Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [479]
VISIT TO WASHINGTON IN JULY 1987
On Thursday 16 July 1987 I flew into Washington to see President Reagan. Our political fortunes at this time could not have been more different. I had just won an election with a decisive majority, enhancing my authority in international affairs. By contrast my old friend and his Administration were reeling under the continuing ‘Irangate’ revelations. I found the President hurt and bemused by what was happening. Nancy was spending her time listening to the cruel and contemptuous remarks pouring out from the liberal media commentators and telling him what was being said, which made him still more depressed. Nothing wounds a man of integrity more than to find his basic honesty questioned. It made me very angry. I was determined to do what I could to help President Reagan ride out the storm. It was not just a matter of personal loyalty — though it was that too, of course: he also had eighteen months to serve as leader of the most powerful country in the world and it was in all our interests that his authority be undiminished. So I set about using my interviews and public statements in Washington to get across this message. For example, I told the interviewer on CBS’s Face the Nation:
Cheer up. Cheer up. Be more upbeat. America is a strong country with a great president, a great people and a great future.
Our embassy was besieged by telephone calls of congratulation. My remarks also touched another grateful audience. On Monday evening — after I arrived back in London — I received a telephone call from the President who wanted to thank me for what I had said. He was in a Cabinet meeting and at one point he put down the receiver and told me to listen. I heard loud and long applause from the Cabinet members.
My main business in Washington, though, had been to discuss the implications for our future defence of the INF treaty which would be signed by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev in December. I had always had mixed feelings about the INF ‘zero option’. On the one hand, it was a great success to have forced the Soviets to withdraw their SS-20 missiles by deploying our Cruise and Pershing. But, on the other, the removal of our intermediate-range land-based missiles would have two undesirable effects. First, it threatened precisely what Helmut Schmidt had wanted to avoid when he originally urged NATO to deploy them: namely the decoupling of Europe from NATO. It could then be argued, as in the 1970s, that in the last resort the United States would not use nuclear weapons to deter a conventional Warsaw Pact attack on Europe. This argument would boost the always-present tendency to German neutralism — a tendency which it had been the long-standing Soviet objective to magnify wherever possible. Second, the INF ‘zero option’ also cast doubt on — though as I always argued it did not in fact undermine — the NATO strategy of ‘flexible response’. That strategy depended on the ability of the West to escalate its response to Soviet aggression through each stage of conventional and nuclear weapons. The removal of the intermediate-range missiles might be argued to create a gap in that capability. It followed that NATO must have other nuclear weapons, stationed on German soil, which would be a credible deterrent and that those weapons be modernized and strengthened where necessary. It was this question — the avoidance of another ‘zero’ on Short-Range Nuclear Forces (SNF) — which was to divide the alliance so seriously in 1988–9.
The main points I now made to the President in Washington were the need to allocate submarine-launched Cruise missiles and additional F1-11 aircraft to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe to compensate for the withdrawal of Cruise and Pershing and the need to resist pressure from the Germans for early discussion of reductions of SNF in Europe. I also