“We had entered a dangerous phase,” Thatcher recalls in her memoirs. 194 One week after the downing of KAL 007, Thatcher convened a meeting of top-flight Sovietologists at Chequers. She asked the experts to present papers on the state of the Soviet Union’s economy, its military doctrine, its power structure.
A recently declassified memorandum, written by J. L. Bullard of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), summarizes the papers presented at the seminar. Overwhelmingly, the participants predicted no change of course in the Soviet Union: “The general message seems to be that the Soviet leaders do indeed face problems in a number of areas, but not on such a scale as to compel them to change course drastically, still less change the system.” This is underlined in the document, although it is not clear by whom—perhaps by Thatcher. One of the experts argued that “the enormous Soviet effort on defense is a dynamo rather than a millstone in the Soviet economy.” There was, apparently, one—and only one—dissenting view among the British specialists: “In a class by itself, it seems to me, is Michael Bourdeaux’s paper, with its conclusion that we may one day see the collapse of the Soviet system from within.”195
A second FCO memorandum recorded that the meeting considered “whether British policy should aim at, in the words used by the U.S. Secretary of State on 15 June, 1983, ‘the gradual evolution of the Soviet system towards a more pluralistic political and economic system.’ The view was reached that the realistic possibilities of change in the Soviet system were such that it was very doubtful whether in the foreseeable future any substantially greater diversity could be expected.”196
“I liked her immediately,” Reagan recalled. “She was warm, feminine, gracious and intelligent and it was evident from our first words that we were soul mates . . . ” (Courtesy of the family of Srdja Djukanovic)
A final FCO memorandum argued that if anything, the Soviet economy was stronger than the seminar’s participants reckoned. “Despite its difficulties, the Soviet economy continues to grow . . . it remains immensely rich in natural resources . . . the Soviet Union has a low debt ratio and remains an attractive proposition as far as the Western banks are concerned.” The author agreed with the consensus view: Attempting to destabilize Eastern Europe would be profoundly unwise. “Policies aimed at destabilization would probably provoke the Stalinist reflex . . . I see little prospect for Finlandi-sation . . . I would expect tension and periodic disturbances but no real change in the foreseeable future . . . I also share [skepticism] about the possibility of reformism in Eastern Europe having an influence on the Soviet Union itself . . . The expectation is of minor reform not major change in the Soviet Union.”197
Let me translate these memos: Reagan is nuts. Don’t listen to him.
The experts at Chequers were hardly endorsing a minority view. In the year Margaret Thatcher came to power, the Soviet Union appeared to be not only invincible, but ascendant. In 1978, while the Western economies were still suffering the crippling aftereffects of the 1973 oil price shock, the Soviet Union, owing to its rich Siberian oil resources, had become the world’s largest oil producer. Backed by the Soviets, the North Vietnamese had expelled American troops. Backed by the Soviets, the Sandinistas had overthrown the Nicaraguan government. Backed by the Soviets, communists had seized power in Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, Ethiopia, and South Yemen.
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear parity with the United States, then surpassed it with the deployment of the SS-18 missile, known in the West, aptly enough, as Satan. The Satan, it was believed, was so powerful and accurate that if used in a first strike, it might well succeed in destroying the American retaliatory capacity. The West’s strategic doctrine had until then been based upon the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction. There were now serious doubts that the destruction would be mutual.
The Soviets had placed Satan missiles in Eastern Europe, targeting Western capitals. The Warsaw Pact enjoyed a massive superiority in conventional forces over NATO. The Soviet Navy was shadowing the U.S. sixth fleet. West Germany was pursuing Ostpolitik in the assumption that accommodation with the East was the only alternative.
The year of Margaret Thatcher’s election, 1979, was also the year in which Iranian revolutionaries seized fifty-two American hostages and paraded them, blindfolded, on television. Americans tied yellow ribbons around their trees. Observing this American reaction—and drawing the obvious conclusions—the Soviet Union one month later invaded Afghanistan.
The Central Intelligence Agency, in that year, summarized the situation thus:In part because of their own perceptions of declining American power, in part because of more objective considerations, the West Europeans and Japanese increasingly believe that the United States is losing international political-military position to the Soviet Union. For evidence, they point particularly to the narrowing of the strategic gap and to the activity of Soviet proxies in Africa and Southeast Asia. To some degree that development has drawn the allies closer to the United States, because of their heightened fear of the USSR. But it has also led to increased attention, especially in West Germany, to a possible long-term need to forge an independent accommodation with the Soviets . . . the United States’ influence over its allies is clearly declining . . . 198
It was against this backdrop that Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, insisting that contrary to all appearance and belief, the Soviet Union was not only weak but mortally vulnerable. Because he was right, it is often forgotten that this point of view at the time marked him as a lunatic. Reagan, remarked former CIA director Robert Gates, “seemed not to doubt that he could change the decade-long trend of Soviet ascendancy. Reagan, nearly alone, truly believed in 1981 that the Soviet system was vulnerable, not in some vague, long-range historical sense, but right then” (my emphasis).199
From 1947, when the American diplomat George Kennan published his famous Foreign Policy article under the pseudonym X, to 1981, the year of Reagan’s inauguration, American policy toward the Soviet Union had been containment, not rollback. Generally, American policymakers viewed communism as a kind of incurable cancer, one that with costly, painful, and permanent therapy might at best be prevented from metastasizing.
Obviously, the price of the Cold War had been extremely high. Communism had claimed at least a hundred million lives.200 But the doctrine of containment had been a success in the most critical sense: There had not been a conventional war between the superpowers, nor had there been a nuclear exchange. It is easy to see why Reagan’s insistence that it was time to move beyond containment and MAD—indeed, that it was time to win the Cold War—provoked, to put it mildly, dissent and alarm among America’s allies.201
Reagan’s rollback strategy rested upon the very policies the experts convened at Chequers said would not work: destabilizing Eastern Europe, particularly by supporting the Solidarity movement in Poland; drying up sources of Soviet hard currency; stressing the Soviet economy by accelerating the arms race; and raising the cost of Soviet military adventures by supporting anti-Soviet forces in the world’s proxy conflicts. These policies were accompanied by a rhetoric of unprecedented bluntness: The Soviet Union was evil. It would be consigned to the ash heap of history.
Publicly, Thatcher—and only Thatcher, among the leaders of the world—supported Reagan unwaveringly, despite massive domestic and international pressure to do otherwise. “I regarded it as my duty,” wrote Thatcher, “to do everything I could to reinforce and further President Reagan’s bold strategy to win the Cold War, which the West had been slowly, but surely losing.”202
Thatcher’s support for Reagan, and the intimacy of their friendship, have been so widely remarked that it is easy, retrospectively, to take as given the robust Anglo-American front during the years leading to the Soviet Union’s collapse. It was neither given nor even likely. When Thatcher came to power, American analysts did not expect her to throw her weight behind the Atlantic alliance. In October 1979, the CIA declared:The “special relationship” between the United St
ates and the United Kingdom . . . has lost much of its meaning. The United States is no longer closer to Britain than to its other major allies. Even if the old relationship still existed it would not mean a great deal, given the United Kingdom’s now largely secondary political, economic and military role in the EC, NATO and the Third World . . . Insofar as the Thatcher government is interested in expanding that role, it apparently intends to do so more in an EC than an Atlantic framework.203
Every word of this analysis was wrong. Within the next decade, the relationship between the United States and Britain would become closer—far closer—than it had been at any point since the Second World War. Britain would prove itself a prime mover in NATO, a prime spoiler in Europe, and a resurgent economic giant.
Had the Labour Party been in power, the story would have been entirely different. Throughout this period, the Labour Party was demanding unilateral nuclear disarmament and the closure of American military bases in Britain. “It’s my total objective,” said Thatcher, “to stop . . . anyone who shares that kind of view from ever getting in power.”204 But had Britain lost in the Falklands—and remember, it was a very close-run thing—Labour would in all likelihood have come to power, no matter what Thatcher’s total objective.
It is unimaginable that Neil Kinnock would have had the rapport with Reagan that Thatcher did, or the influence upon him that Thatcher had. Thatcher and Reagan adored each other. They were natural ideological allies. Their relationship was, moreover, colored in romantic hues—he evoked in her feminine admiration; she inspired his chivalry. If you study photographs of Reagan and Thatcher together, you simply can’t miss this. There is a reason the satirists of the era depicted the two as lovers. Reagan was portrayed, for example, carrying Thatcher in his arms in a parody of the famous poster from Gone with the Wind. “The most EXPLOSIVE love story ever . . . She promised to follow him to the end of the earth. He promised to organize it!” The poster was funny precisely because Reagan and Thatcher looked perfectly natural in that pose—she was always staring at him in that Oh, Rhett, when I knew I loved you, I ran home to tell you, oh, darling, darling! way, and Reagan did always seem to be on the verge of saying, I love you, Scarlett. In spite of you and me and the whole silly world going to pieces around us, I love you! I am not saying that the slightest impropriety ever passed between them. Of course not. I am just saying that this was a friendship not only between a president and a prime minister, but between a man and a woman.
This could hardly be said of Reagan and Kinnock. In 1984, Kinnock visited the United States. He requested a meeting with Rea-gan. Although it was customary for American presidents to meet the leader of the British Opposition, Reagan hesitated. “I suspect you would not be keen to meet with him,” wrote National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane. “In recent years the Labour party has taken stances inimical to our interests, particularly on nuclear, defense, and broader East-West issues. I doubt that even your persuasive powers will change his views.” Kinnock, according to a briefing prepared by the State Department, “has made no secret of his opposition to the Administration’s policies.” He had recently told a visiting congressional delegation that his party was not anti-American: It was just anti-Reagan.205 These are not the views from which close friendships are forged.
“In a way,” says John Hoskyns of Thatcher, “she trail-blazed for Reagan. I mean, Reagan came in, and he followed Carter, and the Carter years were abysmal, really. America was suffering, in a less extreme form, from the same fashionable left-of-center waffle that we had been doing in spades, for years. And everywhere there was the sort of feeling of, Well, you know, that’s not the future. Market economics is just nineteenth-century fantasy. It no longer has a part in the modern world, it’s not like that. But Thatcher was already beginning to show that the impossible was happening—to the worst basket case of all in the civilized world.”
Thatcher’s economic example was important. But its effects were not immediately visible. Well before the impossible began to happen in Britain itself, Thatcher played a crucial diplomatic role abroad. Repeatedly, Thatcher supported Reagan publicly even when she disagreed with him privately, often at high political cost to herself. Her support for Reagan went well beyond what was required to shore up the NATO alliance. Without consulting her full cabinet, for example, she allowed American planes to use British bases to stage their raid against Libya. Likewise, she refused publicly to express reservations about Reagan’s intervention in El Salvador.
Mr. Flannery: Will the Prime Minister turn her mind for a moment away from the fairy tales of Milton Friedman to the serious situation in El Salvador? Although Conservative Members seem to think that this is a joke, will she use her waning influence with President Reagan, who is twirling his atomic pistols in front of the world, and tell him that the last time that the Americans intervened in a small country, by the name of Vietnam, they got a bloody nose, and that the whole world hopes that they will not intervene in El Salvador but will leave the people of that country to determine their own fate, as they are eminently capable of doing if they are left to their own devices, against the brutal tyranny that exists there at the moment?
The Prime Minister: I do not think that the way in which the hon. Gentleman puts his comments is a classic example of how to win friends or influence anyone.206
When faced with the choice between strengthening Britain’s ties to Europe and strengthening its ties to the United States, Thatcher did not even try to find a tactful middle ground:Interviewer: I’ve heard it said by a lot of people that President Reagan appears to be wanting to be seen to be very strong militarily, yet some people have the thoughts that in Europe the feeling is just a little bit softer, with not quite as much determination as President Reagan has. Where do you stand between the two trains of thought?
Prime Minister: Oh, absolutely four-square with President Reagan.207
Giant protests erupted in mainland Europe and Britain against the United States’ plans to deploy cruise and Pershing missiles in response to the Soviet deployment of the Satan. This antinuclear sentiment blossomed into a mass movement financed by the Soviet Union and supported, in Britain, by the Labour Party. “All over Europe,” recalled Reagan, “the peace marchers demonstrated to prevent Western missiles from being installed for their defense, but they were silent about the Soviet missiles targeted against them! Again, in the face of these demonstrations, Margaret never wavered.”208
The first cruise missiles arrived at Greenham Common in December 1983, inaugurating a permanent state of protest at the U.S. air base. Thatcher scolded the protesters: “We are very fortunate to have someone else’s weapons stationed on our soil to fight those targeted on us.”209 Although this was perfectly true, she sounded to her detractors—as she so often did—rather like Mr. Bumble informing Oliver Twist that he was very fortunate to have gruel every day with an onion twice a week.
Mr. Faulds: Reverting to an earlier supplementary question on the subject of theater nuclear weapons, will the right hon. Lady contemplate where that intended theater lies? Will each European Government be free to choose or to veto the push on that final button by that incoherent cretin, President Reagan?
The Prime Minister: I greatly deplore the discourtesy and total futility of the hon. Gentleman’s remarks.
Mr. Faulds: Answer the question!
The Prime Minister: They do not help when the security of Europe depends upon the support of the United States of America. With regard to the theater nuclear weapons, the SS–20s are targeted on Europe, including this country.210
There was one notable moment of dissent: When in 1983 the United States invaded Grenada, a member of the British Commonwealth, without first notifying the British government, Thatcher was furious. She nonetheless held her tongue in public, even while expressing her extreme displeasure with Reagan in private.
Mr. Kinnock: Is it not a fact . . . that the relationship that was said to exist between the right hon. Lady and the President turned out
to be not so special? In the chaos and humiliation of the Grenada affair, will the right hon. Lady at least take the opportunity of adopting a new deportment in world affairs and, as a consequence, demonstrate a greater independence in furthering British interests and working for peace throughout the world?
The Prime Minister: When two nations are friends each owes the other its own judgment. That does not mean that the other in either case is compelled to accept it. It would hardly be a friendship unless one could tender advice to another country—
Mr. Foulkes: And have it ignored!
The Prime Minister:—and have it either accepted or rejected. We do not run the sort of Warsaw pact organization that the right hon. Gentleman—[Interruption]
Mr. Kinnock: I would be the last to suggest the rendering of any alliances, but when the judgment of this Government is apparently utterly cast aside and trampled on by our ally, what obligation does the right hon. Lady then have?
The Prime Minister: It follows from what the right hon. Gentleman has said that, as the United States and Britain are allies, we would always have had to accept any advice that the United States gave us. Indeed, it follows that we would not be free to accept or reject the advice of the United States. However, at the beginning of the Falklands affair we did not ask the United States whether we should recapture the Falklands. We took our own decisions.
By publicly supporting Reagan when he was most isolated abroad, Thatcher won Reagan’s trust and earned his gratitude. Ultimately, and in large part owing to her sheer, dogged loyalty, her influence on Reagan came to exceed that of most of his cabinet members. That influence proved pivotal when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.
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