There is No Alternative (40 page)

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:

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:

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.