The Path to Power m-2

by Margaret Thatcher

  It is perhaps significant that on each of the three occasions when I felt compelled, since leaving office, to intervene publicly on the subject of foreign affairs (other than as regards Europe), it has been my conviction that both moral and practical considerations required a change of approach. The first was when in April 1991 I was moved by what I heard from Kurdish women, who came to beg me to speak out in order to gain relief for their compatriots bearing the brunt of Saddam Hussein’s merciless attacks. Parliament was in recess and there was no minister available to see them. I am glad to say that — doubtless coincidentally — action was subsequently taken at least to set up safe havens.

  The second occasion was when, on the occasion of the coup in the Soviet Union in August 1991,1 was dismayed by the willingness of some Western leaders apparently to ‘wait and see’ whether the coup leaders were successful, rather than give full moral support to the resistance gathered around Boris Yeltsin at the Russian White House. So, as soon as I had checked what had happened, I held a press conference outside my Great College Street office and went on to give a succession of interviews.

  I said that it was quite clear that what had happened in Moscow was unconstitutional and that the Russian people should now take their lead from Boris Yeltsin as the leading democratically elected politician. In this new and dangerous situation our own planned defence cuts must not now go ahead. But I warned against assuming that the coup would be successful. The Soviet people had now developed a taste for democracy and would be reluctant to lose it. They should protect democracy by acting as the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe had done — by taking to the streets and making their views known.

  The following morning it was already starting to become clear that my optimism that the coup would not succeed was being borne out by events. The news was of huge protest rallies in Leningrad and Moscow. I thought it was worth trying to speak directly by telephone to Mr Gorbachev who, according to the coup leaders, had had to step down ‘for reasons of health’. But I was hardly surprised when the Soviet Ambassador told me this was impossible. I had assumed that telephone contact would have been cut off by the KGB — though in this I soon learned I had overestimated the coup leaders’ competence. Later in the day the Conservative MEP Lord Bethell, a great expert on Russian matters, contacted my office to say that he had with him Mrs Galina Staravoitova, an adviser to Mr Yeltsin on a visit to London. I immediately asked them to come in and brief me. I related how I had failed to make contact with President Gorbachev. Mrs Staravoitova then asked me whether I would like to speak to Mr Yeltsin instead. After searching through her handbag, she came up with the number for the direct line to his office in the Parliament building and after several failed attempts — to my astonishment — I was put through.

  Mr Yeltsin and I spoke for some time, with Lord Bethell translating. It was clear that the outlook from the besieged White House was grim but also that Mr Yeltsin and his supporters were in good heart. He asked me if I would chair a commission of doctors to investigate the truth about Mr Gorbachev’s allegedly poor health, which had every appearance of a classic Soviet diplomatic illness. Of course I agreed, and the rest of the day was spent in cooperation with the Foreign Office and the Department of Health trying to compile a suitable list of distinguished doctors. Luckily, it proved unnecessary, for the coup by now was crumbling fast.

  I was duly denounced in the press by British Government ‘sources’ for my call to the Russians to come out into the streets to stop the coup, and for my call to our politicians to stop Western defence cuts. But I had no regrets. Democracy has to be fought for and if necessary died for; and indeed three brave young men did die for it. Their sacrifice is remembered by Russians today.

  But the issue on which my view and that of the Western foreign policy establishments differed most was Bosnia. What seemed to me so tragic was that, like anyone else who had bothered to follow events — and I was regularly briefed both by British experts and by others from the region — I could see the preparations for Serbia’s war of aggression against Bosnia being made. The West’s feeble and unprincipled response to the earlier war against Croatia made it almost inevitable. Indeed, with Western acquiescence the Yugoslav army was able to withdraw its heavy armour from Croatia into Bosnia.

  I was working on Volume I of my memoirs with my advisers in Switzerland in August 1992 when I learned that Bosnian Vice-President Ejup Ganić wanted to see me: he was desperately trying to summon help from abroad for Bosnia, having slipped out of Sarajevo.

  Because of the privations of Sarajevo, I had laid out a substantial afternoon tea for our meeting. To my surprise he refused all food as he gave me a thorough briefing on the political and military situation. But when I went into my study to telephone the Foreign Office to arrange a meeting for him, my colleagues again pressed him to eat something — whereupon he wolfed down several sandwiches at a go. He then explained to them that, having lived in an underground bunker for months with little to eat, he had not trusted himself to eat politely in front of me.

  What he told me confirmed all that I had heard and read, and I now decided that it was my moral duty to act. I would take the highest-profile initiative I could, but focusing on the United States — for after many fruitless conversations with the Foreign Office I despaired of a hearing in Britain. In the New York Times and on American television I sought to awaken the conscience of the West by arguing that by doing nothing we were acting as accomplices. But I also covered the strict practicalities.

  It is argued by some that nothing can be done by the West unless we are prepared to risk permanent involvement in a Vietnam- or Lebanon-style conflict and potentially high Western casualties. That is partly alarmism, partly an excuse for inertia. There is a vast difference between a full-scale land invasion like Desert Storm, and a range of military interventions from halting the arms embargo on Bosnia, through supplying arms to Bosnian forces, to direct strikes on military targets and communications.

  Even if the West passes by on the other side, we cannot expect that others will do so. There is increasing alarm in Turkey and the Muslim world. More massacres of Muslims in Bosnia, terrible in themselves, would also risk the conflict spreading.

  Serbia has no powerful outside backers, such as the Soviet Union in the past. It has up to now been encouraged by Western inaction, not least by explicit statements that force would not be used. A clear threat of military action would force Serbia into contemplating an end to its aggression. Serbia should be given an ultimatum to comply with certain Western demands:

  • Cessation of Serbia’s economic support for the war in Bosnia, to be monitored by international observers placed on the Serb-Bosnian border.

  • Recognition of Bosnia’s independence and territorial integrity by Belgrade and renunciation of territorial claims against it.

  • Guarantees of access from Serbia and Bosnia for humanitarian teams.

  • Agreement to the demilitarization of Bosnia within a broader demilitarization agreement for the whole region.

  • Promise of cooperation with the return of refugees to Bosnia.

  If those demands (which should be accompanied by a deadline) are not met, military retaliation should follow, including aerial bombardment of bridges on the Drina linking Bosnia with Serbia, of military convoys, of gun positions around Sarajevo and Goražde, and of military stores and other installations useful in the war. It should also be made clear that while this is not a war against the Serbian people, even installations on the Serbian side of the border may be attacked if they play an important role in the war…

  Serbia will not listen unless forced to listen. Only the prospect of resistance and defeat will lead to the rise of a more democratic and peaceful leadership. Waiting until the conflict burns itself out will be not only dishonourable but also very costly: refugees, terrorism, Balkan wars drawing in other countries, and worse.[81]

  For a short while it looked as if the argument might be won. I believe that within the
White House, the State Department and the Pentagon there was some genuine reassessment of strategy. But then the military and foreign policy establishments recovered sufficiently to offer any number of reasons why large-scale intervention by ground troops (which I had never suggested) was too risky, why the arms embargo on Bosnia must stay (which ensured that the victims were deprived of self-defence) and why air strikes would not be effective (possibly true on their own, but plainly false if conducted in support of well-armed Bosnian forces as a means of altering the military balance).

  Since the summer of 1992 there has been some movement in the direction I urged, but too little and far too late. Very limited air strikes under absurd restraints have occurred, but always against the background of protestations of the reluctance of the UN and NATO to go further. As a result of American pressure, there is some possibility of the arms embargo on Bosnia being lifted — but not before the moderate Muslim leadership had been forced into dangerously close reliance on Islamic powers such as Iran in the absence of Western help. Above all, whereas in August 1992 there was no official Russian involvement, the Russian government has now become a major player in the deadly game, thus raising the stakes in precisely the way I feared. Finally, British troops and the other forces in the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) are stationed in vulnerable situations in Bosnia, potential hostages to the Serbs if the West does at last become serious. The shameful failure in Bosnia has not only diminished our credibility and moral stature: it has now precipitated the most serious breach in NATO since Suez.

  It is, though, important to regard the Bosnian fiasco as a symptom and not just a cause. There was an almost unreal quality about much discussion of international affairs over the whole of this period which was characterized by the rise and fall of the concept of a ‘New World Order’. The foreign policy thinkers were still engaging in arguments about whether ‘history’ (in the Hegelian sense) had ‘ended’ — whether we had reached, in the words of Francis Fukuyama’s stimulating essay, ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government’.[82]

  In contrast to Mr Fukuyama’s thesis has been the later prediction by Samuel Huntington that international politics will henceforth be dominated by a ‘clash of civilizations’ with the ‘world [being] shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations… [in which] the most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another’.[83]

  The sense of unreality was emphasized by the contrast between these ambitious concepts of the intellectuals on the one hand and the hesitancy of the practitioners on the other. It was increasingly clear that the end of the Cold War — and only two years passed between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the official obsequies over the Soviet Union — had left Western politicians disoriented. It was not simply that security structures, above all NATO, and defence strategies had to be rethought. It was the whole justification, purpose and direction of foreign policy itself which seemed at issue.

  PRINCIPLES OF CONSERVATIVE FOREIGN POLICY

  Bismarck once remarked that asking him to pay attention to political principles while conducting foreign policy was like asking him to walk through a dense forest with a twelve-foot pole between his teeth. And this view is supported by some conservative theorists who ask us to consult only the national interest when formulating foreign policy. In fact, the apparent logic of their approach dissolves upon examination. How do we recognize our vital interests? How best can we pursue them once identified? Do they include freedom and democracy in other countries? How do you persuade your own citizens, or other governments, to join in the pursuit of your chosen course? To what extent is some structure of international order also a specific national interest? And if it is, what degree of sacrifice should we make for it? These and similar questions cannot be answered without reference to principles.

  For me, the conservative approach to international affairs rests on five tenets, which in different degrees and combinations can be applied to the challenges we face.

  The first of these is that collective security can be upheld only if it is guaranteed by a single power or an enduring alliance which is strong enough to dwarf challenges from other powers. In our present world, this means that America must remain the single superpower. This will not be achieved without cost, which American taxpayers alone should not be expected to bear. Nor will it be without friction: Russia and in due course emerging great powers like China, India, Japan, Brazil — not to mention the hypersensitive Europeans — will all resent this. But for the sake of peace and stability it is overwhelmingly the least bad option.

  The fact that the United States cannot maintain this dominant status alone over time, as other countries emerge more fully as world powers, does not negate this point — although it does amend it. In the first place, there is a time lag. Military superiority does not automatically go to the most advanced economic power, particularly when, as now, it is military technology — where the United States excels — rather than simply the volume of resources committed to defence, which is critical. In any case, it is important not to underrate the economic potential of the United States, as the prospect of a vast free trading zone embracing not just North but South America as well opens up.[84]

  Still, America will need dependable allies, willing to share — and share fully — the burden of world leadership, if it is to be prolonged into the twenty-second century. Exactly how this might be achieved — by investing NATO with proper burden-sharing arrangements, especially for out-of-area operations, and underpinning it economically with an Atlantic Free Trade Area — is perhaps the most important topic for us to discuss over the next decade. But, whatever institutional form this burden-sharing takes, and however the burden is distributed between America and Europe, world leadership will still entail heavy obligations. They will nonetheless have compensating advantages: in particular, international arrangements and the decisions of global institutions will tend to reflect American, and by extension Western, interests. Indeed, unless this is so, democratic electorates, especially in the United States, will simply not be prepared to pay the price.

  My second tenet is that in foreign policy we should recognize the value of the balance of power in regional contexts. This is an important qualification to the first assertion, regarding America’s global role. The operation of regional balances of power will help to reduce the number of occasions when American-led interventions are necessary. When, in pursuit of its own interests, a state allies with other states to counter and contain a regional power which threatens to become dominant, a generally beneficial equilibrium is achieved: and the temptations and opportunities for misbehaviour open to the most powerful state are reduced. It was, of course, British policy for many years to promote such a balance of power within Europe; and, as I have explained, this still makes sense when a major, if unstated, objective of policy should be the containment of German power.[85]

  American policy-makers have generally rejected the balance of power principle — partly because of America’s own overwhelming strength, and partly because idealism and ideology have seemed so important and the balance of power was seen by Wilsonians as amoral. More generally, the competitive jockeying for dominance has been held responsible for a succession of wars — above all the First World War. And a powerful contemporary argument has been that in a world where possession of nuclear weapons makes the risk of all war unacceptable, the tensions resulting from operation of the balance of power cannot be afforded.

  These arguments are not without merit. But the US State Department has had almost fifty years of operating in world politics in ways that have tempered the principles of Woodrow Wilson with the realities of local power balances, from the Middle East to the Indian sub-continent. Secondly, as long as there is one ultimate superpower which, if necessary, can determine the outcome of regional disputes,
then there are limits set on the competition between states. And the fact that the US is, in nuclear terms, more powerful than any other state, enhances its ability to set these limits. It is under these conditions that the balance of power is a force for good.

  Arguably, the most important area in which the balance of power — supplemented by a sufficiently strong American presence — can help resolve future problems is in Asia and the Far East. The sometimes hysterical discussion of the ‘threat’ posed by Japan to the American and European economies leaves out two considerations. We are extraordinarily lucky that, both for historical reasons and because it is protected by the American nuclear umbrella, Japan does not wish to be a military as well as an economic superpower. And there are three Asia-Pacific powers which either have, or will shortly have, nuclear weapons: China, Russia and India.

  The precise size and growth-rate of the Chinese economy is disputed; since China’s prosperity is occurring largely in spite, rather than because, of decisions made in Beijing, probably not even the Chinese know the truth. But that the potential is huge, that it is being ever more effectively exploited by the industrious Chinese people (and the wider Chinese diaspora) and that China is building up its defences while the rest of us are running ours down — these things are known.