Veteran BBC journalist Michael Buerk has launched a stinging attack on Argentina, accusing the South American country of "breathtaking hypocrisy" and branding its president a "birdbrain" over its attempts to wrest control of the Falkland Islands from Britain.
Writing for The Huffington Post UK on Thursday, the former presenter of the flagship 10 o'clock news, who also covered the 1982 Falklands war, says Argentina should examine its own "racist" past before pointing fingers at others.
"Thirty years after the end of the Falklands War, Argentina's president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, has launched a diplomatic campaign to gain control of the islands of such breathtaking hypocrisy she makes Jimmy Carr look like Martin Bell," he writes.
"At the UN, in the breaks of the latest G20 summit, every time she opens her mouth it seems, she's been accusing Britain of naked colonialism, demanding we hand the islands, and the 3,000 British citizens who live there, over to her."
He adds: "Colonialism - that's rich, coming from a country of European immigrants whose national policy has been to wipe out all trace of the people they snatched it from."
Tensions have been running high between London and Buenos Aires in recent months as the two nations commemorate the 30 year anniversary of the war that saw Argentina snatch the islands from British control, only to see them retaken by a Royal Navy flotilla.
The spat was highlighted last month when President de Kirchner attempted to hand a letter outlining her country's desire to have talks over the sovereignty of the islands to David Cameron at the G20 summit in Mexico.
The prime minister refused to accept the package, with aides to David Cameron dismissing the incident as a "media stunt" conducted by Argentina for the cameras.
In his blog, Buerk said having spent three months in Argentina during the war he found it "strange" that there were "no black or brown people".
"Argentina's 97% white, according the census. Wonder what happened to the Indian tribes who once flourished on the Pampas? Well, what do you know; they were deliberately exterminated in a series of genocidal military operations in the 19th century," he says.
"Wonder what happened to all those black African slaves - more than a third of Argentina's population at one time? Let me tell you. Thousands upon thousands of black men were forcibly recruited into the army, packed into the front line, deliberately used as cannon fodder in bloody campaigns against the natives and the neighbours."
Buerk, who presents the 'Moral Maze' on BBC Radio 4, said while he loved Argentina and its people they were "brilliant at life but disastrous at government".
"They invented the Tango and thought politics should be broadly similar: a substitute for sex, performed on the streets, brainless, showy, exciting and doomed," he says.
"That's how they've ended up being ruled by a succession of self-glorifying Ruritanian birdbrains and their molls."
He added: "Inevitably, it all goes horribly wrong at regular intervals and they have to find a way of distracting the mob on the street."