Statecraft. Margaret Thatcher
nature and of nature’s God entitled them, it was from our Locke and Sidney, our Harrington and Coke, that your Henry and your Jefferson, your Madison and Hamilton took their bearings.‡
These considerations are not just of academic importance. Their significance lies in the fact that they allow us to grasp an important truth about America – namely that it is the most reliable force for freedom in the world, because the entrenched values of freedom are what make sense of its whole existence.
That is why I felt equally entitled in another lecture on the same theme some two years later to make the following claim:
The modern world began in earnest on July 4th 1776. That was the moment when the rebellious colonists put pen to parchment and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour in defence of truths they held to be self-evident: ‘That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights … and that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ Henceforth patriotism would not simply be loyalty to the homeland, but a dedication to principles held to be both universal and permanent.*
Similar claims have, of course, been made for other revolutions. But they cannot ultimately be sustained. The French Revolution sacrificed Liberty to Equality – Fraternity never really mattered at all – and then Equality quickly gave way to centralised dictatorship. Today the only constructive results of that upheaval are to be found in the administrative reorganisations which succeeded it. The Bolshevik Revolution can be seen in retrospect to have been a reversion to the most odious kind of age-old tyranny, supplemented by the technological apparatus of totalitarianism. And it had no constructive results whatever.
The American Revolution, however, was not a revolution in either of these senses. It was successful through war, but its intentions were to secure peace and prosperity. It broke the political link with Britain, but it contained no programme of social or cultural transformation. Its novelty was at once more limited and more radical, for on the basis of English thinking about the rights of the subject, the rule of law and a limited government, it pronounced a doctrine that would be the basis of democracy.
On frequent occasions, especially when I have a speech to make in the United States, I take in my handbag a well-thumbed little yellow volume – a Bicentennial Keepsake Edition of the United States Constitution, given me by President George Bush Sr and signed by the members of the United States Supreme Court. In the introduction to it, the late Warren Burger, one of the great American judges and the nation’s longest-serving Chief Justice, notes: ‘The [US] Constitution represented not a grant of power from rulers to the people ruled – as with King John’s grant of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 – but a grant of power by the people to the government which they had created.’
And this really sums up what the American Revolution means to the world – and America to me.
These reflections lead me to certain conclusions about the conduct of international politics.
America alone has the moral as well as the material capacity for world leadership
America’s destiny is bound up with global expression of the values of freedom
America’s closest allies, particularly her allies in the English-speaking world, must regard America’s mission as encompassing their own.
JUST ONE POLE
As I have argued in the previous chapter, however you look at it, it was the West which won the Cold War. But among the victors the United States emerged supreme. Because America is uniquely equipped to lead by its historic and philosophical identification with the cause of liberty, this is something I welcome. But many others neither welcome nor accept it.
As the jargon of the experts in geopolitics has it – and in such matters a certain amount of jargon must be permitted – we have moved with the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Union from a ‘bipolar’ to a ‘unipolar’ world. Today America is the only superpower. No earlier superpower – not even the Roman, Habsburg or British Empires in their prime – had the resources, reach or superiority over its closest rival enjoyed by America today. Nor is this simply to be explained, negatively, by the outcome of the Cold War. It is also to be understood, positively, as the result of the dynamism inherent in the American system.
The Caesars, the Habsburgs and the British were in their day heartily disliked by those envious of their power: such is generally the fate of those who bestride the globe. America, by contrast, has until quite recently escaped such odium. This is because, at least outside its own hemisphere, it has refused the temptations of territorial expansion. Indeed, the potential of America has until the present day always exceeded its actual power.
The United States, as befits the world’s greatest democracy, is a reluctant warrior. In the two great wars of the twentieth century it was a late entrant. Even during the Cold War America was, it is sometimes overlooked, for much of the time far from aggressively anti-Soviet. The very doctrine of containment, which exercised greater influence than any other upon American foreign policy during those years, was at heart a defensive doctrine, aimed not at rolling back communism but rather at preventing its rolling remorselessly forward. For all these reasons, America has been a rather well-liked power.
But Americans have recently had to take more seriously the hostility which the United States faces from powerful forces outside its borders. The opponents of the American superpower do not, at present at least, have much in common except their shared hatreds. The more moderate or most discreet of them – in Continental Europe (especially France), Russia and China – express their opposition to America’s superpower status in terms of an alternative doctrine of ‘multi-polarity’. Thus President Jacques Chirac of France has evoked a new ‘collective sovereignty’ to check American power, and his Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, has complained that ‘the United States often behaves in a unilateral way and has difficulties in taking on the role to which it aspires, that of organiser of the international community’.* Beijing is particularly fond of such language. In April 1997 then-President Boris Yeltsin and President Jiang Zemin embraced a Sino–Russian ‘strategic partnership’ aimed at those who would ‘push the world toward a unipolar order’. The following month the ever-obliging French President agreed with his Chinese host that there was need of an international order with ‘power centres besides the United States’.† Most recently, the Swedish Prime Minister, host to the chaotic EU–US Summit at Gothenberg, extolled the EU as ‘one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to US world domination’.‡
Very different in tone – and intent – from such grumblings from peevish statesmen have been the threats levelled against America and Americans from the proponents of Islamic revolution. Well before 11 September 2001 the Islamic terrorist supremo Osama bin Laden had left us in no doubt about his (and many others’) objectives:
We predict a black day for America and the end of the United States as the United States, and it will become separate states and will retreat from our land and collect the bodies of its sons back to America, God willing.§
Bin Laden and his associates were even then well advanced in their plans to fulfil those threats.
In the face of such hostility, any great power faces two temptations. The first, which has been much talked about, is isolationism. In fact, to judge from much of the rhetoric used about America one would easily think that the drawbridge had already risen. President Clinton, for example, described the Senate’s (entirely correct) decision in October 1999 to oppose the nuclear test ban treaty as ‘a new isolationism’. This was part of a broader campaign to portray the Republican Party as a whole as insufficiently committed to America’s world role. It is in this context worth recalling