a very tall order; but concerning even the principal of them, Rapoport’s documents are too sparse to permit analysis and conclusions. Some important questions are missing altogether: e.g., the extraordinary measures (definitively detailed by John Bratzel and the late Les Rout) taken by Argentina’s military to cover their 1940s flirtation with the Axis. The presentation is further weakened by the treatment of relations with the warring powers as discrete topics, rather than as multidimensional problems. The section on British policy, for example, opens promisingly in 1941 with the juxtaposition of conflicting British and North American desiderata for Argentina’s future international orientation, but the fundamental theme—that of public inter-Allied harmony and private conflict—then disappears, to reemerge only haphazardly. As the author permits himself only the briefest and most general of analytical reflections (“A Modo de Balance,” pp. 21-22), ¿Aliados o neutrales? is best considered a useful source book capable of enlightening the careful general reader and possibly of misleading the unwary.
