escape was to try to convince the Americans that retaliation would be counterproductive. After hasty consultation she sent back a holding reply asking for more detail about intended targets, warning of the risk of civilian casualties and spelling out the danger that the United States would be seen to be in breach of international law unless the action could plausibly be justified under Article 51 of the UN Charter as ‘self-defence’.
The next day she held more
The Foreign Office were whole-heartedly against it, believing it would lead to all our embassies in the Middle East being burned, all our interests there ruined. But she knew it was the right thing to do and she just said, ‘This is what allies are for… If one wants help, they get help.’ It just seemed so simple to her.65
After the event, when the television news showed pictures of the dead and injured in the streets of Tripoli, the opposition parties once again condemned her slavish subservience to American wishes, asserting that British complicity in the bombing would expose British travellers to retaliation. Opinion polls showed 70 per cent opposition to the American action – ‘even worse than I had feared’, Mrs Thatcher wrote in her memoirs.66 But in public she was defiant. ‘It was inconceivable to me,’ she told the House of Commons, ‘that we should refuse United States aircraft and personnel the opportunity to defend their people.’67
One opponent who backed her was the SDP leader David Owen. In his view Mrs Thatcher not only displayed courage and loyalty, but demonstrated ‘one of the distinguishing features of great leadership – the ability to turn a blind eye to… legal niceties’. In the event, he believed, ‘the bombing did deter Libya… even though it was, by any legal standard, retaliation not self-defence and therefore outside the terms of the UN Charter’.68 In her memoirs Lady Thatcher too defended the bombing as having been justified by results. ‘It turned out to be a more decisive blow against Libyan-sponsored terrorism than I could ever have imagined… The much-vaunted Libyan counter-attack did not… take place… There was a marked decline in Libyan-sponsored terrorism in succeeding years.’69 There is a problem, here, however. The Thatcher – Owen defence is contradicted by the verdict of the Scottish court in the Netherlands which convicted a Libyan agent of the bombing of the US airliner over Lockerbie in 1989 which killed 289 people, the most serious terrorist outrage of the whole decade. Oddly, Mrs Thatcher fails to mention Lockerbie in her memoirs. This might be because it dents her justification of the American action in 1986. Alternatively it could be because she knew that the attribution of guilt to Libya – rather than Syria or the PLO – was false.[j]
But her principal reason at the time for backing the American raid was to show herself – by contrast with the feeble Europeans – a reliable ally; and in this she was triumphantly successful. Doubts raised in Washington by her reaction to Grenada were drowned in an outpouring of praise and gratitude. ‘The fact that so few had stuck by America in her time of trial,’ she wrote, ‘strengthened the “special relationship”.’71 She got her payback later that summer when Congress – after years of Irish-American obstruction – approved a new extradition treaty, closing the loophole which had allowed IRA terrorists to evade extradition by claiming that their murders were ‘political’. The Senate only ratified the new treaty after pressure from Reagan explicitly linking it to Britain’s support for the US action in April. Here was one clear benefit from the special relationship.
Defusing the Cold War
But these were side shows. The central purpose of the Atlantic alliance was to combat the Soviet Union; and it was here that the eight years of the Reagan – Thatcher partnership saw the most dramatic movement. The sudden breach of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union itself a couple of years later, were totally unpredicted and, even as the events unfolded, unexpected.Yet both Reagan and Mrs Thatcher had been working for exactly that result; and with hindsight it can be seen that their dual-track strategy in the mid- 1980s was staggeringly successful in bringing it about.
Though Mrs Thatcher had always been unrestrained in condemning the Soviet Union as a tyrannical force for evil in the world, she also believed – just because it was so repressive – that it must eventually collapse from lack of popular support and economic failure. She wanted to win the Cold War by helping it to do so: to encourage the Russian people and their subject populations in Eastern Europe to throw off the shackles by their own efforts and find freedom for themselves. She was very excited by the Solidarity movement in Poland, and disappointed when it seemed to peter out under the initial impact of General Jaruzelski’s martial law. Beneath her hatred of Communism she even retained traces of a wartime schoolgirl’s admiration for the heroic sacrifices of the Russian people in the struggle against Hitler. She never lost sight of the ordinary people behind the Iron Curtain.
At this time the Cold War appeared to be at its bleakest. NATO was in the process of stationing cruise missiles in Europe in response to Soviet deployment of SS-20s. Reagan – widely portrayed in Europe as a trigger- happy cowboy – had embarked on an expensive programme of modernising America’s nuclear arsenal, and in March 1983 made his famous speech in Orlando, Florida, labelling the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire… the focus of evil in the modern world’.72 The Russians had a propaganda field day denouncing his warmongering provocation; but just six months later they furnished graphic evidence of what he meant by shooting down a South Korean airliner which strayed accidentally into Soviet air space, with the loss of 269 lives.
Yet it was at this very moment that Mrs Thatcher started making overtures to the Soviet Union. Leonid Brezhnev had died in November 1982 and she was keen to establish early contact with the new General-Secretary, the younger but still stone-faced Yuri Andropov. She began to look seriously for openings after June 1983.
On 8 September she held an all-day seminar at Chequers with academic experts on the Soviet Union to look at the possibilities. An urgent consideration was the recognition that defence spending could not go on rising indefinitely.73 Britain (5.2 per cent) already spent a substantially higher proportion of GDP on defence than either France (4.2 per cent) or West Germany (3.4 per cent).74 Reagan might reckon that the US could always outspend the Soviets, but Mrs Thatcher did not have the same resources. She needed a fresh approach. In Washington three weeks later, therefore, and in her party conference speech a fortnight after that, she surprised her hearers by sounding a new note of peaceful coexistence based on realism: ‘We have to deal with the Soviet Union,’ she asserted. ‘We live on the same planet and we have to go on sharing it.’75
Her next step was to make her first trip as Prime Minister behind the Iron Curtain. In February 1984 she visited Hungary, selected as one part of the Soviet empire that was marginally freer than the rest, and had a long talk with the veteran leader, Janos Kadar, who welcomed her new concern for East – West cooperation and filled her in on the personalities to watch in the Kremlin. As usual, she passed on her impressions to the White House. ‘I am becoming convinced,’ she wrote to Reagan, ‘that we are more likely to make progress on the detailed arms control negotiations if we can establish a broader basis of understanding between East and West… It will be a slow and gradual process, during which we must never lower our guard. However, I believe that the effort has to be made.’76
A few days after she returned from Hungary, Andropov died. Mrs Thatcher immediately decided to attend his funeral. There she met not only his successor, the elderly and ailing Konstantin Chernenko; but also Mikhail Gorbachev, who was clearly the coming man. ‘I spotted him’, she claims in her memoirs, ‘because I was looking for someone like him.’77 In fact the Canadians had already spotted him – Trudeau had told her about Gorbachev the previous September; and nearer home Peter Walker had also met him and drawn attention to him before she went to Moscow.78 Even so, she did well to seize the initiative by inviting Gorbachev – at that time the youngest member of the Soviet politburo – to visit Britain. ‘Our record at picking winners had not been good,’ Percy Cradock reflected. But in Gorbachev’s case ‘we drew the right card’.79
Gorbachev came to Britain the following December. He was not yet Soviet leader, and Mrs Thatcher was accompanied by several of her colleagues; but over lunch at Chequers the two champions quickly dropped their
