For much of the past two decades, Argentina has enjoyed an outsized reputation among progressive audiences abroad. It was one of the first countries in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, a regional pioneer in transgender rights, and the birthplace of the Marea Verde, the feminist wave that helped normalize abortion rights across Latin America and beyond. Domestically, Argentina appeared as a rare case where democracy, redistribution, and social progress advanced together.
Its foreign policy, however, tells a more contradictory story.
Rather than a simple oscillation between Kirchnerist leftism and Javier Milei’s libertarian radicalism, Argentina’s international trajectory reflects a deeper structural problem: both projects attempted to organize foreign policy through populist logics in a world no longer governed by stable hegemonies. To understand why this strategy worked at home but failed abroad, it is necessary to examine how populist reasoning operates, and where its limits lie.
Why Populism Worked at Home
The Kirchnerist era is inseparable from the theoretical framework developed by Ernesto Laclau. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and later On Populist Reason Laclau argued that political identities are constructed through discourse rather than pre-existing social categories.1 2 A political “people” emerges by linking heterogeneous demands into a chain of equivalence, unified against a common antagonist.
This logic proved highly effective in Argentina’s domestic politics. Labor unions, human-rights organizations, feminist movements, and economically marginalized groups were articulated into a broad pueblo opposed to neoliberal elites and international financial institutions. Despite internal tensions, these actors shared a fundamental democratic baseline: elections, civil liberties, and constitutional legitimacy were not in dispute.
This shared normative ground is essential. Laclau’s populist logic presupposes a political arena where conflict occurs within democracy. Foreign policy does not operate under these conditions.
Exporting the Chain of Equivalence
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner sought to extend this domestic logic to the international arena by framing Argentina as part of a Global South coalition resisting U.S.-led liberal hegemony. As Pereyra Doval and Colalongo show, Kirchnerist foreign policy was explicitly constructed as counter-hegemonic, grounded in South–South cooperation and opposition to Western financial power.
China fits relatively smoothly into this framework. Beyond its diplomatic support for Argentina’s Malvinas claim, Beijing offered infrastructure investment and alternatives to Washington-based financial institutions, reinforcing its image as a credible counterweight to U.S. dominance. Russia played a similar symbolic role.
The contradictions emerged when the logic of equivalence was stretched beyond strategic balancing and into normative alignment.
Iran and the Moral Limits of Equivalence
The 2013 Memorandum of Understanding with Iran exposed the fragility of Kirchnerist foreign policy. Iran was not merely another state marginalized by the West; it was formally accused by Argentine prosecutors of orchestrating the 1994 AMIA bombing, the deadliest antisemitic attack in the country’s history.
By pursuing diplomatic normalization, the Kirchnerist government attempted to incorporate Iran into a broader anti-imperialist coalition. Yet this move collided sharply with Argentina’s post-dictatorship identity as a defender of human rights and judicial accountability. Critics argued that the agreement subordinated justice to geopolitical expediency, creating the appearance, if not the reality, of complicity.
From a Laclaunian perspective, this was not hypocrisy but conceptual overstretch. A chain of equivalence can unite heterogeneous actors only so long as their differences do not negate the values binding the chain together. Iran’s political system, grounded in religious law, gender inequality, and repression of dissent, could not be reconciled with Argentina’s progressive self-image. The chain snapped.
ALBA and the Democracy Problem
A similar contradiction emerged in Argentina’s alignment with ALBA governments such as Venezuela and Cuba. Framed as expressions of anti-imperialist solidarity, these partnerships associated Argentina with regimes that systematically eroded democratic institutions, repressed opposition, and restricted civil liberties.
As Colalongo and Sezek note, these alignments offered limited strategic benefit while imposing significant reputational costs. Domestically, Kirchnerism championed feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and the memory politics of Nunca Más. Internationally, it defended governments that criminalized protest and dismantled judicial independence.
Here, the limits of populist foreign policy became evident. Foreign policy lacks the shared normative ground that allows populist equivalence to function domestically. Antagonism alone cannot substitute for institutional compatibility.
A Counter-Hegemonic Project, Now Closed
With the benefit of hindsight, Kirchnerist foreign policy can be understood as a completed cycle. Its counter-hegemonic ambition was coherent in intent but fragile in execution, and its limits cannot be explained simply by the external pressure of neoliberal globalization.
As Andrés Malamud and Federico Schenoni argue, Latin America’s declining relevance in world politics is best understood as a long-term structural trend, evidenced by the region’s diminishing share of global population, economic output, and diplomatic weight. In their Nueva Sociedad article, this marginality is not treated as the result of a single policy failure or ideological orientation, but as a sustained trajectory shaped by enduring systemic constraints and weak regional coordination. Their analysis thus describes a specific historical configuration in which Latin America’s international influence steadily eroded, regardless of shifts in domestic political orientation.
In a complementary argument developed in Foreign Policy, Malamud and Schenoni further contend that Latin America’s loss of visibility on the global stage was reinforced by the broader international context of the post-Cold War era: a period marked by U.S. unipolarity, limited strategic rivalry in the region, and the absence of issues that would make Latin America central to great-power competition. Within such a system, even ambitious foreign-policy projects faced narrow margins for success.
What has changed since, however, is not merely the orientation of Latin American governments, but the structure of the international system itself, raising new questions about whether the conditions that underpinned this earlier diagnosis of irrelevance continue to hold.
Milei and the Illusion of Restoration
Javier Milei’s foreign policy is often portrayed as a radical rupture, and ideologically it is. He rejects Global South solidarity and seeks explicit alignment with the United States and the Western liberal order, presenting Washington not as an imperial adversary but as a civilizational ally.
Yet this project unfolds in a world fundamentally different from the one Kirchnerism sought to resist. The era of neoliberal globalization as a stable hegemonic order has ended. The rise of explicit great-power competition, reflected in recent U.S. security doctrine, has altered the conditions that once sustained Latin America’s marginality.
This does not mean the region has become powerful or autonomous. Rather, its irrelevance can no longer be assumed.
Milei’s attempted realignment faces structural constraints: Argentina remains commercially tied to China, financially dependent on the IMF, and embedded in regional and institutional relationships that cannot be undone at will. His foreign policy therefore remains an open project, subject to adjustment rather than definitive evaluation.
Conclusion: Populism After Unipolarity
Argentina’s recent foreign policy history reveals a broader lesson about the limits of populism beyond ideology. Populist logics can successfully articulate heterogeneous democratic demands within a shared institutional framework. When projected onto the international system, however, those same logics falter.
Kirchnerism’s counter-hegemonic project collapsed under normative contradictions exposed by alliances with authoritarian regimes. Milei’s neoliberal realignment remains an unfinished reaction to the same structural transformation: the end of unipolarity and the fragmentation of global order.
Both projects sought ideological coherence in a world increasingly resistant to it. Argentina’s foreign policy dilemma, therefore, is not primarily ideological but structural. Resolving Argentina’s foreign policy dilemma will require abandoning the illusion that global politics can be organized through populist equivalence alone.
- Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Repr. London: Verso, 1999. ↩︎
- Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2005. ↩︎
Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Javier Milei, Image sourced from Live and Let’s Fly | CC License, no changes made