Martín Abel González argues that the British-Argentine conflict over the Malvinas was primed by United Nations (UN) General Assembly Resolution 2065, passed in 1965. That resolution broke a long, quiet status quo by identifying the Malvinas archipelago as an imperial colony and by urging Great Britain and Argentina to negotiate an end to their conflicting claims to the islands while bearing in mind islander interests. The notion of a decades-long status quo leading up to 1965 reasonably encapsulates the British approach to the archipelago. It ignores Argentina's long-standing Malvinas-focused foreign and strategic policies that took as a starting point the British presence in the South Atlantic as bellicose and the sovereignty question as central to foreign policy making from 1833 forward.

The author reasons effectively that the British position on Malvinas was part of a larger, integrated approach to British territories and the UN-led initiative for decolonization in the 1960s. Argentine diplomats, in contrast, faced a strategic conundrum. In the context of the UN decolonization push, they were successfully able to transform Malvinas from an atrophied, marginal international problem into a decolonization imperative at the top of the UN agenda. In that success, Argentines quickly recognized a problem. Malvinas was different than Angola, Rhodesia, and other cases; self-determination for colony inhabitants would not return the islands to Argentine rule.

Genesis of the Falklands skillfully charts British diplomacy on Malvinas, breaking new ground on how policymakers would come to hive the case off from Gibraltar and Hong Kong by seeing it as a potential sacrificial lamb; if as a consequence, Great Britain might secure stronger strategic ties in the South Atlantic with Argentina while renewing languid commercial relations, Malvinas might be worth cutting loose. British diplomats posited also that such a stand might win Latin American support for British positions on decolonization negotiations in Gibraltar, Rhodesia, and elsewhere.

The overview of closed-door British-Argentine Malvinas negotiations from 1966 to 1968 is lucid. At the same time, González is at his best presenting the British side of policy and strategy, while framing Argentine positions too narrowly. He acknowledges that he was unable to gain permission to review Malvinas-related documentation in the Argentine Foreign Relations Ministry Archive, but he reasons that this is mitigated by his having accessed related materials on the Argentine mission to the UN that undertook the negotiations. This is unconvincing on three counts. First, the classified records González could not access represent roughly 3,500 linear feet of material (i.e., millions of pages). How could he have known what may or may not have compensated for that chasm of information? Second, and inexplicably, the author draws on a very small handful of UN mission records (a dramatically smaller evidence pool than his equivalent British sources). In his second chapter, for example, on the lead up to Argentine-British negotiations at the UN, González cites only fifteen Argentine government sources. Several are short telegrams.

The third problem is more severe. González falls into a conceptual trap in assuming that the Argentine government organized its thinking, policy, and subsequent archiving of Malvinas documentation as a function of South Atlantic strategic concerns and relations with Great Britain. This leads to his mistakenly exclusive emphasis on UN mission records in reference to bilateral negotiations and to his having missed entirely that for Argentine authorities, Malvinas represented much more in how policymakers understood Argentina's international position. Just as Great Britain filtered its approach to Gibraltar through the Malvinas negotiations with Argentina, Malvinas was a prism through which Argentina organized its approach to a majority of foreign policy problems. The mitigating effect González proposed of substituting UN mission records for the inaccessible “Malvinas” records in the Argentine Foreign Ministry Archive sets up a false binary; González not only made no use of thousands of accessible archival documents that trace Argentine Malvinas diplomacy outside the context of bilateral negotiation but also missed that Argentine Malvinas policy and diplomacy were more amply structured than the bilateral, while at the same time having shaped the bilateral.

González ably slices through simplistic historiographical red herrings that include a long-standing narrative characterizing Argentine interests in Malvinas as emotional, nationalist hysteria and another blaming the conflict on British imperialism. In the end, he concludes that the 1966–68 talks on sovereignty transfer failed, not because of Argentine instability, islander obduracy, or British bad faith, but because the two nations were unable to unbundle their respective positions from wider international concerns each nation advanced. This seems an unreasonably complex explanation. A more likely scenario is that they simply could not find a practical solution in the face of the islanders' desire to remain British. The British had no intention of undertaking any sort of sovereignty transfer process against islander wishes, because this might alarm Rhodesian whites and residents of Northern Ireland, among others under the Union Jack.

In the end, González takes a reckless leap by trying to draw a line between the unraveling of talks in 1968 and the “path of Anglo-Argentine relations towards the 1982 war” (211). What path? The 1970s history of Argentine-British-islander relations marks a radical departure from 1960s negotiations. Beginning in 1972, the Argentine air force came far closer than the 1960s UN negotiators or anybody else to charting a path toward a new sovereignty arrangement. The air force became the predominant link between the islands and the outside world, providing everything from fuel to food to passenger transportation off Malvinas. This opened the door to a significant influx of Argentine teachers and other professionals. By 1975, every physician on the islands was Argentine, and more often than not, when islanders traveled to London, they stopped in Buenos Aires to take in the sights. In Argentina, the close Argentine-islander friendships and other relationships forged as a result of the air force initiative remains largely unknown in an Argentine political culture that renders impossible the celebration of a successful and sensible military initiative during the vicious 1976–83 dictatorship.