The Falklands conflict left in its wake a remarkable amount of psychological and conceptual disarray—even consternation— in both Latin American and U.S. policy-making circles. As a consequence, there is a good deal of stock-taking on all sides regarding the nature of hemispheric relationships and where to go from here. This has occurred not because the Falklands crisis itself created substantially new facts or circumstances but because it made explicit certain international trends and new realities that up to now have been implicit and only partially understood.

The conflict demonstrated, for example, the persistence and primacy of national interests in motivating individual Latin American countries, and also how discontinuous such interests can be with larger global issues.