Joseph Tulchin’s Argentina and the United States: A Conflicted Relationship brings to light a historic failure to cultivate a hemispheric friendship. As far back as the Lexington incident in the early nineteenth century, Tulchin argues, “misunderstandings” have marred U.S.-Argentine relations. U.S. support for the British claim to the Falklands/Malvinas in the nineteenth century and later in 1982 hardly encouraged the Argentines to adopt a benign view of U.S. intentions. For its part, Argentina must take the lion’s share of responsibility for its status as an international pariah just prior to democratization in the mid-1980s.
Even if the Colossus of the North and the would-be Colossus of the South had really understood each other, Tulchin argues, profound differences and striking similarities between the two made accommodation all but impossible. In some ways, Argentina and the United States are too much alike. For example, both have foreign policies imbued with moralism, messianism, and exceptionalism. But the hemisphere was just too small for two exceptionalist countries. In the end, Argentina settled for far less: it resisted rather than became a hegemon.
Tulchin’s analysis is convincing from beginning to end. From “First Contacts” through “World War II and U.S. Persecution of Argentina” to the “Reinsertion into World Affairs” in the 1980s, Tulchin’s chapters enrich one’s understanding of Argentina’s vain search for international prestige, significance, and autonomy by pursuing confrontation with the United States. Still, Alfonsín’s regime did acquire more autonomy for Argentina than most of its twentieth-century predecessors did, according to Tulchin. Can Argentina learn to pursue a low-key, “realizable” foreign policy, as Tulchin hopes? Or will it once again seek national identity, international grandeur, and hemispheric confrontation with the United States? Only the future will tell, but Tulchin is the last to underestimate the hold of the exceptionalist tradition on the Argentine imagination.
