The Downing Street Years (55 page)

From the Netherlands I flew on to West Germany, where I visited British forces. On Wednesday afternoon (21 September) I arrived in Bonn for talks and dinner with Chancellor Kohl. He and I discussed the approach to the Athens summit. I told him that it would be deplorable if the impetus he had given to reform at Stuttgart were now lost. So I was relieved when Herr Kohl said that sorting out the CAP and the system of financing the Community must take priority over new policies. He also told me that the European Community was ‘politically essential to Germany’ but it was ‘no good having the Community as a roof over Germany if the roof was leaking’ — an interesting metaphor, I thought; and anyone dealing with the European Community should pay careful attention to metaphors. We in Britain were inclined to minimize their significance — whether about ‘roofs’ or ‘trains’ — and to concentrate on the practicalities — mending the leaking roof, in Chancellor Kohl’ phrase. We had to learn the hard way that by agreement to what were apparently empty generalizations or vague aspirations we were later held to have committed ourselves to political structures which were contrary to our interests. But this is to anticipate a little.

However, I was already beginning to feel — I did so increasingly as the years went by — that there was an imbalance in western diplomacy. European Community heads of government and ministers met regularly, drawn together initially by Community problems, but at the same time discussing wider international issues. By contrast, there was not enough contact and understanding between the European countries and our transatlantic allies in NATO — the United States and Canada. I hoped that my visit to Canada and the United States at the end of September would do something to put this right.

The Canadian visit was, in fact, made on their initiative. The sensitive question of the patriation of the Canadian Constitution from the Westminster Parliament was now behind us.
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My visit was an opportunity to emphasize the value of trade and investment links and, still more important, to try to persuade Canadians to take a larger and more vigorous part in the western alliance than they had under their present Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau. It was common knowledge that Pierre Trudeau and his Liberal Government — who sometimes seemed more interested in the politics of the Third World than in the great East-West issues — were extremely unpopular. But I would also be meeting the Conservative prime ministers of the provinces of Ontario and Alberta, as well as the new Conservative leader at federal level, Brian Mulroney, who had just been elected to the Canadian Parliament and who was firm favourite to replace Pierre Trudeau as Prime Minister at the next election.

I flew into Ottawa on the evening of Sunday 25 September and had supper at the High Commission, one of the great historic buildings in Ottawa. Two of the paragraphs of the speech I was to deliver the following day to the Canadian House of Commons were in French and a French teacher had been specially laid on when I arrived so that I could get my pronunciation just right and avoid international incidents.

The following morning I had talks with Pierre Trudeau and his Cabinet. East-West issues provided the main point of contention, as I had thought they would. Mr Trudeau’ line was that technicians had taken over arms control negotiations from the politicians, and that this was why they were getting nowhere. I did not agree. After all, disarmament talks were bound to be highly technical: if we got the
technicalities wrong we would be in trouble. However, Mr Trudeau developed his theme, arguing that the shooting down of the South Korean Airliner by the Soviets — with the loss of Canadian lives — on 1 September also demonstrated the dangers when politicians were not in command. He understood that the aircraft had been shot down on the orders of a local military commander without reference to Moscow. I replied that what this really showed was that the Soviet command structure and rules of engagement were unsound, because these should not have allowed an aircraft to be shot down without political direction. What liberal leftists like him seemed unable to grasp was that such acts of brutality as the shooting down of a civilian aircraft were by no means uncharacteristic of the communist system itself.

Later that morning I had a private meeting with Mr Trudeau. We discussed international affairs — Hong Kong, China, Belize — but most interesting for me was his impression of Mikhail Gorbachev, of whom I had heard but whom I did not yet know. Mr Gorbachev had visited Canada earlier in the year, under the pretext of examining Canada’ agricultural achievements but really with a view to discussing long term security questions. Pierre Trudeau had found him sticking to the conventional line as regards the INF negotiations, but without the blinkered hostility which characterized the other Soviet leaders. Mr Gorbachev had apparently been prepared to argue and make at least verbal concessions. I did not at this time foresee the importance of Mr Gorbachev for the future. The conversation served mainly to confirm my view that we must persuade the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, to visit the West. How were we to make a proper assessment of the Soviet leaders if we did not have personal contact with them? Still more important, how were we to persuade them to see further than their own propaganda if we never showed them what the West was really like?

After lunch I had my first meeting with Brian Mulroney. Mr Mulroney was undergoing that most misleading of experiences — a political honeymoon. He was charming and charismatic but he lacked any real political experience. It was to his credit that he fully realized this and at his request I spent most of our time talking about my own experience of Opposition and government. Brian Mulroney and I were to become good friends, though we were very different sorts of politician and were to have some serious disagreements. As Leader of the Progressive Conservatives I thought he put too much stress on the adjective as opposed to the noun.

The speech I delivered to the Canadian Parliament that afternoon went very well. It was a more powerful defence of values and principles
than they were used to hearing from their own Government and was interrupted by frequent applause. Apart from one or two MPs, I received a standing ovation which included members of the Diplomatic Corps. This itself provided an interesting vignette of attitudes behind the Iron Curtain: the Soviet, Czech and Bulgarian Ambassadors remained rooted to their seats, while the Hungarian and the Pole rose enthusiastically to join the applause.

That evening a dinner was given for me by Mr Trudeau in Toronto. A problem I was to find throughout this visit first surfaced acutely on this occasion. The dinner was preceded by a walkabout through a large crowd of Liberal Party supporters and the guests at the dinner itself seemed similarly partisan, though very welcoming. Although it was polite and friendly, Mr Trudeau’ speech emphasized the political differences between us. As he spoke, I took notes and used these as the basis of my off-the-cuff reply which took the form of a forthright defence of free enterprise. This brought cheers from the back of the hall though, as one of my party remarked, whether these came from Conservatives who had infiltrated the gathering or from Liberals who had been converted was unclear.

From Canada I flew to Washington for a meeting with President Reagan. Overall, the President’ domestic political position was strong. In spite of the difficulties which the US budget deficit was causing, the American economy was in remarkably good shape. It was growing faster with markedly less inflation than when he came into office and there was widespread appreciation of this. As he himself used to say: ‘now that it is working, how come they don’t call it Reaganomics any more?’ The President had also set his imprint on East-West relations. The Soviets were now definitely on the defensive in international relations. They were the ones who would have to decide how to react to the forthcoming deployment by NATO of intermediate-range nuclear weapons. And they were in the dock as a result of the shooting down of the Korean Airliner. In Central America the Government of El Salvador which the United States had been backing against communist insurgency was looking stronger. Perhaps only in the Middle East had the Administration’ policy not proved even a qualified success. Arab-Israeli peace talks were unlikely to be resumed and there was a growing danger of the US and its allies becoming irrevocably sucked into the turbulent politics of the Lebanon. The President had yet to announce whether he would stand for a second term, but I thought and hoped that he would and it looked as if he would win.

Our discussion that morning and over the lunch which followed
covered a wide canvas. The President was optimistic about events in Central America. As he put it, El Salvador had not been in the news for a long time — because the Government there was winning and so the American media were deprived of their nightly stories told from the viewpoint of the guerillas. I raised the question of the US resuming the supply of arms to Argentina, telling him that a decision to do this would simply not be understood in Britain. The President said that he was aware of that, but there would be great pressure for the resumption of arms supplies if a civilian regime were established in Buenos Aires.

I also took the opportunity to explain our opposition, which hitherto the Americans had always supported, to the inclusion of the British and French independent nuclear deterrents in the arms talks between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet insistence on the inclusion of our deterrents was simply a device to divert attention from the American proposal for deep reductions in strategic nuclear weapons. From the point of view of Britain, our deterrent constituted an irreducible minimum, but it was only 2.5 per cent of the Soviet strategic arsenal. I repeated what I had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that morning: the inclusion of the British deterrent would logically mean that the United States could not have parity with the Soviet Union. Would that really be acceptable to the United States? Or if, say, the French decided to increase their nuclear weapons, would the United States really be prepared to cut its by an equivalent amount? The President seemed to take my point, which I found reassuring. I for my part was able to reassure him as regards the timetable for deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. He had been concerned to learn that the crucial debate on this matter in the Bundestag had been delayed. He had no doubt about the firmness of Chancellor Kohl but he was not so sure about some of those around him. He was convinced that the whole Soviet strategy was still aimed at preventing deployment. I said that he should be in no doubt that Britain would deploy the intermediate-range nuclear missiles as planned, and I believed that West Germany would do the same.

However, our discussion turned on the strategy we should pursue towards the Soviet Union generally over the years ahead. I had been giving a good deal of thought to this matter and had discussed it with the experts at a Chequers seminar.
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I began by saying that we had to make the most accurate assessment of the Soviet system and the
Soviet leadership — there was plenty of evidence available about both subjects — so as to establish a realistic relationship: whatever we thought of them, we all had to live on the same planet. I congratulated the President on his speech to the UN General Assembly after the shooting down of the Korean Airliner and said how right he was to insist that despite this outrage the arms control negotiations in Geneva should continue. The President agreed that now was not the time to isolate ourselves from the Soviet Union. When the USSR failed to prevent NATO’ INF deployment they might start to negotiate seriously. Like me, he had clearly been considering the way in which we should deal with the Soviets once that happened.

The President argued that there were two points on which we had to form a judgement. First, the Russians seemed paranoid about their own security: did they really feel threatened by the West or were they merely trying to keep the offensive edge? The second question related to the control of Soviet power itself. He had always assumed that in the Soviet Union the Politburo controlled the military. But did the fact that the first public comments on the Korean Airliner incident had come from the military indicate that the Politburo was now dominated by the generals? As regards negotiation with the Soviets, we should never forget that the main reason why they were at the negotiating table in Geneva at all was the build-up of American defences. They would never be influenced by sweet reason. However, if they saw that the United States had the will and the determination to build up its defences as far as necessary, the Soviet attitude might change because they knew they could not keep up the pace. He believed that the Russians were now close to the limit in their expenditure on defence: their internal economic difficulties were such that they could not substantially increase the proportion of their resources devoted to the military. The United States, on the other hand, had the capacity to double its military output. The task was to convince Moscow that the only way it could remain equal was by negotiations because they could not afford to compete in weaponry for very much longer. The President recalled a cartoon which had Mr Brezhnev saying to a Russian general, ‘I liked the arms race better when we were the only ones in it.’

Now that the Soviet system has crumbled along the lines he envisaged, his words seem prophetic. It may be that one reason why President Reagan and I made such a good team was that, although we shared the same analysis of the way the world worked, we were very different people. He had an accurate grasp of the strategic picture but left the tactical detail to others. I was conscious that we must
manage our relations with the communists on a day-to-day basis in such a way that events never got out of control. This was why throughout my discussion with the President I kept on coming back to the need to consider precisely how we should deal with the Soviets when they faced up to reality and returned to the negotiating table in a more reasonable frame of mind.