OPINION:
When Javier Milei rebuked the United Nations on how global bureaucracy has veered onto a “tragic course,” the Sept. 24 speech cemented Argentina’s president as a voice of conservatism and freedom.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are U.N. sycophants. Not Mr. Milei. He is a stand-in for American conservatives who know today’s U.N. is a platform for socialism, terrorism and Third World thugs.
In de facto collusion with Mexican drug cartels, the U.N. has bankrolled foreign nationals making their way illegally into the U.S., where many came for the opportunity to commit crimes. Their American dream.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the U.N.’s deployment in the Gaza Strip, was for years basically a military and indoctrination arm of Hamas, which is committed to killing Jews. An UNRWA operative was Hamas’ chief in Lebanon until Israel killed him in an airstrike on Sept. 30.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is a committed socialist who demands billions of dollars from the U.S. and other rich nations for him to hand out. In his fundraising, he likes the apocalyptic: “The world is on fire.”
Mr. Milei knows all this as he becomes the new Reagan on the world stage.
He is a welcome break from South America’s addiction to left-wingers who destroy their countries. Wherever Marxism has been implemented, it has led to tyranny, misery and mass death. Leftist Hugo Chavez’s rule brought a police state and economic collapse to Venezuela.
When Argentines elected Mr. Milei president last November, breaking with their political history, Washington liberals panicked and rebelled.
They admire left-wing leaders no matter how disastrous. “Far right” became Mr. Milei’s first name.
The Washington Post: “Argentina set for sharp right turn as Trump-like radical wins presidency.” (When I saw this, I knew I had found a soulmate.)
The New York Times: “Argentina Elects Javier Milei in Victory for Far Right.” (Now I’m giddy.)
The Associated Press called Mr. Milei a “fiery right-wing populist.” NPR: “far-right populist” and “radical libertarian populist.” Foreign Policy: “Argentina’s Elections Are Becoming Dangerously American.” CNN: “Far-right outsider.”
Time magazine, an all-out promoter of Ms. Harris, outdid them all: “Argentina Just Elected an Eccentric Populist Who Seeks Counsel From His Cloned Dogs.”
I spent a week in Buenos Aires in the late 1980s on assignment to write military stories. Government officials told me they careen from one economic crisis to the next.
Not much changed in the next 30 years before Mr. Milei, the mop-headed economist, arrived.
He immediately dived into free-market reforms and austerity to tackle Argentina’s inflation monster. And he spoke of a new foreign policy that embraced Israel.
In February, only months before Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities, Mr. Milei visited Israel and prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City.
At the Sept. 24 General Assembly, Mr. Milei issued a stinging indictment. The U.N. global bureaucracy is following the orders of the “woke agenda” of “global elites” such as the World Economic Forum. (This columnist believes the aforementioned billionaires’ club is today’s greatest enemy of freedom, next to the Democratic Party.)
General Assembly members, he said, “have voted against the state of Israel, which is the only country in the Middle East that defends liberal democracy, while simultaneously demonstrating a total inability to respond to the scourge of terrorism.”
“In this same house that claims to defend human rights, they have allowed bloody dictatorships such as Cuba and Venezuela to join the Human Rights Council without the slightest reproach,” he said.
He said the U.N. appointed to a women’s anti-discrimination commission the very countries who punish women for “showing their skin.”
He summed up: “This is how we went from an organization that pursued peace to an organization that imposes an ideological agenda on its members, on a myriad of issues, which make the life of man in society. … It has been replaced by a model of supranational government of international bureaucrats who seek to impose a certain way of life on the citizens of the world.”
In contrast, he said he is building a “new Argentina” based on freedom of expression, the right to life and owning property. He was basically quoting our Bill of Rights, a document liberals now want to gut or even toss. Mr. Milei even quoted American Founding Father Thomas Paine (“Common Sense”).
Days after Mr. Milei took office, Desmond Lachman, an economist, columnist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote about the new leader’s daunting task. Last December, Mr. Lachman noted that inflation was running at nearly 140% annually in Argentina.
I asked Mr. Lachman how Mr. Milei was doing 10 months later.
“It seems that Milei has had the courage to address Argentina’s chronic budget deficit problem that has been the underlying cause of its economic woes in general and its high inflation in particular,” he told me. “However, it might be challenging for him to maintain his policy course given the growing political pushback that he is now experiencing. As was to be expected, fiscal austerity and bringing the budget into balance after years of fiscal profligacy is causing immediate pain in the form of a recession and a rise in poverty.”
President Ronald Reagan took office preaching freedom and an end to the inflation of the 1960s and 1970s. The Federal Reserve tightened the money supply in 1981, sending the country into a deep recession. But in 1984, Reagan won reelection on “Morning in America.”
Reuters reported that Argentina’s monthly inflation rate for August dropped to under 4%, putting the annual number at 123%.
Just as Reagan was, Mr. Milei is committed. He ended his U.N. speech with “long live freedom, goddamn it.”
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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