When Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came into office, the Western world was at a low ebb. The 1973 oil crisis had created stagflation. The US had comprehensively lost the Vietnam War. There was a pervasive sense of malaise, embodied in the high-minded but ineffectual presidency of Jimmy Carter. Britain had just gone cap-in-hand to the IMF. Communist insurgencies were rampant in Central America, there were Marxist regimes in southern Africa, and there was a Russian puppet in Kabul.
A decade later, the world was transformed. It was “morning in America”. Britain had won the Falklands War and had become the miracle economy of Europe. And the Berlin Wall was toppling. As John O’Sullivan makes clear in his magisterial book (The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World), Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II were the key to victory in the Cold War, because each saw it in essentially moral terms, good versus evil, or at the very least, light grey versus very dark grey. And each had a clear program of action.
The Cold War was won because Britain and America strengthened their military, revitalised their economies, and restored their national and cultural self-confidence. Eventually, the relative success of Western countries, compared to the relative poverty and persecution of Eastern ones, produced an irresistible popular tide that led to the collapse of the old Soviet bloc.
But that was then. This is now.
Now, we are in the throes of a second Cold War. The democratic West is under challenge from a militarist dictatorship in Moscow; an Islamist dictatorship in Tehran; and a communist dictatorship in Beijing. Russia wants to dominate Eastern Europe. China wants to be the world’s top power and to create a world very much in its own likeness, with “the party over all”. And Iran wants an apocalyptic global caliphate. All three malign powers are loosely coordinating with each other, united in their hatred of the West.
In all this, complacency is our biggest enemy. The current battlefield stalemate in Ukraine; Israel’s recent stunning military coups against its enemies; and the absence, for now, of escalation across the Taiwan Strait, does not mean that things could not move quickly to a potentially existential crisis.
There are three key differences between Cold War I and Cold War II.
First, communist China is a first rate economy that’s rapidly building a military to match. It’s deeply integrated into the world economy and there’s a significant Chinese diaspora in all of the main countries of the West. All-up, communist China is a far more formidable competitor than the old Soviet Union ever was.
Second, the West, the Anglosphere especially, and President Trump’s actions notwithstanding, is comparatively economically stagnant, comparatively societally fragmented, and culturally confused as never before.
The Marxists who failed to get the working class to revolt in the name of equality have been much better at persuading the middle class to revolt in the name of saving the planet and ending discrimination. The politics of climate and identity are driving the Anglosphere especially into grave economic and societal self harm: in the insane rush to replace reliable fossil fuel power with intermittent wind and solar power, which can run a house but not an economy; and mass immigration, that’s well intentioned but is making our countries poorer and less cohesive.
And the readiness to be self-critical, one of Western civilisation’s greatest strengths, that I used to think would guarantee our survival, has degenerated into a destructive self-loathing, in the Anglosphere especially. America is angst-ridden over slavery; Britain is angst-ridden over the empire; and Australia is angst-ridden over the dispossession of the original aboriginal inhabitants, even though no countries on Earth are less racist and more colour-blind.
And third, with Trump a partial exception, there is no leadership.
Is there a national leader anywhere in a major Western country with a coherent plan to revitalise the economy, to reinvigorate institutions, and to restore national pride? And sure, people like Macron and Starmer will talk along these lines, but by failing to control immigration, by failing to cut taxes and regulations, and by imposing politically correct straitjackets on institutions they are actually making a bad situation worse. Other than in America, is there anywhere in the Western world an elected and accountable government that’s clearly in charge of the country, as opposed to a clerisy of judges, bureaucrats and so-called experts?
And as for Trump, there’s much to his credit: “drill baby, drill”, only two genders, “build the wall”, making government more efficient, and driving woke ideology out of business and out of the military – all excellent. But why antagonise Canada, mocking a great country as the 51st state; and why antagonise India, which is the essential democratic counterweight to China? Of course, there’s more good than bad; but, as a character, the President is hardly in the league of Reagan and Thatcher.
Yet while there are few grounds for optimism, there are reasons for hope. As Thatcher said, the facts are conservative. Sometime before the last heavy industry closes, people will realise that cutting emissions is not nearly as important as reliable and affordable power. Sometime after enough doctors have been sued for malpractice, people will realise that it’s best to stick with the body they’ve been born into. And sometime as the military challenge intensifies, people will realise that freedom is worth striving for and that there are worse things than death.
Because for all the apparatus of repression; and for all the brainwashing of ideology, there is a yearning for freedom and an instinct for decency in almost every human heart; no less so in other countries than in our own. As O’Sullivan points out, in closing his marvellous book, we have one advantage that Reagan and Thatcher lacked: we have their example. It’s the close study of those who rose so magnificently to the challenges of their time that should inspire us to overcome the challenges of ours.
I might close on this note: I know we should be cautious in recruiting the dead to fight the battles of living but I feel sure that a reincarnated Margaret Thatcher would utterly reject a policy that put climate action ahead of energy security; would not tolerate for a second the peaceful invasion of Britain now happening across the English Channel; and would not be bluffed by likes of Putin out of giving every possible help to gallant Ukraine.
