There’s an entire literary genre built around the cosmopolitan who loves the Global South—as long as the Global South loses with elegance and dignity. Ishaan Tharoor has written a masterpiece in that genre.
He makes a list of the World Cup’s "charming countries": the Japanese cleaning the stadium, the kind Koreans, Vozinha, the noble loser. All lovable, endearing, unforgettable. All eliminated.
The truth is that this kind of picturesque admiration comes with conditions. The "other" is worth celebrating only as long as they remain endearing. And more often than not, they’re considered endearing because they lose and pose no threat to power.
Tharoor built his "love" for Argentina around its decline: hyperinflation, chaos, a team supposedly suffering from injustice. That’s an aesthetic relationship with the periphery. The moment the periphery stops being picturesque and starts winning, the toy breaks.
His use of Eduardo Galeano’s quote about Maradona and Napoli makes the point obvious: it celebrates a dark South humiliating the white North that had despised it. Then he uses that same quote to argue that Argentina is now the North. That’s where the unspoken assumption slips in: the South American who "looks" European somehow no longer counts as a victory for the Global South.
Argentina is part of the Global South whether he likes it or not. That isn’t something he gets to decide based on whether he finds the country sympathetic. On top of that, he argues that Argentina has become part of the establishment because Milei was supposedly going to be sitting next to Trump in the stands (which now doesn't even appear to be true). It’s exactly the opposite.
An Argentine invited to a stadium in New Jersey, sitting beside the people who hold power, is about as peripheral a scene as you can imagine.
Mistaking proximity for power is a basic analytical error. We were never less sovereign than when we were at our friendliest with those in power. The embrace is submission without friction—a surrender. The problem isn't that Argentina somehow became "bad." The reality is much simpler: Tharoor liked an Argentina that lost.
That says far more about him than it does about Argentina.
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