Book Review

Leaders against the grain

The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: three who changed the world

The causes of the sudden collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War remain a rich and important field of enquiry. John O'Sullivan, the conservative political commentator and columnist, has built his narrative of these events around three leaders he greatly admires and it is told with a clear ideological purpose. He argues that they succeeded because they embodied conservative values which ran against the grain of the times in which they were elected, and that "In all three cases - Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul - it is a spiritual element that best explains them and their achievements".

As an account of what the author calls "the human factor in politics", the book is engaging and revealing. As a contribution to our understanding of this extraordinary period, its value is at times diminished by the triumph of ideology over scholarship. Finally it raises - but, inevitably, does not always answer - some intriguing questions about the lessons these three lives can offer politics today. The picture of John Paul II is the least convincing of the three drawn here. The story of his visit to Poland in 1979 and his role in the Solidarity movement is well rehearsed, and O'Sullivan does not greatly add to what we already know. He is so anxious to paint the late Pope as Ronald Reagan's ideological soul- mate that he ignores the evidence that John Paul was as independently minded in his judgements about Reagan's America as he was about everything else.

There is even a highly speculative suggestion that the two leaders reached some kind of agreement on Reagan's controversial Strategic Defense Initiative at their meeting in 1983; "John Paul would have understood and almost certainly approved of the twin aspiration of missile defence and nuclear arms reduction that underpinned Reagan's strategic thinking," O'Sullivan writes, and therefore " ... would probably have accepted the short- to medium-term policy of building up America's military power, including stockpiles". "Too many ‘woulds' , my dear O'Sullivan," one might say, with apologies to Emperor Joseph II's famous judgement on Mozart's music. 

The account of the debate over East-West relations in the Church includes one mistake which irritates because one suspects it arises from a desire to draw ideological lines. The late Cardinal Agostino Casaroli tends to be disparaged in conservative Church narratives because he was the father of Ostpolitik, the strategy of dialogue with Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and O'Sullivan writes that this policy was pursued by "the Vatican of Pope Paul VI and Secretary of State Cardinal Agostino Casaroli". But Casaroli was not Paul's Secretary of State, nor indeed a cardinal, until appointed to the Curia's top job by none other than John Paul himself. 

O'Sullivan is on much surer ground when he writes of President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In his treatment of Reagan he quite rightly challenges the liberal and largely European prejudice that the president was a "doddering old dimwit asleep at the wheel", and he gives us instead a more rounded picture of a man who could take on the younger and dynamic Mikhail Gorbachev and win. The account of the Reykjavik summit between the two men - which I covered and, I think like many of those who were there, completely misread at the time - is particularly good.

There is, however, one area of the Reagan legacy with direct relevance to today's international scene which escapes a completely rigorous analysis. O'Sullivan describes the way the development of the Reagan Doctrine - which provided a rationale for supporting anti-Communist "freedom fighters" - influenced events in Latin America and, in a more obviously decisive way, in Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union suffered a damaging defeat.

He also recognises that the policy led Reagan into the disastrous Iran-Contra affair, in which arms were sold to Iran to fund guerrillas fighting the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. But O'Sullivan does not address the really serious charge which is sometimes levelled against American, and indeed British, policy towards Afghanistan during this period, namely that by sponsoring the Mujahideen in their fight with the Soviet Union, Western governments encouraged the wider Mujahideen movement which ultimately produced the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Whether or not that is true, the accusation cannot be ignored because it has become a significant factor in twenty-first-century diplomacy. When President Musharraf of Pakistan visited Washington and London in 2006 he was accused of failing to fight Islamic extremism with sufficient vigour; his answer was to complain that Pakistan had been left to clear up a mess resulting from the West's use of holy warriors to challenge the Soviets in Afghanistan.

O'Sullivan worked for Margaret Thatcher, and many of the passages relating to her have the freshness of an insider's account. Although he clearly admires her hugely, he is clear-eyed about her mistakes, such as her opposition to the reunification of Germany. And although the principle source of his admiration is her willingness to stick by her principles, he paints a picture of a leader who was also remarkably pragmatic, a skilled practitioner of politics as the art of the possible.

That pragmatism comes across vividly in the account of her relationship with Reagan. O'Sullivan quotes the Number 10 foreign policy adviser, Sir Percy Craddock, who characterised it as a contrast between "the bossy intrusive Englishwoman, lecturing and hectoring, hyperactive, obsessively concerned with detail", and the "lazy, sunny Irish ex-actor, his mind operating mainly in the instinctive mode, happy to delegate and over-delegate, hazy about most of his briefs, but with certain stubbornly held principles, a natural warmth and an extraordinary ability to communicate with his constituents". But that does not quite do justice to the picture that emerges from the detail of their conversations.

It is striking to be reminded how often the two leaders disagreed - on the invasion of Grenada, for example, and on Reagan's desire for nuclear disarmament - and how successfully they managed to negotiate their way round their disputes without seriously compromising their respective positions. Margaret Thatcher believed that Britain's alliance with the United States was the bedrock of British foreign policy, but it did not stop her challenging Reagan when she felt it necessary.

It is impossible not to read the Thatcher-Reagan story without reflecting on the debate about the relationship between George Bush and Tony Blair. Will future historians find evidence of a similarly robust partnership? A question, sadly, beyond the scope of this rewarding book.

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