Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [104]
While I was at Cancün I also had a separate meeting with Julius Nyerere, who was, as ever, charmingly persuasive, but equally misguided and unrealistic about what was wrong with his own country and, by extension, with so much of black Africa. He told me how unfair the IMF conditions for extending credit to him were: they had told him to bring Tanzania’s public finances into order, cut protection and devalue his currency to the much lower level the market reckoned it worth. Perhaps at this time the IMF’s demands were somewhat too rigorous: but he did not see that changes in this direction were necessary at all and in his own country’s long-term interests. He also complained of the effects of droughts and the collapse of his country’s agriculture — none of which he seemed to connect with the pursuit of misguided socialist policies, including collectivizing the farms.
The process of drafting the communiqué itself was more than usually fraught. An original Canadian draft was in effect rejected; and Pierre Trudeau left it largely to the rest of us, making clear that he thought our efforts rather less good than his own. I spent much of this time seeking to sort out drafting points with the Americans, who continued until almost the last moment to have reservations about the text.
The summit was a success — though not really for any of the reasons publicly given. At its conclusion there was, of course, the expected general — and largely meaningless — talk about ‘global negotiations’ on North-South issues. A special ‘energy affiliate’ to the World Bank was to be set up. But what mattered to me was that the independence of the IMF and the World Bank were maintained. Equally valuable, this was the last of such gatherings. The intractable problems of Third World poverty, hunger and debt would not be solved by misdirected international intervention, but rather by liberating enterprise, promoting trade — and defeating socialism in all its forms.
Before I left Mexico, I had one more item of business to transact. This was to sign an agreement for the building of a huge new steel plant by the British firm of Davy Loewy. Like other socialist countries, the Mexicans wrongly thought that large prestige manufacturing projects offered the best path to economic progress. However, if that was what they wanted, then I would at least try to see that British firms benefited. The ceremony required my going to Mexico City the night before. I stayed at the residence of the British Ambassador, Crispin Tickell. While I was there at dinner the chandeliers started swinging and the floor moved; there was nowhere you could put your feet. At first I thought that I must have been affected by the altitude, even though I had had no difficulty in my earlier days on skiing holidays. But I was reassured by our ambassador who was sitting beside me: ‘No’, he said, ‘it’s just an earthquake.’
Other earthquakes were sending out tremors that year. Before I left for the international visits chronicled in this chapter, I had been all too aware of the significance for the Cold War of the stationing of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. If it went ahead as planned, the Soviet Union would suffer a real defeat; if it was abandoned in response to the Soviet sponsored ‘peace offensive’, there was a real danger of a decoupling of Europe and America. My meetings with President Reagan had persuaded me that the new Administration was apprised of these dangers and determined to combat them. But a combination of exaggerated American rhetoric and the perennial nervousness of European opinion threatened to undermine the good transatlantic relationship that would be needed to guarantee that deployment went ahead. I saw it as Britain’s task to put the American case in Europe since we shared their analysis but tended to put it in less ideological language. And this we did in the next few years.
But there was a second front in the Cold War — that between the West and the Soviet-Third