The end of empire came with a successful defence of empire. The Argentine dictatorship never imagined for a moment that the British would react militarily to their seizure of a small group of islands 8,000 miles away, the inhospitable habitat for 1,763 resolutely British flag-wavers who had survived there, against considerable odds, for 149 years.
But war changes everything. When the conflict ended – “two bald men fighting over a comb,” as the writer Jorge Luis Borges repeated to me in 1983, one year afterwards – both nations would emerge altered. Argentina became a democracy, if a desperately imperfect one. Following a period of self-defeat, Great Britain seemed to rediscover its prefix; it had defended a profound principle against huge odds, in an anachronistic military campaign that invoked glorious moments in its past, resulting in a victory that was instrumental in persuading President Gorbachev, as he afterwards admitted, that Russia could not win the Cold War. There was life in the old dog.
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