I think Keir Starmer would give away the Falklands in a heartbeat

On a brilliant, cold, starlit May morning 44 years ago, I stepped out of a landing craft onto the shores of the Falkland Islands, or the Malvinas for the Argentines – a nomenclature evidently finding increasing favour with Donald Trump.

The water was bloody cold. A frigate was firing occasional shots overhead as the 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment landed. I could smell the cordite.

Being the first Brit journalist ashore to open the brief campaign to recover the Islands for British Crown rule seems a minor curiosity in my autobiography. But I reflect on the episode of the small war in the Falklands in 1982 with a sense of irony at the foibles and strange habits of contemporary history and political mythology.

I landed on 21 May 1982, along with about 4,000 troops and other military personnel. By June 14th 1982 it was all over – British forces had taken the small capital, Stanley, and in excess of 11,000 Argentine forces had surrendered, and wanted to go home. Argentine governments have revived their claim to the sovereignty of the islands ever since. Javier Milei, the present leader, has said the Islands are his – and they have even appeared on Argentine banknotes. Milei is the favourite Maga poster child in Latin America, and Trump has bankrolled him to the tune of some $40bn.

Trump is now doubling down with his White House briefing that the “US is now looking to favour” the Argentine case over the Falklands. This can be no bluff – because since 2010, huge and viable oil reserves have been identified, and they are thought to be increasingly commercially viable. Various consortia have been put together, with two groups, Navitas and Sea Lion, in the lead. Commercial drilling in the Sea Lion field, with a reserve of 500 million barrels of oil, is expected to start in 2028.

Altogether, the complex of four fields round the Falklands is thought to hold an unexploited reserve of 60 billion barrels – including the Malvinas Basin, which goes into Argentine territorial waters and stretches down to Tierra del Fuego on the confines of Antarctica. Venezuela, the largest in the world, has a reserve of 300 billion barrels.

Trump likes oil, and he likes American oil especially, as his claims to Venezuelan and Caribbean reserves and wells suggest. This is why his team’s bluster about the Falklands is no side show, and much more than the fantasy claim to Greenland. In his national security strategy of last November, in the spirit of Presidents Monroe, McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, Trump claimed that the whole American continent, and all that therein lies, is “our hemisphere”.

The historical dispute about Falklands ownership is a muddle. The Argentine case is that the Argentine Republic inherited sovereignty of the Islands from the Spanish Empire, which was briefly master in the early 1800s. However, Brit and French forces had been there prior to that, and afterwards.

The Argentine case is also based on the principle of contiguity – what’s nearest should take control. Argentina claims the Falklands, stuck out in the Atlantic 600 miles away, but also South Georgia and a whole slew of islands, South Orkney, South Shetlands, Southern Thule – a huge pile of ice, rock and guano – strung thousands of miles across the Antarctic oceans.

This leads me to suspect that team Starmer, with their proclivity for lawfare rather than warfare, would give up the Falklands in a heartbeat – despite protestations today that the decision rests with the decisions of the Islands’ people. I am not sure what would happen if there were a hard push from Buenos Aires. Based on policy and performance to date, I cannot see the team of Hermer, Lammy, Cooper, Reeves, Healey, and the consiglieri Jonathan Powell and Philippe Sands, arguing for the defence of the Falklands in principle, by way of international law, or practice, with hard military power. After all, they are renewing the effort to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius – with its pro-China regime – on the same basis.

This is where I think the “lawfare not warfare” dogma of Starmerland may be in trouble. Hermer and the government lawyers would have to go to the UN, as they do over Chagos. The Falklands has been referred often to the various UN bodies on decolonisation. But small Crown Dependencies with their own democratically elected councils are somewhat different – especially if they are not deemed able to govern and manage their defence entirely by themselves. And democracy, the will of the people, all 3000 on the Falklands now, counts. It matters in the Falklands and St Helena, as it does for Gibraltar – all three in the sights of the Lawfare brigade nowadays by all accounts.

The Falklands are costly to defend, as the Treasury and MoD love to moan. Frankly, the defences are pretty thin there now, but that shouldn’t encourage another mad Argentine adventure like that of April 1982, which cost the lives of 255 British service personnel, three islanders and 649 Argentine service personnel, including 323 sailors of the cruiser Belgrano.

The likely outcome now, I suspect, might be a condominium with Buenos Aires. This may be needed as the Falklands alone will not be able to manage and facilitate the oil and gas bonanza now in prospect.

The lawfare lobby should not overlook another asset from the Falklands – Britain’s contribution to Antarctic science. The Falklands are a logistical base for the string of world-leading laboratories and stations of the British Antarctic Survey. Britain has pioneered the use of Antarctica for entirely peaceful purposes and is the prime architect of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959. It is still a model for international cooperation, imitated in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

It’s not the kind of thing that warms the cockles of the hearts of Trump, Vance and Hegseth. But it is a beacon for progress and hope as planet Earth from pole to pole and in inner and outer space, heads into a new Cold War.