There is No Alternative (45 page)

On December 8, 1987, Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, eliminating from the planet intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles. Reagan kept SDI. The treaty strongly favored NATO, giving it unequivocal strategic superiority over the Soviet Union. It resulted in the most dramatic and significant reduction of nuclear arms in history.

Gorbachev signed the treaty for many reasons, not least among them that he was a great and visionary leader. But it is fair to assume that the personal relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev—and Reagan's success in persuading Gorbachev that he would not use this advantage to launch a first strike—gave Gorbachev the confidence to make this deal. And it is reasonable to assume that Thatcher's friendship with Gorbachev played a large role in this.

There is a great debate, of course, about the extent to which Reagan's policies prompted the Soviet Union's collapse. Many scholars are now inclined to believe that it would have soon collapsed anyway. Gorbachev, many say, is the hero of this story.

The debate is to an extent artificial. Heroism is not a zero-sum game. Gorbachev
is
a hero. I agree. A monumental historical figure. We should not understate his role. I am not seeking the nomination
of the Republican Party, so I am happy to say the obvious: Gorbachev was even more significant to history than Reagan.

Would the Soviet Union have collapsed absent Reagan's policies? Absent Gorbachev's ascent? No one knows. We can only guess. Some of the people who now say it would have collapsed anyway are the ones who were saying it would never collapse before.

Peter Schweizer, an analyst of the Reagan doctrine, estimates that Reagan's policies cost the Soviet Union roughly $45 billion a year—a catastrophic burden, given that Soviet hard currency earnings amounted to $32 billion a year. He bases these numbers on Moscow's own estimates. Specifically, Reagan blocked the Soviet's natural gas pipeline to Europe, costing them $7 billion to $8 billion per year in revenues. By financing anti-communist guerrillas from Latin America to Afghanistan, Reagan forced the Soviet Union to spend an additional $8 billion a year in counterinsurgency operations. Following the invasion of Grenada, an anxious Cuba demanded and received an additional $3 billion in Soviet arms. The Soviets lost between $1 billion and $2 billion a year because of the restrictions Reagan placed on technology exports. Aid to Poland, to counter Reagan's sanctions, cost them another billion per year. Reagan cajoled the Saudis into opening the oil spigots, depressing the global price of oil, and thereby depriving the Soviets of billions of dollars in hard currency.
²³¹
Most devastatingly, to match Reagan's defense spending, the Soviets increased their military budget by $15 billion to $20 billion per annum.
²³²

I can't resolve this debate—and neither can anyone else—but this much we can say with confidence: Reagan's policies did not provoke the Stalinist reflex in the Soviet Union, as the Sovietologists at Chequers had feared. The Soviet economy was not growing, as the Sovietologists at Chequers believed. The destabilization of Eastern Europe
did
have a profound effect on the Soviet Union itself. Soviet defense spending
was
a millstone, not a dynamo. And Soviet leaders
did
face problems of a nature that compelled them to change drastically—and indeed prompted the system itself to collapse. Now that the Soviet archives are open, it is clear that Reagan's policies at the very least hastened the Soviet Union's demise.

Reagan's policies, moreover, did not lead to nuclear war.

To someone who was unsure, in 1983, whether there would be a 1984, this is an impressive record.

In one sense, the end of the Cold War represented the triumph of an idea: The free market and liberal democracy defeated communism and totalitarianism. In another sense, the end of the Cold War was a contingent story of human relationships. Thatcher played a critical role in both senses of this story. It is hard to see how the story could have played out quite as it did without her.

The end, when it came, was swift and vertiginous. In 1988, Gorbachev announced a drastic reduction of the Soviet military presence in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union, he said, would no longer intervene in the Eastern bloc. Emboldened by this declaration, the Hungarian parliament voted in January 1989 to permit freedom of speech and assembly. It set a date for multiparty elections.

In February 1989, the last Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan.

On April 5, 1989, the Communist Party in Poland agreed to permit free elections. On June 4, Solidarity won an overwhelming
majority of the vote. When the Communist Party leaders phoned Gorbachev to ask what to do, he replied, “The time has come to yield power.”

Shortly afterward, the Hungarian Communist Party renounced communism and opened the border to Austria, allowing thousands of East Germans to flee to the West.

In October, massive demonstrations took place in East Germany. “
Wir wollen raus!
” chanted the protestors:
We want out!
The hard-line communist Erich Honecker wanted to shoot them all. He turned to the Soviet Union for help, but none was forthcoming. The protests grew in number and strength, forcing Honecker and his entire cabinet to resign.

On November 9, 1989, East Berliners breached the Berlin Wall. Fatefully, the Kremlin refused to give the orders to restrain them with lethal force. The overwhelmed border guards opened the gates. Tens of thousands of East Germans surged through the checkpoints. At first disbelieving, then euphoric, they began drilling through the wall, pounding at it with hammers. They dismantled it with chisels and screwdrivers. They lifted slabs away with cranes. They poured through the holes. They scrambled over the top. They flooded across by the millions, emerging, dazed and blinking, into the sunlight.

West Berliners, delirious with joy, met them with champagne.

“The Wall is gone! The Wall is gone!”

In 2005, the French and the Dutch held referendums on the proposed European Constitution. The constitution—265 handsome pages, forty times the length of the American Constitution, unreadable, uninspiring, and an absolute tour de force of bureaucratic jargon—would have enshrined such self-evident truths as these:

I am told that visitors to the Library of Congress often find their eyes glistening when they contemplate the yellowed parchment of the American Constitution. I suspect this document might not have the same effect.

A few points to note: Every year, the European Commission produces more than 11,000 new regulations;
²³⁴
and every year, according to the commission's own findings, these regulations cost European businesses 600 billion euros.
²³⁵
The commission's rulings are intended to supersede those made by the elected officials of the member states. Although the European parliament is elected directly by the citizens of member countries, the vastly more powerful commission is not elected at all.

In both France and the Netherlands, the European Constitution was contemptuously rejected. And for obvious reasons: No matter how many times they have been told by their leaders that they are to cherish the ideal of European unity, ordinary Europeans feel a quaint, persistent attachment to their distinct cultural identities,
their legal and educational traditions, and their sovereignty. What's more, they don't
like
all those regulations.

Margaret Thatcher warned that they might not.

The story of Thatcher's downfall is often described, with justification, as a classic tragedy:
a noble hero, a tragic flaw, reversal of fortune, downfall, purgation.
“Ideology, aggression and arrogance grew on her,” wrote Anthony Bevins, the political editor of the Left-leaning
Independent.

Neil Kinnock agrees. “After she got the second victory—reduced majority, but not reduced enough—
hubris
set in. And you know the rest of the story.”

I do; others might not. Thatcher's reluctance to bring Britain further into Europe divided her cabinet. In September 1990, Geoffrey Howe, her longest-serving cabinet minister, resigned in protest. His
bitter resignation speech set in motion the train of events that led to the revolt of the Conservative Party and her resignation.

Those who see in Thatcher's downfall the plot of
Julius Caesar
are not imagining things. Shakespeare anticipated every line in this story.

Certainly, Thatcher had by the end of her time in power become hostile to Europe. In
Statecraft,
written in 2002, Thatcher laid out the case against Europe with devastating precision: