Sputnik Moment | Profile

On October 4, 1957, the success of Russia’s space program humiliated the United States when the former Soviet Union placed humanity’s first artificial satellite in space, flying over North American homes for 22 days. Sputnik 1 shook the world’s major nations and prompted the creation of NASA just five months later. Eleven years later, America’s reaction to landing the first man on the moon and defeating Russia in space connected the “Sputnik moment” with the “Eureka moment” when reality forces us to react and improve.

In January of this year, just as Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term as president, the United States experienced another Sputnik moment, one that has been described as a technological Pearl Harbor. At that time, China announced the launch of its first conversational artificial intelligence. Deep Seek is as powerful as Chat GPT, but it achieved this by investing just 6 percent of what Open IA invested in its own development ($600 billion vs. $100 billion) and surpassed Chat in just one month. GPT is the most free application. Currently, the majority of apps in the US are downloaded to Apple devices.

Another wake-up call for Donald Trump is that he had already made the trade war with China an issue during his first presidential campaign in 2016, and midway through his term, the 2020 pandemic revealed that economic globalization had lost sight of strategic issues, with the US enduring a dependence on certain medical products made only in China because they were cheap.

Supply chain security has always been a consideration in military analysis. The wars at the end of the last century were triggered by oil supplies, but after fracking, that supply became less strategic, making it self-sufficient and over the past decade replacing Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world’s largest producers of gas and oil.

Some analysts believe that the United States will inevitably lose the trade war with China when it finishes incorporating into production and modernization the other half of its landlocked population, which has largely lost touch with the advances it has made over the past 50 years. And its final defeat can only be recovered by an earlier military war, when the United States’ war advantage over China is still 3:1.

Others believe that one-third of China’s military power over North America is still enough to destroy the United States, allowing Cold War-era mutual deterrence with the former Soviet Union to come into play again.

And while the recent easing of trade tensions over tariffs may be less the result of President Trump achieving his goals than his temporary capitulation in the face of China’s threat to completely cut off rare earth supplies to North American companies, today the United States, along with its allies, is not self-sufficient in rare earths. They could achieve the same thing as hydraulic fracturing and hold a truce within their own territory until they have a surplus of rare earths, but the difficulty lies in the separation process.

It is not illogical to include this context as one of the reasons for the very cordial relations between the Trump and Millais administrations, forging ties between the two countries at the best moment in their history, as stated by the two countries’ newly appointed ambassadors in Buenos Aires. And consider that the trade deal between the two countries announced Thursday in Washington is part of this process.

This process, which is still under construction, allows different hypotheses about possible futures, although parts of Argentina’s political rifts fail to recognize the possibility of an outcome different from their imagination, and which may actually be a turning point in Argentina’s history, embodying the thesis of development by invitation, in which Argentina is actually called into the club of Western capitalist progress (the European Union-Mercosur Treaty will also be signed soon), and ending with yet another prohibitive tariff agreement. Similar to the 150 cases the United States has with various countries around the world, we announced three more, including our own cases in strategically unrelated states such as Guatemala, El Salvador, and Ecuador.

In a column on Perfil’s morning show yesterday, I laid out at length the case of Chinese maquilas masquerading as Mexican invading the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the concepts of offshoring, nearshoring, and reshoring (such as the reabandonment of the Monroe Doctrine to extracontinental powers) were added to theories about specific references in the epitome of agreements on agriculture (livestock vs. soybeans) and pharmaceuticals.

Another turning point was between 2001 and 2005, first with the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York and the associated temporary US interests in Latin America. For months, Cavallo received only 5 percent of the aid that Milais received from the United States to protect himself from the same catastrophe (in his case, default due to convertibility collapse). The second is the “alcarajo” against George W. Bush promoted by Chávez, Kirchner, and Lula at the Fourth Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata.

The mistakes of Argentina and the United States created the conditions for reconciliation. The United States believed that since it has a common global currency and controls its finances, it does not need to control its industrial processes, but Argentina has once again become a chronic dollar debtor, an example of a financial crisis, and in order to avoid falling into the abyss, it is more dependent on the immediate status quo of the country that controls its finances and manufactures dollars than on the country that buys its own products and promotes its economy and exports. Both are paradoxes of history. The final side of the coin in the air remains to be seen.