Richard Aldous of Bard College has a newly relevant book sure to be of interest to readers of National Review. A history of the personal diplomacy between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship, published in 2012, argues against the idea of constant affection between these ideological brethren. Indeed, the two statesmen disagreed beginning in Reagan's first year as president, and clashed regularly until his final year in office. What's striking to a reader of this elegantly written history is the importance of their debates.
President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher argued about national sovereignty. When the Argentine junta invaded the Falkland Islands in the spring of 1982, the Reagan administration did not want Thatcher's government to retaliate militarily. The Argentines were a useful ally in America's fight against Latin American Communism. Reaganites such as U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick did not want to lose an anti-Communist partner over a few islands in the South Atlantic. Thatcher, however, saw Argentina's aggression for what it was: a direct challenge to British sovereignty that could not be appeased. Britain recaptured the islands. Thatcher's popularity spiked.
A year later, when a Communist putsch overthrew the government of Grenada, sovereignty was the issue once more. The Reagan administration prepared an invasion and regime change to stop Cuba and the USSR from establishing a beachhead on the small Caribbean island. Thatcher was incensed, not least because Grenada is a realm of the British Commonwealth whose sovereign is Queen Elizabeth II. Reagan went ahead anyway — solidifying his own political position and leading Thatcher to question just how much she could count on the United States.
The two leaders had different conceptions of deterrence. When Reagan introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the spring of 1983, Thatcher, who held a degree in chemistry from Oxford, was skeptical. She demanded technical briefings in the science of ballistic-missile defense. She also worried that SDI would overthrow the principle of mutual assured destruction, which had deterred the Soviet Union from using its conventional forces to cross Fulda Gap into Western Europe.
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