In this note, we study submanifold geometry of the Atiyah--Hitchin manifold, a double cover of the 2-monopole moduli space, which plays an important role in various settings such as the supersymmetric background of string theory. When the manifold is naturally identified as the total space of a line bundle over S^2, the zero section is a distinguished minimal 2-sphere of considerable interest. In particular, there has been a conjecture about the uniqueness of this minimal 2-sphere among all closed minimal 2-surfaces. We show that this minimal 2-sphere satisfies the ``strong stability condition" proposed in our earlier work, and confirm the global uniqueness as a corollary.