There Is No Alternative

“It is easy to forget the state of the country . . . in the years which led up to 1979,” remarked Michael Howard, leader of the Conservative Party from 2003 to 2005. “The air of defeatism which was the prevailing climate of the time was the economic and social equivalent of Munich . . . from the beginning she displayed the resolve and determination which made her, to my mind, the peacetime counterpart of Churchill.” (Courtesy of the family of Srdja Djukanovic)

Having perceived the gathering of historical forces, she mastered them. She reversed the advance of socialism in Britain, proving both that a country can be ripped from a seemingly overdetermined trajectory and that it takes only a single figure with an exceptionally strong will to do so. She did not single-handedly cause the Soviet empire to crumble, but she landed some of the most devastating punches of the Cold War and, extraordinarily, emerged unbloodied from the fight.

There is an even larger sense in which Margaret Thatcher perceived and mastered the forces of history.

Since the eighteenth century, two views of political life have vied for dominance in the Western world. They are views about the hypothetical state of nature—the condition of mankind in the absence of government. The first view is that of Thomas Hobbes: The life of man in the state of nature, he wrote, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The second is that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.”

Hobbes wrote Leviathan during the English civil wars of the seventeenth century. Such horrors as he had seen, he believed, arose because of the absence of government, and in particular, the absence of a government powerful enough to overawe men who would otherwise be fractious and dominated by self-interest.

Leviathan is a defense of a central and commanding power in political life. It is sometimes understood, for this reason, as an argument for totalitarianism. A close study of Hobbes suggests little to encourage this view. The form of this central power was to Hobbes largely a matter of indifference. He favored a monarchy, but this is not his key point. His key point is that there is a choice between anarchy and a powerful state. And since, as he could plainly see, anarchy was awful, he chose a powerful state.

This powerful state is the Leviathan, and it is a Leviathan because it possesses—in theory, at least—a monopoly on violence. Leviathan to this day remains a critical justification for the existence and the primacy of the nation-state. This was a primacy Thatcher sought instinctively and ferociously to preserve.

It is perverse that Hobbes is widely seen as providing a defense of absolutism in political life, for the historical trail between his thought and the unspeakable evils of the twentieth century is almost impossible to map. Neither Lenin, nor Stalin, nor Hitler, nor Mao thought in his terms; they did not justify their rule by an appeal to a state of nature in which men would find themselves enemies to one another.

These were men, instead, who had read Rousseau.

It is Rousseau’s view of the state of nature, not Hobbes’s, to which the great and awful events that began with the Terror and ended with the Gulag may be traced. In Rousseau’s view, man is born both good and noble; if he finds himself in chains, it is because these chains have been imposed by government. A syllogism is implied. If these chains have been imposed by government, these chains must be snapped. If these chains must be snapped, violence must be employed—otherwise, men would free themselves. If violence must be employed, it must be employed without restraint. Every revolutionary movement from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first has seen the logic of this position. It is inexorable.

I do not believe Margaret Thatcher was a careful student of Hobbes—or of Rousseau, for that matter. To judge from her autobiography, she too misunderstood Hobbes’s point. Raisa Gorbachev, apparently, displayed an interest in the copy of Leviathan on Thatcher’s bookshelf during her visit to Chequers; Thatcher worried this might signify that Mrs. Gorbachev was a particularly hard-line communist. But while she did not properly understand what Hobbes had written, she was, nonetheless, in instinctive agreement with his views. Political life, Thatcher believed, must be organized around nation-states. These states must possess a monopoly on violence. The authority of the nation-state must not be compromised from the outside, by transnational bodies such as the European Union, or from the inside, by groups such as the National Union of Mineworkers.

Thatcher’s career may be viewed as a series of rebukes to those who would seek to diminish the authority of the nation-state and to reduce its monopoly on violence. She is thus not only one of the greatest enemies of socialism the world has known, but one of the greatest enemies of anarchy, as well. Again, she perceived the forces of history, and again, she mastered them.

If you need to be reminded why anarchy is awful, one word will suffice: Iraq.

That word brings me to my next point. Thatcher was enormously prescient. But she was not supernaturally prescient, and it is a mistake to assign to her the status of a secular saint. On some issues, she was simply wrong. Iraq was one of them. By “wrong,” I do not mean the invasion of Iraq was ultimately wrong. I don’t know yet whether it was, and this is not the place for this debate. I mean that she did not weigh properly the real risk that invading Iraq would lead to anarchy, and she did not foresee what would be required to contain that anarchy. In this sense, she was wrong.²⁷¹

On other issues—critical issues—she was bizarrely oblivious. This is often the case, even among the political figures who matter most. If some politicians are given the gift of seeing into the loom of time, they are rarely given the gift of seeing it whole. Churchill saw with astonishing prescience the danger posed by the Nazi regime; in 1946, he saw with the same prescience the descent of the Iron Curtain. About India, however, he was blind, and he was blind again in thinking the call for social reform in postwar Britain could be ignored.

The world’s attention now is focused on the conflict with radical Islam. Rightly so. But let us be frank: About this, Margaret Thatcher was blind. In this regard, she doesn’t matter. I looked everywhere for evidence that she had even considered the issue carefully. I could not find it.

CB: There’s not a single mention in your book, and not a single mention in any memoir from the time, of anyone being concerned by the growing threat of Islamic extremism—

Bernard Ingham: No.

CB: Were there no indications at the time that this was an issue that would preoccupy Britain so greatly in the next decades?

BI: Well, I suppose our objective was to keep them on our side because of the oil . . . and I suppose that perhaps in trying to keep them on our side because of the oil we did exacerbate the problem. Because we did play up to some pretty reprehensible regimes . . . Where were the indications coming from, apart from OPEC, which was really a business response, a monopolist response, where were the indications coming from of Islamic extremism at the time?

CB: Well, the Iranian revolution, for one thing. The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt. The rise of the Taliban, which of course we contributed to—

BI: Yes, but we’d put up—let me plead our history, we’d put up with so many sects in our time! HAH! HAH! I mean, we put up with India! HAH! I mean, what was another sect?! HAH! HAH! . . . But you’re quite right . . . who the hell had ever heard of Islamic extremism in 1979? I didn’t. I’d heard of oil.

Who the hell had ever heard of Islamic extremism in 1979? I had, for one: I was only eleven years old, but I had seen newscasts about American hostages with hoods over their heads. Yet by all accounts, these images made a bigger impression on me than they did on Thatcher and those around her.

CB: During the time that you were working with Margaret Thatcher, do you remember anyone asking the question, “Are we nurturing a problem with Islamic fundamentalism, here and abroad?”

John Hoskyns: It wasn’t in the air. It wasn’t in the air at all.

I asked this question again and again; the response was always the same.

CB: When you were working with Mrs. Thatcher, was there any anticipation of the conflict with radical Islam?

Peter Walker: No, not really, no.

CB: It was really not anticipated—

PW: I never heard a murmur.

However much this appears to be the crucial conflict of the modern world, it truly does seem that Thatcher had nothing to say about it.

Thatcher’s vision and her accomplishments were considerable—immense, even—but this business of venerating her as an infallible living god is intellectually indefensible and slightly idolatrous. It simply isn’t plausible, however often it is asserted, that if she were still in charge, we wouldn’t be in this mess—“this mess” being whatever has recently gone wrong.

In March 2007, when British sailors were seized, held hostage, and humiliated by the Iranian navy, you could scarcely open a newspaper without reading that this would never have happened if Thatcher were in power.

CB: How do you think she would have handled the Iranian seizure of the British sailors? And I know you can’t answer that definitively, but—

Charles Powell: Yes, well, I mean, it’s hard to—she was shocked, to the degree that she understood what had happened, she really was. Well, first of all, I find it so hard to believe it would have happened in those days. I mean, her armed forces were just better-equipped and everything . . . once it had happened, I think she would have been very strong in her rhetoric about absolutely no bargaining . . . we wouldn’t have surrendered to blackmail, there would have been no giving in to the Iranians, for the hostages . . . and they would certainly not have been treated in any way as heroes when they got back. But that’s all speculation.

Perhaps that is just what would have happened—no bargaining, no giving in, and no one would have dared to do that to her in the first place. Or perhaps not. A small but relevant point: On April 17, 1984, a group of anti-Gadhafi demonstrators gathered in front of the Libyan embassy in London. Gadhafi loyalists opened fire on the demonstrators from the second floor of the embassy, striking and killing a young British policewoman. Shortly afterward, the murderers were permitted quietly to leave the country. They were not arrested and tried, despite howls of outrage from the British press. Why not? Because Thatcher feared reprisals against British citizens in Libya. This is precisely the sort of thing that would never have happened if Thatcher were still in power, except that in this case, Thatcher was in power.

In other words, as Powell rightly says, it is all speculation.

It is likewise often said that if Thatcher were still in power, we would never have gone into Iraq so unprepared to cope with the aftermath of the invasion.

CB: I wonder how you think she would have handled Iraq . . . The overwhelming feeling I get is that this is a woman who picks her battles very, very carefully—

John Hoskyns: Yes.

Miranda Hoskyns: You always said she was quite cautious about quite a lot of things—

JH: She was, rightly. Everyone said she was very cautious, but one would say that was sensible. Sensibly so. She realized how things can go wrong. And also, certainly, once she’d been prime minister for five or six years, she also realized how absolutely crucial it was—and this was what I was always going on about, with my business experience and indeed my military experience, little though that was—that there really are only a few things that you’re going to be able to do, and they’ve got to be related to whatever the great purpose is, small in number, and they’ve got to be worked out like mad before you do them. And even then, one out of three will probably go disastrously wrong. This you’ve seen in all her domestic policy. So I can imagine her intuitively saying, you know . . . the question is, how do we get out again? . . . I can imagine that she would have been basically pretty sympathetic to the war, as I was . . . I didn’t think, “Oh, this is a wonderful idea. This is the best thing we’ve ever done,” but what I could see was, and I think people over here were very short-sighted about it, was if you had had 9/11 in the middle of London, you do realize that you’ve got to do something —electorally, politically, and in terms of sort of material force . . . What it is you do, I don’t know, but you can’t just sort of say, “We must all stay very calm and play ‘The Stars and Stripes’ and hope for the best.” Because all the Arabists say, or many of them say, the one thing Islamic fundamentalism says is that the West is depraved, disintegrating, collapsing, corrupt, and all we really have to do is give one push and the whole thing will implode. So you better make sure that they don’t get that presumption confirmed . . . She might easily have listened, she might have talked to one of the top generals or soldiers offline, nobody knowing, and they would have said, “I’m sure we can win that little war, but we really do have to know what happens after that.” . . . And I would have thought her caution would have said, “We really do have to know.” Because again, she’s intuitive! She isn’t stupid! And one feels now, which I didn’t at the time, because I didn’t believe it, but you know, that Rumsfeld and others were—almost mad! They must have been! . . . I feel that if she’d been there, she wouldn’t have had those sort of people, she wouldn’t have been that stupid herself, and she’d have had cleverer people ’round her, and there’s a chance she would have said . . . “I think this Rumsfeld fellow’s got it wrong. I don’t think he really understands what he’s doing. And he should certainly not, as your Secretary of Defense, be telling Colin Powell to go away and shut up. Because the State Department is going to have to pick up these pieces.” I can’t believe she would have been that stupid. Whereas it seems to me that Blair thought, “This is wonderful. I’m going to ride behind the mighty colossus of American military power, we put in a few thousand jolly good British troops, just to show we’re willing, and my name will be in lights! Isn’t this fun!” You know?

That she would have exhibited greater caution about Iraq is an extremely common point of view; no one to whom I spoke dissented from it.

CB: Just as a hypothetical—had she been in power, how do you think she would have dealt with the second, the most recent, Iraq War? Do you think she would have offered the kind of support Tony Blair offered—

Peter Walker: Um, I mean, it’s a guess, obviously—

CB: Absolutely, of course it is—

PW: I would have guessed that she would have given much more thought to what happens when the initial battle is over. I mean, the extraordinary thing about the whole affair, two really bad things, is that both George Bush and Tony Blair, well, first, they misled people about the reason, and both tried to doctor the intelligence services’ advice, and they gave no thought to—after you won the military battle, what the hell do you do? And I think, if she had had the caliber of foreign secretary of Peter Carrington, he would have said, “Look, when this is over, there’ll be civil war in Iraq. You’ve got these two groups that hate each other, despise each other, and no matter how nasty the present president has been, he’s stopped that civil war taking place.”

Not only would Thatcher have had the foresight to prevent the Iraq debacle, her admirers say, it wouldn’t have been an issue in the first place if only she had remained in power:

Bernard Ingham: I tell you, the situation would not have arisen if she’d have been in office in ’91. She’d have gone straight through to Baghdad. She wouldn’t have stopped. The turkey shoot—straight through to Baghdad. No, she would have had to persuade George Bush, but she was a fairly formidable persuader. And she would have simply said, “Well, we’re not leaving our job half-done.”

CB: Really? You think she would have had the ability to persuade him? Because he was so reluctant. Really reluctant.

BI: Well, what you don’t know is what kind of diplomatic efforts she would have mounted to secure that, do you? I mean, damn it, they were defeated, weren’t they? What you don’t know is what kind of aftermath we would have had to cope with—nobody knows that.

CB: You have to imagine the aftermath would have been pretty similar to what we’re seeing now.

BI: Could have been, yes.

CB: And that was precisely the problem Bush Senior didn’t want.

BI: Could well be. But I think she was of the view, admittedly she was out of office, that we should have gone through to Baghdad and finished the job.

CB: You think she was of the view, or have you heard her say that?

BI: I’ve heard her say that.

Now let’s look at the facts; they are a matter of public record. In 2002—in her last significant public speech, delivered to an American audience—this is what she said:

Our purpose must be to strike the other centers of Islamic terrorism wherever they are. And we must act equally strongly against those states which harbor terrorists and develop weapons of mass destruction that might be used against us or our allies.

The recent shameful European reaction to President Bush’s State of the Union Speech reminds me of nothing so much as that which greeted President Reagan’s words two decades ago. Americans shouldn’t take too much notice. Fear masquerading as caution, pique posing as dignity, words substituting for thought—we have been there many times before. Whatever the protests of the faint-hearts, it is high time to take action against the rogue states which are arming against us.

In particular, Saddam Hussein constitutes unfinished business. And he now needs to be finished—for good. First rate intelligence, the support of opposition elements within Iraq, and overwhelming force will probably all be required. But the risks of not acting far outweigh those of allowing Saddam to continue developing his weapons of war. I hope and trust that Britain will support to the hilt the action your president decides to take.²⁷²

I see no evidence in these remarks that she would have shown any greater prescience about Iraq than those who were, in fact, in power.²⁷³ She was certainly correct to note that first-rate intelligence, the support of opposition elements within Iraq, and overwhelming force would be required. Perhaps if she had been in power, she would have noticed the absence of all three elements in the plan. But we simply cannot know.

So that is not why she matters. She matters enough for what she really did perceive and what she really did achieve that there is no need to exaggerate. It does not diminish her much to note that as idols generally do, she has feet of clay.

A final point. She matters now because her battles are not over. For a brief, perishable moment during the 1990s, it was possible to imagine that the great questions of history had been settled. But history did not, as Francis Fukuyama predicted, come to an end. Quite the contrary.

Socialism was buried prematurely. This fact has been little remarked, precisely because the world’s attention has in recent times been focused on the dramatic rise of Islamic extremism. Amid this anxiety it has been forgotten that the appeal of socialism as a political program is ultimately far wider, more seductive, and more enduring than political Islam. To the vast majority of the secular world, Islam is alien and will always be alien. Islamic law is widely and correctly perceived as a recipe for immiseration. This is not so of socialism, a political movement that like fascism embodies the religious impulse in secular form, and is thus an ideology destined to rise again and again from the grave, skeletal claws outstretched and grasping for the instruments and subjects of labor.

Wherever men are miserable—and that is almost everywhere—they will be vulnerable to those who promise Utopia, for if Hobbes expressed some portion of the truth, Rousseau expressed some portion of the truth as well. There is no inconsistency between the declaration that life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short and the declaration that man is everywhere in chains. That this observation is bleak is no reason not to think it correct. If for no other reason, I doubt the promises of socialism will ever lose their capacity to inspire.

Throughout Central America, the Middle East, and Africa, policies Thatcher would deplore remain or have recently been put in place. One need only look at the Iraqi constitution, which assumes that it is the business of the state and not the individual to create jobs, to see that this is so. Socialism is again on the ascendant in Latin America. It is a commonplace of American political discourse that we must reduce our dependence upon Saudi oil, given the Saudi kingdom’s pernicious tendency to export Islamic extremism. We import almost as much Venezuelan oil as we do Saudi oil. Venezuela is now exporting socialist extremism every bit as energetically as the Saudis export Islamic extremism. Cuba appears for now to have won the stand-off with the United States. Socialist dogma and practice remain solidly entrenched throughout Africa and the Middle East. Socialism is again on the march throughout Europe, especially in France. France, you say? But Sarkozy won. Indeed he did. And the first thing he did upon taking office—because he had no choice—was pack his government with socialists. He even married one.

According to a poll conducted in 2005, only 36 percent of French citizens support the free-enterprise system. In Germany, 47 percent of the population claims to embrace socialist ideals.²⁷⁴ Chancellor Angela Merkel, once described as Germany’s Thatcher, has abandoned plans for free-market reforms. She has instead imposed new taxes and restrictions on the labor market. She has promised new efforts to “regulate” globalization.

American academics remain enthralled by socialism. You will not find many college students wearing Osama bin Laden T-shirts, but Che Guevara T-shirts are campus favorites. Socialism is the real message of the anti-globalization movement: The forces Thatcher confronted are one and the same as the forces that in 1999 led to the imposition of martial law in Seattle.

I live in Istanbul, and I am regularly asked by concerned Americans whether secularism in Turkey is under threat. Do I fear, they ask, that the Turkish government has fallen under the control of Islamic crypto-fundamentalists? My standard answer to this question is that this is a legitimate concern, but so far I am not excessively alarmed. In fact, the only political violence I’ve seen here has nothing to do with Islam. On May Day 2008, just as I was finishing this book, the Turkish security forces used tear gas and water cannons to prevent crowds of trade unionists, communists, and anarchists from marching to Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Turkey’s three main trade union confederations, which bitterly oppose the government’s efforts to implement free-market reforms, claimed to have mobilized half a million marchers. The demonstrators showed up with gas masks and Molotov cocktails, throwing rocks at the police. The police beat them indiscriminately. They fired gas bombs into the crowd and shot water cannons into the trade union headquarters. Hundreds were arrested. Dozens were injured. I was proofreading the chapter of this book titled “I Hate Communists” when the police chased some 500 wet, coughing communists right down the street in front of me.²⁷⁵

This conflict, even more than the divide between religion and secularism, will be the fault line of the coming century. How could it not be? It has been the fault line of political life since the French Revolution.

I cannot promise it (remember Chiang!), but I do strongly suspect that Margaret Thatcher’s ideas and personality will assume an even greater significance with time. Recognizing what she achieved in Britain—and coolly appraising the cost of these victories, which was considerable—is as essential for our generation as for hers. Every society confronting these historical forces will inevitably arrive at a place much like the one Margaret Thatcher found herself upon her ascent to 10 Downing Street.

She perceived these forces, and for a time she mastered them. This is why she matters to history.

These forces are still at work; they must again be mastered.

This is why she matters to you.