The Downing Street Years (132 page)

They were not interested in compromise. My objections were heard in stony silence. I now had no support. I just had to say no.

In three years the European Community had gone from practical discussions about restoring order to the Community’s finances to grandiose schemes of monetary and political union with firm timetables but no agreed substance — all without open, principled public debate on these questions either nationally or in European fora. Now at Rome the ultimate battle for the future of the Community had been joined. But I would have to return to London to win another battle on which the outcome in Europe would depend — that for the soul of the Parliamentary Conservative Party.

CHAPTER XXVI

The international scene in 1987 and 1988 was not so very different to that before the general election. President Reagan was in the White House, continuing the defence policies which time and again had forced the Soviets to the negotiating table. Mr Gorbachev was proceeding with increasingly far-reaching reforms in the Soviet Union which, whether he liked it or not, would eventually open the floodgates of democracy, if not prosperity. The West’s strategy of defeating communism while ensuring our peace and security — a strategy in which I believed with a passionate intensity and that I sought to communicate when I went to eastern Europe — was working. Its very success would mean that new questions about Britain’s foreign relations and NATO’s defences would arise.

Yet even before this happened the familiar landscape changed in another way I did not foresee. I had breathed a sigh of relief when George Bush defeated his Democrat opponent in the US presidential election, for I felt that it ensured continuity. But with the new team’s arrival in the White House I found myself dealing with an Administration which saw Germany as its main European partner in leadership, which encouraged the integration of Europe without seeming to understand fully what it meant and which sometimes seemed to underestimate the need for a strong nuclear defence. I felt I could not always rely as before on American co-operation. This was of great importance at such a time. For by now — 1989 — the cracks in the eastern European communist system were widening into crevices and soon, wing by wing, the whole edifice fell away.

This welcome revolution of freedom which swept eastern Europe raised great strategic issues, above all in the West’s relations with the Soviet Union. (Indeed, what now was ‘the West’?) But I also saw at once that it had profound implications for the balance of power in Europe, where a reunified Germany would be dominant. There was a new and different kind of ‘German Question’ which had to be addressed openly and formally: I did so.

History teaches that dangers are never greater than when empires break up and so I favoured caution in our defence and security policy. Decisions about our security must, I argued, be made only after careful reflection and analysis of the nature and direction of future threats. Above all, they must be determined not by the desire to make a political impression by arms control ‘initiatives’ but by the need credibly to deter aggression.

For thinking and speaking like this I was mocked as the last Cold Warrior — and an unreconstructed Germano-phobe to boot. In fact, they said, I was a tiresome woman who might once have served a purpose but who just could not or would not move with the times. I could live with this caricature; there had been worse; but I also had no doubt that I was right, that the unexpected did happen and that sooner or later events would prove it. And, without claiming any foresight about the precise timing of the fall of communism, I did find my basic approach vindicated as 1990 wore on. This occurred in several ways.

First, Anglo-American relations suddenly lost their chill; indeed by the end they had hardly been warmer. The protectionism of that ‘integrated’ Europe, dominated by Germany, which the Americans had cheerfully accepted, even encouraged, suddenly started to arouse American fears and threaten to cost American jobs. But this change of heart was confirmed by the aggression of Saddam Hussein against Kuwait which shattered any illusion that tyranny had been everywhere defeated. The UN might pass its resolutions; but there would soon be a full-scale war to fight. Suddenly a Britain with armed forces which had the skills, and a government which had the resolve, to fight alongside America, seemed to be the real European ‘partner in leadership’.

Then again the full significance of the changes in eastern Europe began to be better understood. Having democratic states with market economies, which were just as ‘European’ as those of the existing Community, lining up as potential EC members made my vision of a looser, more open Community seem timely rather than backward. It also became clear that the courageous reforming leaders in eastern Europe looked to Britain — and to me because of my anti-socialist
credentials — as a friend who genuinely wanted to help them, rather than exclude them from markets (like the French) or seek economic domination (like the Germans). These eastern European states were — and are — Britain’s natural allies.

Further east in the USSR more disturbing developments made for a reassessment of earlier euphoric judgements about the prospects for the peaceful, orderly entrenchment of democracy and free enterprise. In the Soviet Union I had won the respect both of the embattled Mr Gorbachev and of his anti-communist opponents. I never underestimated the fragility of the movement for reform; that was why I spoke up for it — and for Mr Gorbachev — so forcefully in the West. Events now increasingly suggested that a far-reaching political crisis in the USSR might soon be reached. The implications of this for control over nuclear weapons and indeed the whole arsenal which the Soviet military machine had accumulated could not be ignored even by the most enthusiastic western disarmers. In short, the world of the ‘new world order’ was turning out to be a dangerous and uncertain place in which the conservative virtues of hardened Cold Warriors were again in demand. And so it was that in those last months and weeks of my premiership, while domestic political pressures mounted, I found myself once more at the centre of great international events with renewed ability to influence them in Britain’s interests and in accord with my beliefs.

On Thursday 16 July 1987 I flew into Washington to see President Reagan. Our political fortunes at this time could not have been more different. I had just won an election with a decisive majority, enhancing my authority in international affairs. By contrast my old friend and his Administration were reeling under the continuing ‘Irangate’ revelations. I found the President hurt and bemused by what was happening. Nancy was spending her time listening to the cruel and contemptuous remarks pouring out from the liberal media commentators and telling him what was being said, which made him still more depressed. Nothing wounds a man of integrity more than to find his basic honesty questioned. It made me very angry. I was determined to do what I could to help President Reagan ride out the storm. It was not just a matter of personal loyalty — though it was that too, of course: he also had eighteen months to serve as leader of the most
powerful country in the world and it was in all our interests that his authority be undiminished. So I set about using my interviews and public statements in Washington to get across this message. For example, I told the interviewer on CBS’s
Face the Nation:

Our embassy was besieged by telephone calls of congratulation. My remarks also touched another grateful audience. On Monday evening — after I arrived back in London — I received a telephone call from the President who wanted to thank me for what I had said. He was in a Cabinet meeting and at one point he put down the receiver and told me to listen. I heard loud and long applause from the Cabinet members.

My main business in Washington, though, had been to discuss the implications for our future defence of the INF treaty which would be signed by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev in December. I had always had mixed feelings about the INF ‘zero option’. On the one hand, it was a great success to have forced the Soviets to withdraw their SS-20 missiles by deploying our Cruise and Pershing. But, on the other, the removal of our intermediate-range land-based missiles would have two undesirable effects. First, it threatened precisely what Helmut Schmidt had wanted to avoid when he originally urged NATO to deploy them: namely the decoupling of Europe from NATO. It could then be argued, as in the 1970s, that in the last resort the United States would not use nuclear weapons to deter a conventional Warsaw Pact attack on Europe. This argument would boost the always-present tendency to German neutralism — a tendency which it had been the long-standing Soviet objective to magnify wherever possible. Second, the INF ‘zero option’ also cast doubt on — though as I always argued it did not in fact undermine — the NATO strategy of ‘flexible response’. That strategy depended on the ability of the West to escalate its response to Soviet aggression through each stage of conventional and nuclear weapons. The removal of the intermediate-range missiles might be argued to create a gap in that capability. It followed that NATO must have other nuclear weapons, stationed on German soil, which would be a credible deterrent and that those weapons be modernized and strengthened where necessary. It was this question — the avoidance of another ‘zero’ on Short-Range Nuclear Forces (SNF) — which was to divide the alliance so seriously in 1988–9.

The main points I now made to the President in Washington were the need to allocate submarine-launched Cruise missiles and
additional F1-11 aircraft to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe to compensate for the withdrawal of Cruise and Pershing and the need to resist pressure from the Germans for early discussion of reductions of SNF in Europe. I also wanted to see an upgraded and longer-range Follow-On to LANCE missile (FOTL) developed by the Americans and deployed by the mid-1990s, and a Tactical Air to Surface Missile (TASM) to replace our free-fall bombs. On these matters relating to the strengthening of our SNF the President and I saw eye to eye. Where I did agree with the Germans — but found myself unable to convince the Americans — was that I would have liked to retain the old German Pershing 1A ballistic missiles for the rest of their natural life (a few years), not including them as part of the INF package. But it was the future of SNF that to my mind was the most crucial element in our nuclear deterrence; and it certainly proved the most controversial.

Britain’s own security interests were closely bound up with US-Soviet arms negotiations. As regards SNF, these weapons were a vital protection for our troops stationed in Germany. Discussions between the two great powers about strategic nuclear weapons were also of direct interest to us insofar as they affected the position of our Trident nuclear deterrent. More generally, I never ceased to believe in the importance of nuclear weapons as a means of deterring conventional, not just nuclear, war — the one issue on which I knew I could not take the Reagan Administration’s soundness for granted.

So although I had no intention of allowing myself to become a kind of broker between the Americans and the Soviets, I was delighted when Mr Gorbachev accepted my invitation to stop over at Brize Norton on his way to the United States to sign the INF Treaty. This would give me an opportunity to gauge his thinking before his meeting with President Reagan and to tackle him on other issues, such as human rights and regional conflicts, on which I thought I could exert beneficial influence. The Americans had specifically asked me to press Mr Gorbachev on Afghanistan, where it was clear he was trying to find a way of pulling Soviet forces out of that disastrous venture.

Within the Soviet Union there were mixed signs. Mr Gorbachev had brought his ally Mr Yakovlev into the Politburo; but — in a move
which was to have enormous long-term consequences — his one-time protégé, Boris Yeltsin, who had been brought in as head of the Moscow Party as an incorruptible radical reformer, had been publicly humiliated. Within the Soviet leadership, apart from Mr Gorbachev himself, it still seemed that probably only Foreign minister Shevardnadze and Mr Yakovlev were fully committed to the Gorbachev reforms.