Javier Milei’s Foreign Policy and the Predominant Socio-Economic Actors: The Case of AmCham

Abstract

The article examines the transformations of Argentina’s foreign policy under President Javier Milei, focusing on the relationship between diplomatic alignment with the United States and the interests of the country’s dominant economic groups, particularly those represented by the American Chamber of Commerce in Argentina (AmCham). Adopting a historical approach to Foreign Policy Analysis, it explores the coherence between Milei’s neoliberal domestic agenda —characterized by deregulation, financialization, and unrestricted openness to foreign capital— and his foreign policy decisions.

The paper argues that Milei’s highly ideological and so-called “cultural-war” diplomacy is, in fact, functional to U.S. capital interests and their local allies, thereby reproducing traditional patterns of dependence in a global context marked by friend-shoring and renewed hegemonic rivalry. The convergence between political alignment with Washington and AmCham’s corporate support for structural reforms reveals an international strategy consistent with the interests of transnational capital, yet detrimental to Argentina’s social majorities and to its longstanding diplomatic traditions of autonomy and multilateralism.

m.