As he left the Prime Minister’s country house at the unexpectedly late time of 5.50 p.m., Gorbachev quoted an old Russian proverb: ‘Mountain folk cannot live without guests any more than they can live without air. But if the guests stay longer than necessary, they choke.’34
Far from choking, Margaret Thatcher was immensely cheered by the rapport that she had been able to establish with the rising Politburo member she expected to emerge as the next Soviet leader. As his car was heading down the Chequers drive, she gave an ecstatic debriefing on the private talks to her senior aides.
‘He sounds like a man you can do business with’, observed Bernard Ingham.
‘Yes, he certainly is’, replied the Prime Minister.
‘Can I say that to the press?’ Bernard Ingham asked.35
That was how the phrase went round the world, with Margaret Thatcher using it herself the following day in a BBC interview: ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.’36
When these words were translated to the object of them, he was pleased. Mikhail Gorbachev recalled:
I had no complaint! In fact, I used the same language when I reported to the Politburo very positively on my British visit. There was a lot of discussion and debate around the table, which I summed up by telling my colleagues, ‘We should continue to do business with Margaret Thatcher. And we did!’37
BRIDGE BUILDING BETWEEN MOSCOW AND WASHINGTON
The first business, after the success of her dialogue at Chequers with Mikhail Gorbachev, was for Margaret Thatcher to make the most of her opportunities as a bridge builder between Moscow and Washington. To take the initiative in this role, she had to fulfil a schedule of intercontinental travelling that was heroic even by the standards of prime ministerial aviation.
In the space of six days she held talks with Russian, Chinese and American leaders on three continents. Her fifty-five hours of flying time included sectors from London to Beijing to sign the Hong Kong agreement; from Beijing to Hong Kong to reassure its people that they had not been sold out; from Hong Kong to Hawaii, where she insisted on a nocturnal visit to Pearl Harbor; from Hawaii to Washington; and finally a helicopter flight from Washington to Camp David.38 President Reagan was waiting at the aircraft steps to greet her with a kiss on the cheek and a lift in his golf cart. ‘I sometimes thought I was directing Gone with the Wind’, commented Bernard Ingham.39
The Camp David discussions were difficult but ended in a considerable diplomatic success for Margaret Thatcher. After she had briefed the President on her positive view of Gorbachev, SDI dominated the agenda. ‘This was the first occasion on which I had heard President Reagan speaking about SDI’, she recalled. ‘He did so with passion. He was at his most idealistic.’40
This was a polite way of saying she thought he was wrong. Reagan had developed an optimistic view of SDI, believing it could eliminate all nuclear weapons and end the Cold War. As a scientist, Margaret Thatcher felt this was nonsense. She was in favour of further SDI research, but she feared that reliance on deployed SDI technology would undermine all other forms of nuclear deterrence, including Britain’s Trident. She argued long and hard to change the President’s mind, but with no success.
Charles Powell captured the tiring atmospherics: ‘I saw the President’s eyes stray towards the clock calculating how many more minutes to a Martini and lunch as she rampaged on about the finer details of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.’41 The official White House minutes suggest that the Martinis, even when they came, afforded no respite: ‘During the cocktail session before lunch, the President, Mrs Thatcher and Ambassador Price continued discussions at some length.’42
In the end, the length and perseverance of the Prime Minister’s arguments resulted in a breakthrough. Towards the end of the afternoon, she and Powell concocted a draft statement that she read out to the President. It consisted of four points:
The US and Western aim is to maintain balance: i.e. not achieve superiority, while taking account of Soviet developments.
SDI-related deployment, in view of treaty obligations, would be a matter for negotiations.
The overall aim is to enhance not undercut deterrence.
East–West negotiations should aim to achieve security with reduced levels of offensive systems on both sides.
Reagan accepted these points with almost casual nonchalance, saying he hoped ‘they would quell reports of disagreements between us’.43
The formula worked. The President noted in his diary he hoped, on ‘Star Wars’, that he ‘had eased some concerns she had’.44
The Prime Minister evidently felt she had secured a much bigger deal. She announced publicly that she had received assurances that the United States would not deploy SDI unilaterally and would not abandon deterrence. In the community of diplomats and nuclear weapons experts in NATO capitals there was considerable relief at Margaret Thatcher’s achievement over SDI. And probably in Moscow as well.
Three months later, the Prime Minister was back in Moscow for another funeral for another General Secretary – Konstantin Chernenko. He was succeeded after only thirteen months in the top job at the Kremlin by Mikhail Gorbachev. Margaret Thatcher had an hour with the new Soviet leader after the ceremony, which was twice as long a session as the appointment time given to any other VIP attending the funeral. At this second Gorbachev–Thatcher meeting, they did not do any substantial business together but their rapport continued to build, and she again relayed her favourable impressions of Gorbachev to the White House.
According to the US Secretary of State, James Baker, her assessment that the Soviet Union now had a completely new kind of leader had ‘a profound influence’ on the US plans for its strategy and summitry.45
Prompted by these positive reports on Mikhail Gorbachev, the United States began feeling its way to a better relationship with the Soviet Union. For all his public rhetoric about the ‘Evil Empire’, Reagan had been trying since the start of his Presidency to engage in private handwritten correspondence with Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. He was disappointed when these personal letters received only the most stilted of replies. ‘The trouble is, they keep dying on me’, he lamented in his ‘aw-shucks’ style to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver.46
Once Gorbachev was firmly installed in the Kremlin, Reagan reached out to him and arranged a US–Soviet summit in Geneva. There is no doubt that Margaret Thatcher’s positive views on Gorbachev helped to encourage the setting up of this meeting. President Reagan acknowledged this at the time and in his memoirs.
Immediately after his return from the Geneva summit, the President convened a meeting of the National Security Council. His opening words to the NSC were: ‘Maggie was right. We can do business with this man.’47
On the Gorbachev side of the summit, Margaret Thatcher had been a helpful interlocutor with her insistence to him that President Reagan was absolutely sincere in his idealistic quest for peaceful nuclear disarmament.
To both leaders her preliminary diplomacy was a positive influence in getting the Geneva summit off to a good start. Once Reagan and Gorbachev began meeting directly, the role played by the British Prime Minister inevitably diminished. Yet, throughout an important period of pre-summit diplomacy, Margaret Thatcher had seized her moment and her seat at the top table with the superpowers.
Between the Chequers lunch with Gorbachev in December 1984 and the Geneva summit of November 1985, she had been one of the most important players on the world stage. She was not the creator of the new chapter of US–Soviet relations, but she was an important catalyst in helping to bring it about so swiftly. There was still much more for her to do in both Washington and Moscow.
DIFFERENCES WITH REAGAN OVER SDI AND REYKJAVIK
Margaret Thatcher was at cross-purposes with Ronald Reagan over SDI for most of the 1980s. Their differences were a source of considerable mutual irritation. Nevertheless, they preserved a façade of agreement through some testing episodes. But by the time she came to write her memo
irs, Margaret Thatcher made a major historical U-turn on this issue. She asserted in 1993 that, ‘Ronald Reagan’s original decision on SDI was the single most important of his presidency … [it] was to prove central to the West’s victory in the Cold War.’48 She did not take this attitude while she was in power. The gap between her revisionism in hindsight and her view of SDI at the time needs an explanation.
Margaret Thatcher supported SDI so long as it was only confined to the testing laboratory. As a scientist she had little faith in SDI ‘Star Wars’ technology. As a strategist, she feared its deployment would wreck all other forms of deterrence, including Britain’s Trident, and leave Western Europe dangerously exposed to Soviet military expansionism. When she first tried to explain her anxieties to President Reagan, he was unsympathetic. Nevertheless, he quietened her down by agreeing to the reassuring statement issued from Camp David in December 1984. This bought time but not Margaret Thatcher’s silence. Knowing that the President was a true and total believer in the power of SDI to end the nuclear arms race, she returned to an attack on the roots of his ‘Star Wars’ faith. Having failed to move him in private, she embarked on the risky course of undermining his strategy in public.
An invitation to address a joint session of the US Congress on 20 February 1985 provided the opportunity for her manoeuvre. It took the form not of a full-frontal assault on SDI, but of a passionate defence of the existing arrangements for nuclear deterrence, which had kept the peace in Europe for the past forty years. The text for her speech was not drafted by the Foreign Office. It owed much to the contribution of the Prime Minister’s hawkish Downing Street voices, including Lord Chalfont, George Urban and Hugh Thomas. One telling passage ran:
Our task is not only to prevent nuclear war, but to prevent conventional war as well [applause]. No-one understood the importance of deterrence more clearly than Winston Churchill, when in his last speech to you he said: ‘Be careful above all things not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure and more than sure that other means of preserving peace are in your hands!’49
Most of the Senators and Congressmen present gave this cheer-leading for nuclear deterrence a standing ovation. But the White House was annoyed by it, and by her more specific criticisms of SDI at a meeting with the President the following day.
‘You know, she’s really missing the point’, Reagan said to his National Security Adviser, Robert ‘Bud’ McFarlane, after the discussion. ‘And she’s doing us a lot of damage with all this sniping about it.’50
Another burst of British sniper fire against SDI came from the Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, who made a speech in London warning of the dangers ‘in creating a new Maginot line of the 21st century in space’. The analogy, and the detailed critique of the ‘Star Wars’ technology that accompanied it, caused, in Howe’s words, ‘a transatlantic explosion’.51
The domestic part of the explosion erupted in No. 10 Downing Street where the Prime Minister was so furious with her Foreign Secretary that she telephoned President Reagan to apologise on his behalf. She was almost as furious with Charles Powell, who had fallen asleep while beginning to look through the draft of Howe’s speech on the plane coming back from Chernenko’s funeral. As a result, the speech was ‘cleared’ by No. 10 without ever having been read by the Prime Minister or her Private Secretary. Margaret Thatcher’s wrath at these sins of omission and commission was volcanic, but no one’s career was destroyed by the eruption.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this incident, the Prime Minister did not cease her barrage of veiled and not so veiled criticism of SDI. Speaking at an arms control seminar in Washington in July 1985, she delivered another stern warning that SDI would undermine the justification for nuclear defence in Europe. She repeated this argument at such length that even the President’s good-natured patience was sorely tried. ‘Boy, she’s a great talker, not a great listener’, he commented in an aside to the Director of the US Arms Control Agency, Kenneth Adelman.52
Over lunch after the seminar, Margaret Thatcher went so far in her expressions of concern about SDI that she received an unusual rebuff from President Reagan. She was once again repeating her anxieties that his dream of using the new technology to eliminate nuclear weapons would cause a new arms race in conventional weapons. ‘If you follow that logic to its implied conclusion’, she told him, ‘you expose a dramatic conventional imbalance, do you not? And would we not have to restore that balance at considerable expense?’ Reagan stared straight back into her eyes and replied, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I imagined’.53
It was clear to those present that a magisterial rebuke had been delivered to the British Prime Minister by the American President. As ‘Bud’ McFarlane recounted: ‘It was rather an awkward silence there while both sides absorbed the weight of what had just been exchanged. I think the staffs of both sides agreed that this had better never get out.’54
The tension created by this exchange between the two leaders took some efforts to dispel. A few hours after the rebuff from Reagan, McFarlane called on Margaret Thatcher in the British Embassy. No record of their conversation is available, but the surrounding correspondence with its cryptic reference to secrecy (‘I shall of course treat what you said with the greatest possible discretion’, wrote the Prime Minister) suggested that a high-level deal was struck.
According to historian Richard Aldous, ‘McFarlane had bought Thatcher’s silence’.55 He persuaded her to keep her doubts about SDI to herself in the run-up to the Geneva summit. This would also keep Reagan’s conservative critics quiescent in Washington and preserve the unity of the Western alliance in the eyes of the Soviets.
As a reward, McFarlane suggested that British companies might be able to win $300 million a year’s worth of SDI research contracts. ‘You know, there may be something in this after all’, was Margaret Thatcher’s response to this enticing prospect.56 However, the end result was that UK firms won a disappointingly smaller slice of the SDI research budget, worth around $40 million in total.
There was one further and far greater disappointment for Britain’s Prime Minister related to SDI, although paradoxically it paved the way to the Cold War breakthrough, which she had been hoping for. The moment of maximum distress came when Margaret Thatcher was briefed on the progress of the second Reagan–Gorbachev summit while it was being held at Reykjavik on the weekend of 11–12 October 1986.
‘My own reaction when I heard how far the Americans had been prepared to go was as if there had been an earthquake beneath my feet’, was how she described her response to the news from the summit.57 Her Chief Whip, Michael Jopling, who was with her in the room when she received the briefing, ‘never saw her more incandescent’.58
The cause of this near-panic was Margaret Thatcher’s discovery that Ronald Reagan had offered over a ten-year period to eliminate all nuclear weapons from the US arsenal. He was willing to dispense with America’s nuclear bombs, cruise missiles, intermediate missiles and submarine-launched missiles – which would inevitably have included Britain’s US-built Trident system. Mikhail Gorbachev had provisionally agreed to carry out the same elimination process from the Soviet nuclear forces. But just when this momentous disarmament deal was about to be struck, Gorbachev inserted a new requirement. He insisted that SDI should be confined to laboratory testing, and must never be deployed. Reagan refused to drop his pet project. As both leaders dug in their heels, the Reykjavik summit ended in an impasse with no agreement.
As she absorbed the news of the concessions the Americans had been prepared to make, Margaret Thatcher’s views on what had so nearly happened at Reykjavik became apocalyptic. ‘The whole thing was shaking’, she recalled. ‘We hadn’t a defence anymore. I thought, “My goodness me, I must get over”.’59 Two weeks later she was back again with President Reagan in Camp David seeking his reassurance.
At the time of this meeting, Reagan was at the lowest point of his Presidency, due to the Iran–Contra scandal that threatened to become another Water
gate. Margaret Thatcher proved to be the staunchest of the President’s defenders. ‘I believe implicitly in the President’s total integrity on that subject’,60 she told a Washington press conference at a time when no one else was willing to give such an endorsement. Reagan was delighted by the Prime Minister’s support, which made it even easier for him to give her what she wanted.
Margaret Thatcher had come to Camp David in order to ensure that Britain’s Trident programme would go ahead, and that the United States would continue to back NATO’s policy of nuclear deterrence. She was successful in both objectives, although at a lower level of commitment than she wanted. In the short term, the White House agreed the joint statement she had sought. It gave her the ideal headline in the following day’s Sunday Times: ‘Thatcher Wins Reagan Pledge to Sell Trident.’61
But she admitted to ‘a gnawing anxiety’62 that sooner or later US policy might revert to the kind of Reykjavik horse-trading that could leave Britain stranded outside America’s nuclear umbrella of protection.
Within the priesthood of nuclear warfare specialists, Margaret Thatcher’s obsession with maintaining a high level of nuclear deterrence looked exaggerated. For, in reality, the concept had never been seriously threatened. To those who understood its technical complexities, SDI was never likely to be deployed, and unlikely to bring about the abolition of all other nuclear weapons. ‘Star Wars’ technology was for starry-eyed believers in a futuristic world, which existed only in a few people’s imaginations in 1986. Yet the most devoted of these imaginative visionaries was the President of the United States. His simple faith led him to call Gorbachev’s bluff with absolute conviction at Reykjavik. And the bluff worked magnificently.
SDI had only ever been a cosmic gambling chip. But because Reagan played it so convincingly, the Soviet Union realised they had lost the game disastrously. After Reykjavik, Gorbachev knew his country could not afford to join an arms race in space. His dialogue with Margaret Thatcher had been instrumental in persuading the Soviet leader that Reagan meant business both in his toughness over SDI and in his sincere desire for meaningful disarmament. Partly by chance, and partly by the force of her personality, Margaret Thatcher had been the most effective intermediary between East and West at a pivotal moment in history.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 62
