Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [478]
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