This is the script for my video posted on June 22, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
Just 3600 people live on these islands today, but in the 1980s they were the site of a war that killed 255 British military members and 649 Argentine troops and fundamentally changed modern naval doctrine. The Falkland Islands are famous for this namesake war, but you’re probably not aware of the rest of their dynamics. So how do the Falklands influence geopolitics?
The first recorded sighting of the islands is usually attributed to English captain John Davis in 1592, though actual landfall wasn’t made until 1690 under captain John Strong. He named Falkland Sound, the strait that divides the main islands, after British Viscount Falkland. The Spanish, meanwhile, called the islands Islas Malvinas, derived from the French Iles Malouines, after sailors from the famous walled city of Saint-Malo. There was no indigenous population, so the islands were completely uninhabited when the Europeans found them.
In the 18th century, the islands were controlled by various countries in a tangled chain of possession. France founded a port in East Falkland in 1764, but the British, who were unaware of the French presence, claimed Saunders Island and founded their own port in 1766. Spain acquired the French colony around the same time, and in 1770 a Spanish force expelled the British from the port they'd founded, triggering the Falklands Crisis of 1770 and nearly starting a war between Spain and Britain. Both sides returned to their holdings and neither relinquished their sovereignty claims. But in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the British pulled out for economic reasons, leaving only a plaque asserting its continued sovereignty, and Spain withdrew its own garrison while fighting off various wars of independence in the Americas.
In 1816, the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata, the precursor to the Argentinian state, declared independence. An Argentine privateer raised their flag on the islands, but the state he represented was unrecognized and no forces occupied the area afterward. Shortly thereafter though, a merchant born in Hamburg named Luis Vernet established a settlement in the islands and sought permission from both the Argentine government and the British consulate for it. Argentina gave their permission and named him commandant, and he went on to seize several American sealing ships, provoking a raid from the USS Lexington that destroyed the settlement.
Shortly thereafter, an Argentine attempt to station a penal colony and military garrison in the islands ended in mutiny, and in 1833 the British reasserted their control and forced the Argentine commander to leave under protest. Today, Argentina asserts that this action was an illegal act of force, and that Britain not only expelled Argentine authorities and people, but they barred Argentines from resettling. Argentina has protested on this basis ever since. But from the British perspective, the actions of 1833 were a reassertion of a pre-existing claim, not a conquest of a settled territory, and the actual documentary record indicates that only the military garrison was removed and nearly all civilian settlers stayed at British invitation.
Britain ran the islands as a settled colony from that point on. The economy became based on wool and sheep, and apart from one incident during WWI when Royal Navy ships destroyed a German squadron, the area remained largely peaceful. But in 1976, Argentina experienced a coup that ultimately saw the commander-in-chief of the army, Leopoldo Galtieri, become president and military dictator under a junta in 1981. In a short period of time, Galtieri faced massive pushback from his own people, due in part to extreme inflation and the so-called Dirty War in which 10000-30000 people were disappeared. To rally nationalist sentiment and divert attention, he ordered an invasion of the Falklands.
The war itself deserves a video of its own, but suffice it to say that Britain responded in force. They assembled 127 ships and about 26000 personnel, traveling about 8000 miles to fight back and retain control of the islands. They established a 200 nautical mile Total Exclusion Zone within which any ship or aircraft from any country operating without British authorization was liable to be attacked without warning. But on 2 May 1982, an Argentine light cruiser, the ARA General Belgrano, was torpedoed by a British attack submarine while outside of the exclusion zone, killing 323 people. Since then, even Belgrano's commanding officer has called the sinking a legitimate act of war. The ship had been maneuvering rather than simply fleeing, and Britain had publicly warned that any Argentine vessel posing a threat was liable to attack regardless of whether it was inside the exclusion zone. This was one of the most significant naval incidents since WWII, and it’s still a point of contention between Argentina and Britain.
The Falklands War had a huge impact on naval doctrine in nearly every country. It’s the foundational modern case study demonstrating the vulnerability that surface ships have to sea-skimming anti-ship missiles. Argentina fired only six Exocet anti-ship cruise missiles against the British navy, but their disproportionate impact on the war proved to other countries that they could be used as cheap force-equalizers against stronger countries, and dozens of countries around the world still field them today. It didn’t help that British ships at the time had no close-in weapons system, or CIWS, to defend themselves from incoming munitions, and they had no airborne early warning radar, leaving them incredibly vulnerable. Apart from that, fires aboard ships drove changes in shipborne firefighting, and dozens of civilian ships were requisitioned and converted to support logistics in ways that had never been done before.
Alongside serious economic difficulty, the war shattered the Argentinian junta’s credibility, resulting in Galtieri’s fall and a return to democracy in 1983. It also contributed to massive boosts for Conservatives in the UK under Margaret Thatcher. In 1986, they introduced a conservation zone and licensing regime that allowed squid to become the main economic staple at well over half of its GDP and made the territory financially self-sufficient. If you eat calamari in southern Europe, there’s about a 50% chance it’s a Falklands squid. But there's also a huge offshore oil field that's only just beginning to be developed, targeting peak production of 50,000 barrels per day. This is a drop in the bucket globally, but for a place with a population of only a few thousand, it could provide a massive economic uplift, and hypothetically renewed tension with Argentina, which is part of why Britain spends between 60 and 200m pounds every year on its defense.
Keep reading
- Why has Javier Milei changed things for Argentina?
- Why does Guatemala claim half of Belize?
- Why is Spain an African country?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.