From Over-Ideologisation to De-Autonomisation: Worldview, Cognitive Shortcuts, and Foreign Policy Under the Milei Government

Abstract

This article examines the foreign policy of the Milei government in Argentina. Its central argument is that the president's worldview—conceptualised as Western Supremacist Civilisationism—functions as a relatively closed cognitive schema that activates systematic heuristic shortcuts and produces what we call the paradox of power. Rather than generating diffuse costs, this worldview concentrates them structurally in exactly those domains where the state most needs negotiating space. Drawing on Hermann's Leadership Trait Analysis framework and on Jervis's perceptual mechanisms, the article examines three empirical dimensions to show that these costs are the predictable product of an expansionist cognitive profile, documented in a corpus of primary discursive sources. The cumulative result of this cognitive architecture is de-autonomisation: the structural erosion of Argentina's international room for manoeuvre.