Realist idealism?

A Foreign Policy Analysis of the Presidency of Alberto Fernández

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to understand how internal and external constraints impacted both in the decision and in the execution phases of the main foreign policy guidelines during the presidency of Alberto Fernández. In the domestic front, the president’s belief system, the coalitional dynamic and the worrying state of the economy are analyzed, whereas the situations generated by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the war between Russia and Ukraine are analyzed in the external front. These constraints, combined with a study of the main geographic spaces and the main issues in the Argentinian foreign policy agenda, clearly show eight guidelines that the government has followed. The main hypothesis of the article is that ideational factors appear to have had a bigger effect in the shaping of the guidelines, whereas the local political game and the external constraints appear to have affected their execution more strongly.