This is the script for my video posted on July 30, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
How did Javier Milei go from a TV news pundit to the president of Argentina? And what impact has he had on his country’s geopolitical dynamics?
Milei was born in Buenos Aires in 1970, to a homemaker mother and a bus driver father who later became successful in the bus business.
He sang in a Rolling Stones cover band and picked up the nickname el Loco, the Madman, for his outbursts and strong opinions.
When hyperinflation tore through Argentina in 1989, with prices rising by up to 3000% in a single year, he decided to become an economist. He spent two decades as an economist for a billionaire's conglomerate, and then, through the 2010s, became a fixture on Argentine television, screaming about the state and insulting other panelists on air. That is where the country met him.
In theory Milei is an anarcho-capitalist who wants the state abolished entirely. In practice he governs as a minarchist, believing in minimal government, and pairs that with hard traditionalist, anti-collectivist politics. He is also genuinely eccentric.
He owns four English mastiffs named after free market economists, all of them clones of his late dog Conan, whom he reportedly consults through a psychic medium.
At rallies he wielded a chainsaw to symbolize cutting the state, under the persona El Peluca, or the mophead.
He’s a staunch opponent of Peronism, the dominant state-interventionist political force in Argentina that promotes social justice, economic independence, and political sovereignty.
He won a congressional seat in 2021 on anti-establishment anger. Then two years later he ran for president. Inflation crossed 100% that February, a 32-year high, while poverty was near 40% and the government was printing money to cover its deficits. Argentines were exhausted, and a radical outsider stopped looking so unlikely.
In the August primary he finished first, which almost no one predicted. In October he came second to the sitting economy minister presiding over the crisis. Then the establishment right endorsed him, and in the November runoff he won 56 to 44, the largest share since Argentina returned to democracy.
He took office in December 2023 and started economic shock therapy immediately. A 54% currency devaluation. Ministries cut from 18 down to 9. Transport and energy subsidies slashed. Within ten days he issued a mega-decree of 366 articles that rewrote or repealed more than 300 laws.
The Senate rejected it and the courts struck down its labor chapter, so he went to Congress with a 664-article omnibus bill. That collapsed too, but a stripped-down version with 238 articles finally passed in July 2024, authorizing privatizations, emergency powers, and a new investment regime. Over his first two years, more than 63k state jobs were cut.
What he did not do was dollarize. He had campaigned on scrapping the peso entirely and abolishing the central bank, but there were never enough dollars to achieve this, so he stabilized it instead.
It worked, in a sense. Argentina posted its first fiscal surplus in 14 years. Inflation peaked near 290% in April 2024 but now runs around 33%. Poverty spiked after the devaluation, then fell hard. But the bill came due elsewhere, via billions of dollars in fresh IMF debt, four general strikes, pensioners outside Congress every week, mass marches over university cuts, and more than 21k companies reportedly shut down in two years.
Meanwhile, Milei has faced multiple scandals. In February 2025 he promoted a crypto memecoin that spiked and collapsed within hours, wiping out 251m dollars across 86% of traders while a handful of insiders profited 180m dollars. Argentina's own Anti-Corruption Office cleared him, though it reports to his Justice Ministry and ruled only on narrow ethics grounds. His sister Karina, his closest political operator and Secretary General of the Presidency, faces separate allegations over kickbacks on stage drug contracts. Criminal investigations are open on both fronts.
In September 2025 his party was crushed in Buenos Aires Province, causing markets to panic, but six weeks later he won the October midterms outright, tripling his bloc in the lower house and finally clearing the one-third threshold he needs to sustain vetoes and decrees. He used it to pass a labor law allowing 12-hour workdays, cheaper severance, and tighter limits on strikes.
Abroad, he bet everything on the US. In October 2025 the US Treasury opened a 20 billion dollar swap line and directly bought pesos in the first intervention of its kind in 25 years. The conditions were not subtle. Standing beside Milei at the White House, the current US president said that if he won, the US would stay with him, and if he didn’t win, support would vanish. Milei won, and Argentina repaid the swap in January.
He aligned with Israel just as tightly, reversing decades of Argentine UN voting, and has said he intends to convert to Judaism after leaving office. He also promised to move Argentina’s embassy to Jerusalem, then postponed it reportedly because an Israeli firm had partnered on oil drilling near the Falkland Islands. I highly recommend watching my recent video on the Falklands for more detail there.
Days before taking office in 2023, he withdrew Argentina's application to join BRICS, which cost him nothing. But he isn’t always consistent. He campaigned on pulling out of the Mercosur political and economic bloc entirely, then backed down and signed its landmark trade deal with the EU.
China was similar in that he said he would not do business with communists, then he renewed China's 5b dollar swap line despite US pressure to scrap it, because China buys Argentina’s soy and the beef, holds stakes in its lithium, and runs a deep space tracking station in Patagonia under a fifty-year lease. Inside Argentina, Milei takes big swings. But he can’t afford to when it comes to foreign partners.
Unless energy exports change things. Argentina sits on the world’s second-largest shale gas reserves and its fourth-largest reserves of shale oil. Argentina pumped roughly 800k barrels of oil per day in 2025, and energy exports ran a surplus near 8b dollars. That number continues to grow as new investment into shale exploitation comes in. This is the geopolitical lever that matters, because every Argentine crisis traces back to a shortage of dollars, and sustained energy exports would end it, regardless of who governs.
That is the optimistic case. The pessimistic one is that a 30-year tax and regulatory carve-out for foreign investors, written by a government already facing corruption allegations, is a very large amount of money moving through a system with very weak oversight, leaving plenty of room for abuse. Either way, the money is coming, and whoever governs next inherits whatever Milei builds now.
Keep reading
- Why are the Falkland Islands disproportionately important to geopolitics?
- How does small, landlocked Paraguay get geopolitical leverage?
- How has Mexico changed under its first woman president?
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.