Margaret Thatcher would have handled Russia differently

Almost 32 years after her fall, Margaret Thatcher still overshadows British politics. As we face the threat of inflation at a level that we have not known for almost three decades, a lot of people are asking what she would have done. Would she have acquiesced in reflation, paid for by government borrowing? That seems unlikely. What would she have felt about modern monetary theory and its handmaiden, quantitative easing? One suspects that there would have been a quick answer to that question: extreme alarm.

But her views on foreign affairs are equally relevant: perhaps even more so. At the end of March 1987, she went to Moscow for talks with Mikhail Gorbachev. They did not agree about everything. There were vigorous exchanges. But there had been extraordinary progress. After all, at the beginning of that decade, Leonid Brezhnev had been threatening to send Soviet troops into Poland. Now, Mrs Thatcher had found a man that she could do business with and he had come to respect her. It seemed likely that future disagreements would all be settled by jaw-jaw and that war-war was off the agenda, even in its Cold form. After that meeting, her great foreign policy advisor, Charles Powell, thought that it had marked the end of the Cold War. Although that was a bold conclusion, it turned out to be correct – about Cold War I. Now, Cold War II seems unavoidable. Indeed, there is a new and crucial priority: to ensure that it stays Cold.

A mark of a good book is that when you dip into it to check one point, you find yourself reading a lot more. This is true of Charles Moore’s awesomely impressive three volumes on Margaret Thatcher. By the end of her reign – no other word will do – the Old Girl was worn out, and who could blame her, after those long years of exhaustion and relentless strain. Yet almost to the end, she had a thoroughly creative grasp of geopolitics. If she had served for, say, five more years, would the world have been in a better place?

There are grounds for caution and indeed scepticism. Her views on Europe are well-known and thoroughly sensible. She would have been happy to accept an enlarged EFTA arrangement with the EU which could have settled down and thus made a full Brexit unnecessary. But it would probably have been impossible to negotiate such a wise compromise.

Then there was South Africa. As Robin Renwick’s books, including The End Of Apartheid, make clear, her views were not the same as her husband’s. She was certain that the whites had to give up power. This had a huge influence in thoughtful Afrikaner circles. If even Mrs Thatcher was pressing them to make fundamental changes, perhaps the time had come. So F.W. de Klerk persuaded his fellow countrymen to make a leap in the dark. It has hardly been a leap into an earthly paradise, but in the real world, always short of paradises, we can probably accept a favourite phrase of the Lady’s: there was no alternative.

Margaret Thatcher was always a staunch friend of Israel. She passionately believed that its people had the right to live in peace, behind secure boundaries. But she was also convinced that there had to be a deal with the Palestinians. On that point, she was influenced by personalities. She liked, admired and respected King Hussein of Jordan.

In English Arabist circles, he was often referred to as the “PLK”: plucky little King (he was short). That always sounded as if it verged on the patronising and Mrs Thatcher seemed to have preferred “GLK” as in gallant little King. He certainly was gallant. Per contra, she did not approve of Messrs Begin and Shamir, who had both been involved in anti-British terrorism in the immediate post-war years. She much preferred Shimon Peres, who also seemed more flexible.

It could easily be argued that in pressing Israeli leaders to find a modus vivendi with the Palestinians, she was acting in Israel’s best long-term interests, yet that would always have been a hard case to sell in Israel itself. Instead, we have had the steady grandmother’s footsteps expansion of the settlements, altering facts on the ground, almost irrevocably. For the time being, this hardly seems to matter. No-one seems interested in Palestine. But it is hard to believe that this will continue indefinitely. The best we can hope for is that renewed conflict will not lead to tragedy.

There are problems that even Margaret Thatcher could not have solved. There is also a paradox. It might be that her greatest contribution would have been in the most troubled matter: relations with Russia. There, she might have inspired the radical measures which the West should have taken to promote stability. “Stabilnost” was a word on many Russian lips around that time, expressing a heart-felt aspiration and one which it might have been possible to gratify.

In the late 80s, a lot of Western right-wingers, emotionally attached to the Cold War, seemed determined to find reasons to justify continuing hostility to Russia. That was not true of Margaret Thatcher. Although she was never naive, once the Wall came down and the Soviet Empire crumbled, she would have been ready to welcome further change.

Around that time, I once asked her if the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) could gradually replace NATO. “Yes” she answered. I should have asked her to develop that thought. Alas, there was no time.

I suspect that she would have been cautiously content with the notion that post-Cold War, the West should scrap or at least re-evaluate all its concepts, but been less happy with the notion of beating our tanks and war-planes into higher social-welfare payments. She would not have wanted the peace dividend to gallop ahead, well outstripping a stable peace.

But if we had tried to lock Russia into a European system of collective security and international legal norms, while adding trade-trade to jaw-jaw, could Russia have taken a different path? At that stage, Russians seemed eager to accept advice from the West.

Who knows? Could they have been persuaded that although free enterprise was vital and with it privatisation, this did not mean flogging off hugely valuable natural resources at fire-sale prices to those who would become the oligarchs and then use some of their profits to corrupt Vladimir Putin.

Around the beginning of the century, a shrewd diplomatic observer described Putin as a man unsure of himself and the system which he had inherited. He did not know which bits of the central Russian state he could rely on. Not by temperament a democrat or a free marketeer, he might have been ready to accept that they seemed to work better than the old Soviet way of doing things.

It may be that it was all doomed to go wrong. A blend of personal insecurity, paranoia, blackness of soul, resentment of the West and aggressive Russian nationalism – all reinforced by the odd billion – might always have led him to the dark side. But there would have been no harm in trying a more welcoming approach.

Apropos darkness, proposals to try him in the Hague are little more than whistling to keep up our spirits in the dark. It is a long way from the Kremlin to the Hague. It may be an equally long way to a peace deal in Ukraine. I have talked to a couple of characters who are well-informed themselves and in a position to draw on other similar assessments. They are not offering much comfort. They believe that there is no prospect of overthrowing Putin and they do not think that he will lose the war, which may be just as well. The use of battlefield nuclear weapons is part of Russian military doctrine. That is not a pleasant thought.

Nor is the current calibre of Western leadership. President Biden is not as good as he was, and he never was much good. As for the alternatives, which is more alarming: Donald Trump’s delusion that he might regain the White House, or the vast numbers of Americans who seem ready to encourage that delusion?

Then we have Boris. It was never going to last. Almost a month had passed since he had said or done something idiotic. Was it conceivable that he had changed? No, it was not. To compare Ukrainians’ heroism with Brexit: has he never come across the idea of engaging brain before opening mouth? Then again, that is virtually irrelevant. As the man has no moral sense whatsoever, it is unlikely that he will ever be able to make much sense.

The Scot Nats had not been doing well of late. They must be applauding Boris and wishing that he will take every opportunity to visit Scotland. Douglas Ross, the Scottish Tory Leader, had withdrawn his opposition to Boris. He cannot change his mind, straight away. But there are other Tory MPs who became resigned to Boris because of Ukraine. They have now been reminded why they almost wrote a letter calling for a confidence vote. Although he cannot go immediately, he does have to go.