Paul Anderson, review of Reagan and Thatcher by Geoffrey Smith, Tribune, 4 January 1991
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were both crusading free-marketeers, friends of big business who won office on populist promises to reduce the burden of taxation, curb union power and cut government waste. Both were moral conservatives, enthusiasts for family values and law and order. And both were instinctive hardline cold warriors. It is hardly surprising that they hit it off when they first met in 1975, or that in office (except after the American invasion of Grenada in 1983) they enjoyed a personal and political relationship closer than normally exists between heads of government.
But did their closeness really make that much difference? Geoffrey Smith, a Times journalist and committed Atlanticist, believes it did, and in some ways he is right. His book shows that the "special relationship" between the president and the prime minister was crucial in securing American support for Britain in the Falklands war and was the main reason that Thatcher endorsed the American bombing of Libya in 1986. Thatcher was instrumental in persuading Reagan that Mikhail Gorbachev was a man with whom it was possible to do business, and she kept quiet after the British security services told her about the Irangate affair (an episode examined in some detail here).
Beyond this, however, it is arguable whether the ideological and personal affinity between Thatcher and Reagan had particularly far-reaching effects.
It certainly did little to stop the focus of American foreign and defence policy drifting away from Europe. On Star Wars, which Thatcher (like other West European leaders) saw as a dangerous threat to nuclear deterrence, the "special relationship" merely allowed her the opportunity to air her views and get a vague agreement from Reagan to limit research: the programme went ahead regardless, eventually to be cut drastically by Congress. Similarly, Thatcher's attempts to scupper a super-power deal on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces were brushed off by the Reagan administration, which was desperate for a disarmament agreement in the wake of Irangate.
Smith puts a different spin on all this, emphasising the seriousness with which Thatcher was taken in the United States even when she was at odds with the administration. "A Thatcher intervention with the president was always a powerful instrument in the ceaseless battle over policy," he writes in his conclusion. But Smith never lapses into sycophancy, and it is not necessary to agree with his analysis or assumptions to appreciate the work he has put into uncovering the history of Anglo-American relations in the eighties.
