Thatcherism and the Cold War

On 26 June 1979 Margaret Thatcher’s plane made a brief refuelling stop in Moscow on its way to a summit in Japan. A group of Soviet leaders, led by Alexei Kosygin, came out to the airport to have a late supper with the British Prime Minister. The encounter was good-humoured – perhaps because the Russians had already been to a banquet earlier in the evening and were, one assumes, well lubricated by toasts to ‘international friendship’. Discussions ranged widely and at one point Thatcher asked whether the Soviet Union would face problems because of Islamic unrest in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Official notes of the meeting record dryly that Kosygin – who must already have been planning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that was to take place on Christmas Day 1979 – ‘made no comment’. All this reminds us how much the world has changed in the three decades since 1979 and, in particular, how much of that change is due to the end of the Cold War. Thatcherism coincided with a particular phase of the Cold War, between the fall of Saigon – on the very day that Ronald Reagan wrote his first letter to Margaret Thatcher – and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The subsequent reunification of Germany and its accompanying upheavals helped to bring Margaret Thatcher down. This was a period that began when the West – weakened by Vietnam, Watergate, the oil crisis and the aftermath of internal upheavals in the late 1960s – seemed on the back foot and when the clients of the Soviet Union seemed, in Vietnam and Angola, to be on the march.