Thatcher’s US Policy II: The Diplomacy of Interests

Abstract

The costs of Britain’s American policy were clear, sometimes painfully so, under Thatcher, while the benefits of its first two objectives, at least, were hard to demonstrate. It was beyond the power of British diplomacy to exercise decisive influence over the level of US engagement in the world. That depended primarily on the existence of external threats to American interests and secondarily on the ability of US administrations to convince their electorates of the reality of these threats. Influencing US foreign policy offered more scope, especially if the prime minister and president of the day liked each other enough to engage in close consultations. Thatcher enjoyed considerable success in this regard but even so, it is still hard to determine how much influence she actually exercised. Was she, for example, an independent source of opinion listened to by senior figures in the Reagan administration, or merely the instrument of one faction against another in the bureaucratic politics which characterizes much of the American policy process? Even the strong testimony of American officials, as opposed to their British counterparts, about the extent of Thatcher’s influence in Washington provides no easy answer to that question.