Excerpts of Remarks by The Rt. Hon. The Baroness Margaret Thatcher L.G., O.M., F.R.S. Before the Heritage Foundation’s “Leadership for America” Gala

Washington, D.C.
December 12, 1997

‘Courage’

(Emphasis added throughout.)

***

President Reagan is one of the greatest men of our time, and one of the greatest American
Presidents of all time. If that is not fully appreciated today, and sadly it is not, it isn’t really
surprising. After all, so many people have been proved wrong by Ronald Reagan that they
simply daren’t acknowledge his achievement. Forests have already been pulped to print the
revisionist analyses of the eighties. Those who were once so confident of the superiority of the
Soviet system that they advocated appeasement of it now pretend to believe that it was doomed
to inevitable collapse. Tell that to the Russians! The former Soviet ministers didn’t — and don’t
— doubt the seriousness of the struggle, even if Western liberal commentators do.

***

The Need for — and Power of — Courage

When The Heritage Foundation asked me to make the virtue of Courage the centerpiece of this
Lecture, I was not displeased. … [I]n my political lifetime, I believe that it is fortitude or
Courage that we’ve most needed and often, I fear, most lacked.

Today we are particularly conscious of the Courage of Ronald Reagan….

…Ronald Reagan set out to challenge everything that the liberal political elite of America accepted
and sought to propagate. They believed that America was doomed to decline. He believed it was
destined for further greatness. They imagined that sooner or later there would be convergence
between the free Western system and the socialist Eastern system, and that some kind of social
democratic outcome was inevitable. He, by contrast, considered that socialism was a patent
failure which should be cast onto the trash heap of history…. ***

It is, however, for fighting and winning the Cold War that Ronald Reagan deserves the
most credit — and credit not just from Americans, but from the rest of what we called in
those days the Free World, and from those in the former communist states who can now
breathe the air of liberty….

Of course, there were always some honest men struggling to arrest the decline, or at least to
ameliorate its consequences. The doctrine of “containment” was envisaged as a way of
conducting a strategic resistance to communist incursion. Similarly, the doctrine of “détènte”
also had its honorable Western advocates….But the fact remains that it meant different things to
different sides.

For the West, détènte signified — as the word itself literally means — an easing in tension between
the two superpowers and two blocs. This made a certain sense at the time, because it reduced the
risk of a nuclear confrontation which Western unpreparedness had brought closer because we had
allowed our conventional defences to run down. But it also threatened to lead us into a fatal
trap. For to the Soviets, détènte signified merely the promotion of their goal of world
domination while minimizing the risk of direct military confrontation. So under the cloak of
wordy communiqués about peace and understanding, the Soviet Union expanded its
nuclear arsenal and its navy, engaged in continual doctrinal warfare, and subverted states
around the globe by means of its own advisers and the armed forces of its surrogates.
There was only one destination to which this path could lead — that of Western defeat.
And that’s where we were heading.

***

….The Soviet Union was dangerous — deadly dangerous — but the danger was that from a
wounded predator, not some proud beast of the jungle.

The more intelligent Soviet apparatchiks had grasped that the economic and social system of the
USSR was crumbling….It would have to rely for its survival on the ability to terrify its opponents
with the same success as it had terrified its own citizens.

A totally planned society and economy has the ability to concentrate productive capacity on some
fixed objective with a reasonable degree of success, and do it better than liberal democracies.
But totalitarianism can only work like this for a relatively short time, after which the waste,
distortions, and corruption increase intolerably. So the Soviet Union had to aim at global
dominance, and achieve it quickly, because given a free competition between systems no one
would wish to choose that of the Soviets. Their problem was that even though they diverted the
best of their talent and a huge share of their GDP to the military complex, they lacked the moral
and material resources to achieve superiority. That would be apparent as soon as the West
found leaders determined to face them down.

Ronald Reagan’s Contribution

This was what Ronald Reagan, with my enthusiastic support and that of a number of
other leaders, set out as President to do. And he did it on the basis of a well-considered
and elaborated doctrine.

The world has, of course, seen many international doctrines — Monroe, Truman, and Brezhnev
have all made their contributions, some more positive than others. But for my money it is the
Reagan doctrine…that has had the best and greatest impact. This was a rejection of both
containment and détènte….the truce with communism was over. The West would henceforth
regard no area of the world as destined to forego its liberty simply because the Soviets claimed it
to be within their sphere of influence. We would fight a battle of ideas against communism,
and we would give material support to those who fought to recover their nations from
tyranny.

President Reagan could have no illusion about the opposition he would face at home in embarking
on this course: He had, after all, seen these forces weaken the West throughout the seventies.
But he used his inimitable ability to speak to the hearts of the American people and to appeal over
the heads of the cynical, can’t-do elite. He and Cap Weinberger made no secret of the
objective: military superiority. The Soviets understood more quickly than his domestic
critics the seriousness of what was at stake. The Russian rhetoric grew more violent; but an
understanding that the game was up gradually dawned in the recesses of the Politburo.

….The Soviet power brokers knew that they had to choose a reformer because they understood
that the old strategy of intimidating and subverting would not work with Ronald Reagan in
the White House and — who knows? — even Margaret Thatcher in 10 Downing Street.

The final straw for the Evil Empire was the Strategic Defense Initiative. President Reagan
was, I believe, deliberately and cunningly tempted by the Soviets at Reykjavik. They made ever
more alluring offers to cut their nuclear arsenals, and the President, who was a genuine believer in
a nuclear-weapons-free world (it was one of the few things we disagreed about), thought he was
making progress. There was no mention of SDI, and it appeared that the Soviets had tacitly
accepted that its future was not for negotiation. Then, at the very last moment, they insisted that
SDI be effectively abandoned. The President immediately refused, the talks ended in acrimony,
and in the media he was heavily criticised. But it was on that day, when a lesser man would
have compromised, that he showed his mettle.

As a result of his courage, work on the SDI programme continued and the Soviets understood
that their last gambit had failed. Three years later, when Mr. Gorbachev peacefully allowed
Eastern Europe to slide out of Soviet control, Ronald Reagan’s earlier decision to stand firm was
vindicated. The Soviets at last understood that the best they could hope for was to be allowed to
reform their system, not to impose it on the rest of the world. And, of course, as soon as they
embarked upon serious reform the artificial construct of the USSR, sustained by lies and
violence for more than half a century, imploded with a whimper.

The idea that such achievements were a matter of luck is frankly laughable. Yes: The
President had luck. But he deserved the luck he enjoyed. Fortune favours the brave, the saying
runs. As this hero of our times faces his final and most merciless enemy, he shows the same quiet
courage which allowed him to break the world free of a monstrous creed without a shot being
fired. President Reagan: Your friends salute you!

New Challenges for Old

Democracies, like human beings, have a tendency to relax when the worst is over. Our Western
democracies accordingly relaxed — both at home and abroad — in the period after the fall of the
Berlin Wall.

It was, of course, right that in this period there should be a new look at priorities. The threat
from the Soviet Union was much diminished — both directly in Europe and indirectly in regional
conflicts which they had once exploited.

***

…[T]he post-Cold War slackening of resolve has led to a lack of military preparedness.
Understandably, with the end of the Cold War the sense of omni-Present Danger receded. Less
excusably, the fact that the Soviet Union and its successor states no longer challenged the West’s
very survival led Western countries to behave as if other, new threats could be ignored. Yet the
truth is so obvious that surely only an expert could miss it: There is never a lack of potential
aggressors.

We now have to reassess our defence spending, which has been cut back too far: Still more
significant has been the failure to grasp the vital importance of investment in the very latest
defence technology. The crucial importance of keeping up research and development in defence
is the great lesson of SDI. It is also the lesson — in two respects — of today’s confrontation with
Iraq.

The original defeat of Saddam’s forces was so swift — though sadly not complete — because of
our overwhelming technical superiority. The fact that we are still having to apply constant
pressure and the closest scrutiny to Iraq also bears witness to the lethal capability which science
and technology can place in a dictator’s hands and the enormous difficulty of removing it.
Chemical and biological weapons and the components for nuclear weapons can be all too easily
concealed.

The proliferation of ballistic missile technology also greatly adds to the menace…. Diplomatic
pressure to restrict proliferation, though it may be useful, can never be a sufficient instrument in
itself. It is important that the West remain able and willing — and is known to be able and
willing — to take preemptive action if that should ultimately become necessary.

But it is also vital that progress be made towards the construction of an effective global defence
against missile attack. This would be a large and costly venture to which America’s allies must
be prepared to contribute; it would require a rare degree of courageous statesmanship to carry it
through. But it is also difficult to overstate the terrible consequences if we were to fail to take
measures to protect our populations while there is still time to do so.

…[P]olitical courage will be required constantly to restate the case for Western unity under
American leadership. America was left by the end of the Cold War as the effective global
power of last resort, the only superpower. But there was also a widespread reluctance to face up
to this reality. The same mentality which Ronald Reagan had had to overcome was at work.
Large numbers of intellectuals and commentators, uneasy at the consequences of a victory whose
causes they had never properly understood, sought to submerge America and the West in a new,
muddled multilateralism. I suppose it’s not surprising. As Irving Kristol once noted, “No
modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals.”

***

The Challenge Ahead

Today’s international policy makers have succumbed to a liberal contagion whose most alarming
symptom is to view any new and artificial structure as preferable to a traditional and tested one.
So they forget that it was powerful nation states, drawing on national loyalties and national
armies, which enforced UN Security Council Resolutions and defeated Iraq in 1991. Their
short-term goal is to subordinate American and other national sovereignties to multilateral
authorities; their long-term goal, one suspects, is to establish the UN as a kind of embryo world
government.

***

International relations today are in a kind of limbo. Few politicians and diplomats really
believe that any power other than the United States can guarantee the peace or punish
aggression. But neither is there sufficient cohesion in the West to give America the moral
and material support she must have to fulfill that role.

This has to change. America’s duty is to lead: The other Western countries’ duty is to support
its leadership….Provided Western countries unite under American leadership, the West will
remain the dominant global influence; if we do not, the opportunity for rogue states and new
tyrannical powers to exploit our divisions will increase, and so will the danger to all.

….These are as much the tasks of today as they were of yesterday, as much the duty of
conservative believers now as they were when Ronald Reagan and I refused to accept the decline
of the West as our ineluctable destiny. As the poet said: “That which thy fathers bequeathed
thee, earn it anew if thou would’st possess it.”

— End of Excerpts of Remarks —