Today’s briefing:
— Why the Falklands are back
— Oil's back up to $100
— Un-redact this doc
Your Insider’s briefing:
— Why the Falklands are back
— Oil's back up to $100
— Un-redact this doc
Good morning {{first_name | Intriguer}}. Argentina’s legendary Jorge Luis Borges — the blind poet who became a national treasure — once memorably summed up the 1982 Falklands War as “two bald men fighting over a comb.”
In vintage Argentine self-deprecation, he was capturing what he saw as the absurdity of the UK and Argentina tearing each other apart over a windswept archipelago with more sheep than people.
But fast forward to 2026, and it seems those same two ol’ baldies might be fighting over that comb again. So what’s going on here… have they been hitting the Rogaine? A sneaky trip to Turkey? Or perhaps… that old comb might be made of solid gold?
Onwards.
 | Managing Editor Jeremy Dicker |
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Quote of the day
“I will keep this paper as a memento of how desperate China is, and how ineffective its position is in the face of a free audience.”
That spicy line came from Manila’s defence secretary at a conference in Seoul, responding after one of China’s local military attachés passed him a note — mid-speech — rejecting a Hague ruling against Beijing’s vast South China Sea claims.
Grudge diplomacy.
Islands are having a moment, no?
You’ve got the Chagos stuck in a kind of diplomatic limbo, Putin doing victory laps through Japan-claimed Iturup, then MrBeast in Fiji for his latest Survivor collab.
But we need to talk about another archipelago off the coast of southern Argentina, known as the Falklands to anglophones, or Las Malvinas to Spanish-speakers.
Why?
Argentina’s Milei just threatened criminal charges against Israeli-listed energy firm Navitas if it charges ahead with its planned oil drilling near the islands.
And that’s just a dunk off last week’s self-serve alley-oop, when his fiery speech warned Argentina will have to “act quickly” to liberate the islands from British rule, concluding “there is no other path forward.”
So what — and we cannot stress this enough — is going on?
Way back in the 18th century, the French (1764), Brits (1765), and Spaniards (1767) all planted flags in the uninhabited islands, and things soon got spicy:
Spain bought the French colony (1767), but…
Spain then withdrew as its empire crumbled (1811), all just as…
Argentina started to break from Spanish rule (1810-1816).
The Argentines then argued they inherited Madrid’s islands, but the Brits evicted the small Argentine garrison in 1833, and have run the territory ever since!
Or at least until 1982, when Argentina’s military dictatorship suddenly invaded. Why? Sure, a lingering territorial claim, but also the dictatorship really needed a win back home, where its dirty war was being exposed, its economy was in freefall, and its generals were losing the streets.
So President Galtieri gambled Thatcher wouldn’t fight, but boy did he lose that bet. He also lost 649 men (the Brits lost 255). And after two brutal months, his troops surrendered on a Monday, and Galtieri himself was out by the Thursday.
That’s how Thatcher got a rebuttal to persistent claims of British decline, while Argentina got a national injury that still throbs to this day.
Speaking of this day...
President Milei never actually seemed too focused on these islands back when he ran his insurgent campaign: he got in trouble from hardliners when he noted you can’t just disregard the islands’ residents, plus he even praised Thatcher herself!
So… why is President Milei now weighing back into all this again?
Sure, there was the FIFA World Cup incident, which saw the Argentines fined for waving a “Malvinas are Argentinian” banner after they beat England. But that’s like singing the national anthem on the biggest stage after beating the old enemy. Mood music.
The actual sparks came in…
May: Navitas announced it’ll drill from 2027, and produce oil from 2028
June: Milei hit record low approvals amid austerity and corruption headlines
July: Another embarrassing poll found 66% of Argentines thought Milei (unlike the FIFA team) didn’t even care about the islands, and then…
August: President Trump flagged that relative US neutrality on the issue was “under review”, later linking it all to London’s non-help on Iran.
So that brings us to September, a ~year out from high-stakes elections, when Milei — Trump’s favourite Argentine in the region’s new Donroe Doctrine era — told his nation that the “winds of change” are now blowing in Argentina’s favour.
To put it another way, this is all a mix of mood music, sparks, fear, and opportunity.
And so how are the Brits responding?
They’re keeping a stiff upper lip rather than fuel Milei’s moment, calmly reiterating that the Falklands are British, and that 99.8% of Falklanders want to stay British.
At least, that was the result of the 2013 referendum, which Argentina dismissed at the time as a mere “parody of squatters”.
Intrigue’s Take
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Intrigue’s Take
Welcome to 2026, dear Intriguer, where there’s clearly no shortage of historical threads to pull. We explored Serbia’s latest little tug yesterday, for example.
The thing is, of course, none of these grievances are new. They’re all there, long buried under old borders, treaties, and war memorials. They never vanished. Rather, they mostly just got nudged backstage by a rigid post-Cold War order that raised the price on too much boundary-pushing or revisionism.
But in this nationalist era of ours, that price of re-litigation now seems to be dropping, while the political payoff seems to be rising, so maybe consider this Falklands/Malvinas spat a mere preview of what’s to come.
Meanwhile, the island geography is hardly incidental. In fact, perhaps nowhere is our world’s re-ordering now more tangible than on random rocks surrounded by vast oceans. They were always strategic outposts for empire-building. Then they became unsinkable aircraft carriers for power projection. More recently they’ve become gateways to control critical trade lanes. And as rattled capitals scramble for resources, they’re gates to control lucrative fish stocks, energy, and minerals.
In Milei’s case, though, we do wonder whether any political payoff here will come with an economic cost: his entire presidency has rested on the core mission of proving to global capital that his country is once again stable, predictable, investible. But beating the drums of sovereignty, ramping up naval plans, and threatening criminal prosecution against a listed oil producer? It all risks muddying the message.
Yet zoom out a little more and you’ll recall this is hardly just a Milei thing: in fact, in a world where so many borders were drawn in blood, it’s hard to name many capitals that can really sleep soundly once our maps start unravelling.
Sound even smarter:
Recent polls suggest 60% of Argentinians think Milei’s shift on the Falklands/Malvinas is due to political convenience.
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Meanwhile, elsewhere…
🇮🇷 IRAN — War on, war off.
Amid a quieter month, the US says it’s now destroyed five IRGC-linked tankers after Iran twice tried to put ballistic missiles into a US warship. Tehran has now answered with another volley at US forces in Jordan. Unsurprisingly, oil is back up at $100 for the first time since July. (WaPo $)
Comment: Absent political changes in Tehran or DC, this feels like the new Hormuz equilibrium: a kind of low-boil, high-stakes attrition loop, with no obvious off-ramp in sight.
🇮🇱 ISRAEL — Settlement spat.
Israel is objecting to what it’s describing as “outrageous lies”, after the UK, France, Canada, and others moved to ban imports originating from unlawful Israeli settlements in the West Bank. In response, the Israelis are closing the UK’s consulate in East Jerusalem, and one hardline minister has called for Israel to back Argentina’s claims over the Falklands/Malvinas! (EuroNews)
Comment: Why is this all blowing up now? After a run of settler violence and expansions, the Europeans/Canucks are responding to the publication of Israel’s construction tenders for the new ‘E1’ settlement that’d sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. And that tender actually closes a week before Israel’s 27 October elections — the timing looks a lot like an attempt to ensure E1 survives whoever wins. Anyway, the actual trade hit from these new sanctions will be negligible (in the millions, mostly ag). The more meaningful hit will be the way this all fuels the West’s next street protests, spiking the political costs around supporting Israel.
🇮🇸 ICELAND — Mind the flag.
Reykjavík has summoned the US ambassador after President Trump tweeted a map with the Stars and Stripes draped over the US, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, and the Caribbean, all labelled “United States of America”. Iceland’s foreign minister has called it “completely inappropriate”, with the others also irked. (RUV)
Comment: Maybe these stunts are just to distract from Iran, Epstein, or debt, and even rally the base ahead of the midterms. Or maybe they just reflect the MAGA comms style of flooding the field to put everyone else in perpetual reaction mode. But whatever this is, random territorial jabs risk just accumulating more bad international karma for the US.
🇺🇳 UNITED NATIONS — “This is not 1945”.
That’s how the Bangladeshi foreign minister (Rahman) opened the 81st UN General Assembly in New York, taking over from Germany’s Baerbock with a promise to rebuild trust in multilateralism. (BanglaNews24)
Comment: Rahman is mounting a brave attempt to modernise the institution, but a hall full of diplomats can only do so much when the world’s major powers now openly prefer to settle scores outside UN walls. World leaders start arriving around 22 September, but we already know China’s Xi will skip to instead see Trump in DC. Meanwhile, the Security Council’s next secret ‘straw poll’ to pick the UN’s leader is also due soon, with no clear front-runner yet breaking from the pack.
🇨🇳 CHINA — Solar plugs the gap?
According to the Ember think-tank, clean energy covered all of China’s new electricity demand last year, while the country’s fossil fuel use has now peaked or dropped in eight of the 11 industrial sectors tracked by Ember. It comes after solar nudged past coal to become China’s largest installed capacity source in July. (Ember)
Comment: Even factoring in China’s lagging economy, plus the gap between actual and potential kilowatt-hours (coal was still ~50% of generation in H1), the longer term trend seems to be that China’s historic clean machine is now not only large enough to meet new demand, but also start nibbling away at the old system.
🇰🇪 KENYA — Temporary amnesty.
President Ruto has offered temporary amnesty to undocumented East African migrants, after his announcement of a crackdown on foreign small-scale traders sparked a rush on Burundi’s local embassy. (Al Jazeera)
Comment: A sudden and disorganised crackdown is a rough look, particularly in the aftermath of South Africa’s own bout of vigilantism. It’s also a reminder that integration is an easy line at regional summits, but it’s harder to sell in the streets.
🇻🇺 VANUATU — More island drama…
Port Vila wants the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to resolve a colonial-era dispute over who owns the uninhabited, volcanic Matthew and Hunter islands near New Caledonia. But because Paris doesn’t accept the ICJ’s compulsory jurisdiction, it now gets to decide if the case even proceeds. (Lowy Institute)
Comment: The real prize is not the empty islands, so much as the massive ~350,000km² EEZ they generate, rich in fish and other resources. Intriguingly, New Caledonia’s independence movement actually backs Vanuatu’s claims, so this risks getting political and geopolitical, fast.
Extra Intrigue
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Word-game of the day
Screenshots from the game.
You know the feeling: the government ✌️de-classifies✌️ a bunch of material, but every word you actually want to read is blocked by those fat black ‘redacted’ bars:
You’re not going to believe this, but [redacted] is actually an alien in disguise.
Incredibly, [redacted] revealed that the meaning of life is actually [redacted].
Oh, and it turns out Atlantis didn’t sink, it [redacted].
Anyway, with a hat-tip to Intriguer Mathieu, there’s a new word-game called The Daily Leak which helps us all scratch that sweet sweet secret itch. Every day a new fictional (but real-sounding) classified dump drops, and you play to un-redact it!
It’s like Hangman, but for diplomacy nerds.
Today’s poll
What do you think will happen with the Falklands/Malvinas?
Yesterday’s poll: Do you think the EU will keep getting bigger?
🇪🇺 Yep, there are still easy candidates in the queue (55%)
🚫 Nope, the queue is mostly just a costume at this point (44%)
✍️ Other (write in!) (1%)
Your two cents:
🇪🇺 G.M: “Multipolarity is all well and good, but democracy has provided a stable path for growth and something approaching peace and prosperity.”
🚫 H.L: “The advantages of full EU membership are now less than equal of just spending years in the queue. That could change as the world as we know it splinters into more factions whose driving self interests threaten everything.”