The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  Nevertheless the implosion of Communism did not bring her unmixed joy. On the contrary, her last year in office was one of her most difficult on the international front. For the immediate consequence of the opening of the Berlin Wall was an irresistible momentum to reunite the two parts of Germany, a prospect which exacerbated her fear and loathing of the former enemy. At the same time she was having to come to terms with a new administration in Washington in which she had much less confidence than she had in Ronald Reagan. At her moment of ideological victory, therefore, she found herself more isolated on the world stage than ever before.

  She was relieved when Vice-President George Bush trounced the Democrat Michael Dukakis in November 1988 to ensure continuity of Republican rule. But she would never have the same rapport with Bush that she had with Reagan. She was now the senior partner, but Bush, unsurprisingly, had no wish to be patronised. Guided by a new team of advisers – James Baker as Secretary of State, Dick Cheney as Secretary of Defense, Brent Scowcroft as National Security Adviser – he determined to make his own alliances. In particular, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bush had identified Helmut Kohl as the European leader with whom he should forge a special relationship. With Mrs Thatcher it was necessary for him to show that he was his own man.

  Bush’s relations with his European allies are fully documented in A World Transformed, his remarkably candid joint memoir written with Brent Scowcroft, which reprints a lot of documents, transcripts of telephone conversations and diary accounts of the intense diplomacy accompanying the end of the Cold War – far more than has yet received security clearance at the Bush Library in Texas.[o] From this there emerges a vivid picture of the tensions between the leading players and the extent of Mrs Thatcher’s isolation as Bush and Kohl, with much less objection than she hoped for from Mitterrand and Gorbachev, rushed to consummate the reunion of the two Germanies far faster than she thought wise or desirable.

  Even before the heady events of November, however, from the very beginning of Bush’s presidency she was afraid that Washington was going soft on nuclear disarmament. Gorbachev was trying to split NATO by offering cuts to prevent the alliance modernising its short-range nuclear forces (SNF). Kohl, under domestic pressure from the Social Democrats and Greens, wanted to delay modernisation and reduce the number of missiles immediately. By contrast, Scowcroft wrote, ‘Thatcher was unyielding on any changes that might weaken NATO defences.’5 She wanted the Americans to let her handle Kohl, which they were unwilling to do – partly because ‘Margaret… was even more unyielding than we, and far more emotional about the dangers of compromise’, but also because Bush was not willing to play second fiddle to her.

  She was very annoyed when Kohl’s Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, tried to ‘bounce’ the alliance into SNF cuts by announcing them in the Bundestag before they had been agreed. She gave Bush her views in a telephone conversation which he described as ‘vintage Thatcher’: ‘We must be firm with Germany… There could be no question, no question, she repeated, of negotiations on SNF.’6

  But the Americans did change their position on SNF negotiations. Mrs Thatcher, Scowcroft recalled, was ‘not happy… particularly since we had not consulted with her beforehand’:

  The truth of the matter was that we knew what Thatcher’s reaction would be… We believed we had to make this gesture to the Germans… and, had we consulted the British, it would have been very awkward to proceed over their strong objections.7

  Before the May 1989 NATO summit in Brussels she was still ‘unhappy and apprehensive’ about the American proposal for immediate cuts in conventional forces, linked to SNF negotiations; but at the end of the day she knew the limits of her influence. She told the envoys who came to brief her in London, ‘If the President wants it, of course we will do it.’8 Yet even as they sat down to dinner in Brussels she buttonholed Bush. ‘We must not give in on this,’ she told him. ‘You’re not going to give in, are you?’ In the end James Baker and the Foreign Ministers – still Howe for Britain – found a form of words she could accept. ‘Our strategy of using our conventional forces proposal to encourage a deal over the nuclear forces problem worked,’ Bush wrote.The next morning, to his relief, ‘Margaret waxed enthusiastic. I suspect she did not want to be separated from the United States.’9 But while the Americans congratulated themselves on ‘a resounding success’, the press had no doubt that Mrs Thatcher had suffered a humiliating defeat.10

  The next day Bush went on to Germany and delivered a speech at Mainz in which he referred to West Germany and the United States as ‘partners in leadership’. Mrs Thatcher took this as a snub to her special relationship with Washington. ‘In truth she need not have worried,’ Scowcroft wrote. ‘The expression had no exclusionary intent and was meant only for flourish and encouragement.’11 Nevertheless it was widely interpreted as reflecting a real and important shift in transatlantic relationships. Bush tried to make up by describing Britain as America’s ‘anchor to windward’. ‘This was kindly meant, but not exactly reassuring,’ Percy Cradock commented.‘The anchor to windward is a lonely position and not the one we had imagined we occupied.’12

  At least one special relationship did persist, however, between Scowcroft and Charles Powell, whom Scowcroft regarded as ‘my opposite in the British Government’. Secure lines were installed so that the National Security Adviser could speak directly to his counterparts in London, Paris and Bonn. ‘All either one of us had to do was to push a button and lift the receiver to have the phone ring on the other’s desk… We soon learned how to explore in a comfortable, offhand manner the limits of the flexibility we felt our principals would have on various issues.’ Scowcroft felt that by this time Powell was ‘the only serious influence on Thatcher’s views on foreign policy’.13

  Mrs Thatcher naturally watched the dominoes come down across Eastern Europe with unrestrained delight, as first Poland and Hungary moved towards democracy without provoking Soviet intervention; then the Hungarians allowed refugees from East Germany to cross into Austria; and finally the East German authorities themselves opened the Berlin Wall on 9 November and the population emerged like the prisoners in Fidelio to tear it down with pickaxes, crowbars and their bare hands and dance exultantly on the ruins. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania followed before the end of the year as the so-called ‘velvet revolution’ brought the dissident playwright Václav Havel to power in Prague, while President Ceauşescu and his monstrous wife were summarily executed in Bucharest on Christmas Day. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But Mrs Thatcher, mindful of the excesses of the French Revolution 200 years before, was already wary of things getting out of hand. Back in 1982 she had predicted that the Wall would fall one day:

  The day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles… One day, liberty will dawn on the other side of the wall.

  But she admitted she had not expected it so soon.When it happened, she told reporters in Downing Street that she had watched the television pictures with the same enthusiasm as everyone else and celebrated ‘a great day for liberty’. But even at that moment she was quick to stamp on questions about German reunification. ‘I think you are going much too fast, much too fast,’ she warned. ‘You have to take these things step by step and handle them very wisely.’14 But she quickly found that the impetus of events was too strong for her.

  She had three admissible reasons for resisting the prospect of a united Germany. First, she was afraid that its sheer economic strength would upset the balance of the European Community. Second, she was afraid that a neutral or demilitarised Germany would leave a gaping hole in NATO’s defences against a still-nuclear Soviet Union.Third, she feared that the loss of East Germany (and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact generally) might destroy Gorbachev and thus jeopardise the biggest prize of all, democracy in the USSR. All these were rational arguments for caution. But they were underpinned in Mrs Thatcher’s m
ind by another, inadmissible reason – her virulent and unappeased loathing of the wartime enemy.

  There is no easy explanation of why Margaret Thatcher found it so much harder than others of her generation to forget the war. Certainly it dominated her adolescence from the age of fourteen to twenty – her last four years at school, her first two at university – but she was not alone in that. Grantham suffered fairly heavy German bombing – probably heavier than anywhere outside London except for Coventry and Plymouth; also from 1941 Lincolnshire was full of US airbases and US airmen, which sharpened her awareness of the Americans’ role in saving Europe from itself. She had heard first-hand testimony of the nature of the Nazi regime from the young Jewish refugee whom her parents briefly had to stay before the war; later she had a large Jewish community in her Finchley constituency. But all this pales in comparison with the experience of her male contemporaries who actually fought in France, Belgium, North Africa and Italy, let alone those who liberated the concentration camps, almost all of whom – certainly the future politicians among them – seem to have come back determined to rebuild the continent, ready to forget the war and move on. She had suffered no personal loss of family or close friends to explain her enduring bitterness. Yet forty years later she was still consumed by an ‘atavistic fear of Germany and [a] suspicion of the German people qua people’.15

  As soon as the Wall came down in November 1989 she knew that Kohl would lose no time in pressing for reunification of the two Germanies; but she believed that the four wartime allies, if they were resolute, could still prevent it, or at least delay it for ten or fifteen years. Unification was not a matter for the Germans alone, she insisted, but affected NATO, the EC, the Russians and the whole balance of power in Europe. She even tried to argue that the Helsinki Agreement precluded any alteration of borders. In Paris she hoped to form an Anglo-French axis to contain Germany, but found Mitterrand unhelpful. A week later she flew to Camp David to share her fears with the President directly. ‘She particularly worried that talk of reunification or changing borders would only frighten the Soviets,’ Bush recorded:

  ‘The overriding objective is to get democracy throughout Eastern Europe,’ she told me. ‘We have won the battle of ideas after tough times as we kept NATO strong’… She added that such change could take place only in an environment of stability.16

  ‘The atmosphere,’ Mrs Thatcher acknowledged, ‘did not improve as a result of our discussions.’17 In fact, Brent Scowcroft felt ‘some lingering sympathy for Thatcher’s position’, believing that she ‘had her eyes on some very important priorities’.18 But from the moment Kohl had telephoned him to describe the ‘festival atmosphere [like] an enormous fair’ as the Wall came down, the President was firmly on Kohl’s side.19 ‘We don’t fear the ghosts of the past,’ he assured the Chancellor. ‘Margaret does.’20 For his part Kohl was exasperated by Mrs Thatcher’s obstruction. ‘I think it is a great mistake on Maggie’s part to think this is a time for caution,’ he complained.21 Her ideas were ‘simply pre-Churchill. She thinks the post-war era has not come to an end. She thinks history is not just. Germany is so rich and Great Britain is struggling. They won a war but lost an empire, and their economy. She does the wrong thing. She should try to bind the Germans into the EC.’

  Kohl still professed to see reunification as a long process over several years, with West Germany meanwhile remaining in NATO and the GDR in the Warsaw Pact – as Mrs Thatcher wanted.22 Bush suspected that Kohl really hoped for unification much sooner than this, but did not want to prejudice it by seeming to press too fast. Nevertheless he was happy to give Kohl ‘a green light. I don’t think I ever cautioned him about going too fast.’ In his relaxed view ‘self-determination was the key, and no one could object to it’.23

  Brent Scowcroft still shared Mrs Thatcher’s worry about Gorbachev’s response. ‘It was still possible that the Soviets would conclude that a united Germany was intolerable and oppose it, by force if necessary. Or they would successfully impose conditions on it taking place which would render it unacceptable to us.’24 The difference was that while the Americans, determined that the new Germany should be a member of NATO, were working to overcome Soviet opposition, Mrs Thatcher was trying to deploy Gorbachev’s objections as a brake. From their private conversations she believed that Mitterrand also shared her alarm and hoped that he would join with her to slow the process down; but whatever he may have said in private, Mitterrand was realistic. He had no intention of opposing the cherished project of his friend Helmut Kohl, but still put the preservation of the Franco-German axis before her idea of a Franco-British one. ‘He made the wrong decision for France,’ she asserted in her memoirs.25

  The diplomatic method eventually agreed was the ‘Two-plus-Four’ process, whereby the two Germanies negotiated the domestic details of unification in an international context approved by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France. This met Mrs Thatcher’s wish to involve the Russians, despite American fear that it would give them a chance to be obstructive. But Bush gambled that Gorbachev could be won over, and he was right.

  Mrs Thatcher’s other concern was that premature euphoria about the end of the Cold War would lead to reductions in defence spending. When she met Bush at Camp David – just before he was due to meet Gorbachev in Malta for the latest round of arms-limitation talks – she was adamant that he should give nothing away. ‘We had a good visit,’ Bush wrote, ‘but she did not want to see any defense cuts at all of any kind.’ Once again, however, she recognised the limits of her influence. ‘In the end… Margaret sent me a nice telegram pledging her full support in very comforting words.’26

  At the NATO summit in Brussels in December she was very unhappy about American proposals for cutting conventional forces in Europe, fearing that the Russians would simply pull their forces back beyond the Urals, from where they could easily sweep west again at a moment’s notice. Despite Kohl’s repeated assurances that neutralisation was out of the question, he was under strong domestic pressure to reduce the number of allied troops and NATO missiles on German soil; she was afraid that Gorbachev might exploit this weakness to make neutralisation his condition for accepting unification. In the end, however, Scowcroft noted, ‘it became apparent that, while not happy, she would acquiesce in what we wished to do’.27

  By February 1990 she accepted that she was losing the battle, but was still anxious to save Gorbachev’s face. ‘I fear that Gorbachev will feel isolated if all the reunification process goes the West’s way,’ she told Bush by telephone. ‘He’s lost the Warsaw Pact to democratic governments.’ Then Bush’s account went on:

  Margaret’s fears of a united Germany, however, came ringing through. She darkly perceived that Germany would be ‘the Japan of Europe, but worse than Japan. Japan is an offshore power with enormous trade surpluses. Germany is in the heart of a continent of countries most of which she has attacked and occupied. Germany has colossal wealth and trade surpluses. So we must include a bigger country, the Soviet Union [or] you, in the political area.’

  ‘It was not enough to anchor Germany in the EC,’ she believed. ‘That might become Germany’s new empire: the future empires will be economic empires.’28 On this occasion Scowcroft found her arguments becoming more sophisticated and her tone ‘much improved’, but still found her fears ‘worrying’.29 He was ‘dismayed’ that her anxiety not to upset Gorbachev led her to back a ‘demilitarised East Germany’, outside NATO, instead of a united Germany in NATO as the Americans wanted. Meeting Bush in Bermuda in April, she still argued that ‘we should allow Soviet troops to remain for a transitional period – it would help Gorbachev with his military’. ‘I don’t agree,’ Bush replied, ‘I want the Soviets to go home.’30

  In fact she had already accepted the inevitable at the end of March when Kohl came to Britain. Heaping insincere encomiums on the Chancellor, Mrs Thatcher formally gave her blessing to the new Germany, so long as it was in NATO and retained ‘sizeable’ British, French
and American forces, including short-range nuclear weapons, on its soil.

  Her acceptance was made easier by the results of the first free elections held in the old GDR. One of her arguments for delay had been that the East had lived under authoritarian rule for so long – first under the Nazis, then under Communism – that it could not be expected to adapt quickly to democracy. In fact the voters confounded her by voting heavily for Kohl’s CDU, giving a clear endorsement both to his policy of rapid unification and to broadly free-market economic policies (the former Communists won only 16 per cent) and allaying her fears of neutralism. Visiting Moscow in June, Mrs Thatcher played her part in helping to secure Gorbachev’s acquiescence that the reunited Germany could join NATO – in return for badly needed Western credits to shore up the Soviet economy. In July Gorbachev survived a last-ditch challenge from his own hardliners; and Kohl flew to Moscow to receive the Soviet blessing in person. The new Germany came into being on 3 October 1990, less than eleven months after the opening of the Wall.

  Even with Germany locked into NATO she still worried that facile talk of a ‘peace dividend’ from the ending of the Cold War would lead to a short-sighted lowering of the West’s nuclear guard. Washington was pressing for an early NATO summit, eventually held in London in July, to bring forward cuts in both nuclear and conventional forces in Europe. To her dismay Mrs Thatcher found herself once again ‘at odds with the Americans’. As Bush relates, she still objected to weakening nuclear deterrence by diluting the doctrine of flexible response:

  She argued that we were abandoning the fundamentals of solid military strategy for the sake of ‘eye-catching propositions’… She saw the move to declare nuclear weapons ‘weapons of last resort’ as undermining our short-range forces and as slipping us to a position of ‘no first use of nuclear weapons’, leaving our conventional forces vulnerable… She demanded an entirely new draft.31