Margaret Thatcher by The Editors of New Word City

Author:The Editors of New Word City [The Editors of New Word City]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612302065
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2013-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

“We Were Soul Mates”

Thatcher took further steps to restore Britain’s power and prestige on the world stage, in large part by building on her relationship with Ronald Reagan. The two had met several times before they each took office, and they liked each other right away. They were both self-made conservatives with passionately supportive spouses, gut-level politicians who operated from informed instinct. “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.” After Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, Thatcher was the first head of state to see him.

A partnership was formed, one that would have a profound effect on the Soviet Union and the Cold War. Both Thatcher and Reagan felt that the longstanding Western strategy of containment was failing as Moscow achieved nuclear parity, deployed SS-18 missiles aimed at Europe and the United States, and used proxies in Africa and southeast Asia to undermine America and its allies. But defying the opinion of most economists and even their own intelligence agencies, both also believed that the Soviet economy was overstretched by its military buildup and that Moscow was vulnerable.

Reagan believed the Cold War could be won during his presidency. One of the key components of his plan was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or Star Wars), a complex, ambitious, and expensive plan to stop incoming missiles using x-ray lasers, space-based weapons, and other untested science. SDI was derided by most of America’s allies, and Thatcher herself had misgivings. But she kept quiet, writing later: “I regarded it as my duty 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.” (In 1993, Bill Clinton scuttled SDI after the system failed its initial tests.)

Thatcher backed the NATO decision to base U.S. nuclear missiles in Western Europe, countering the threat of the Soviet SS-18s. She provoked and defied mass protests by antinuclear groups when she allowed the United States to place 160 cruise missiles at a Royal Air Force (RAF) base. She bought U.S. Trident nuclear submarines to replace the British Polaris, tripling Britain’s nuclear defenses. And in 1986, she defied public opinion again by permitting U.S. planes to use British bases to attack Libya in retaliation for the bombing of a Berlin discotheque.

The Reagan-Thatcher entente was based on their mutual loathing of communism. In 1976, she had declared, “The Russians are bent on world dominance . . . . They put guns before butter while we put just about everything before guns. They know that they are a superpower in only one sense - the military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms . . . .” For both Reagan and Thatcher, the Cold War was visceral - as she said to an African leftist leader, “I hate communists.”

Then she met Mikhail Gorbachev.

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