MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Milei ratifies Argentina's alignment with US

Milei also criticized Argentina's foreign policy under Alberto Fernández (2019-2023)

Argentina President Javier Milei announced Friday that his country's alliance with the United States had become a part of his administration's “new foreign policy doctrine” because both nations “share a tradition based on freedom, the defense of life and private property.”

He made those remarks during the ceremony of the donation of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport aircraft to the Argentine Air Force attended by US Southern Command Chief General Laura Richardson.

Milei maintained that the transfer of the aircraft would allow Argentina to maintain a permanent air link with the Antarctic bases and the South Atlantic islands. He added that his new foreign policy doctrine would also focus on Argentina's “reinsertion” into the international agenda.

“With the United States we share in part a common cultural DNA that was shaped by the founding fathers of both nations in our first constitutions, a tradition that has at its base the ideas of freedom, the defense of life, liberty, and private property,” Milei insisted.

“That means that we are in favor of freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom to trade, to produce and to work for all, and consequently we are against tyranny, whether in the form of political oppression, economic slavery or religious fanaticism,” he stressed.

“Those ideas lifted the vast majority of the world's population out of extreme poverty in the last 250 years, turned the United States into the power it is today and also Argentina in the late 19th century into the power it once was,” the Libertarian leader went on.

“To stray from that path cost us 100 years of failure and condemned us to go from being the spearhead to the caboose of the West, but the most serious thing is that it condemns us to economic misery and consequently to irrelevance in the concert of Nations,” he added.

Milei also criticized Argentina's foreign policy under Alberto Fernández (2019-2023) which led to “isolationism, bombastic speeches, and spurious pacts.”

“This new foreign policy doctrine will allow us to promote the economic prosperity of our peoples, an indispensable requirement to guarantee the sovereignty of our homeland”, he anticipated, and completed: “Only prosperous Nations can defend their sovereignty and only Nations with free economies that cooperate economically among themselves become prosperous,” Milei also argued.

On her day in Argentina, Richardson was also welcomed at the Senate by Vice President Victoria Villarruel. Escorting her was US Ambassador Marc Stanley. During the meeting, Villarruel and Richardson discussed common strategic issues on energy, food, continental challenges, and hemispheric policy.