Irony Lady
By Peter Cuthbertson
In announcing her presidential bid, the Times of London reports that Hillary Clinton has suggested Margaret Thatcher as a role model. Thatcher's strength and leadership are widely admired across the political spectrum and her influence was profound. The choice is inspired: the world of the early twenty-first century, as much as the 1980s, requires the Thatcherite "vigorous virtues" of moral clarity and unfaltering conviction.
Now that the former British Prime Minister has been brought into the Presidential debate, it is worth asking how Thatcherite values can be applied in the coming years to the security, defense and foreign policy realms for which Sen. Clinton is looking to her for guidance.
Moral clarity: Margaret Thatcher's approach to the Soviet Union lacked the self-doubt and ethical confusion so often mistaken for intellectual sophistication. After becoming Conservative leader, she warned of Soviet rearmament and championed the need to counter it. The Kremlin, unnerved, swiftly dubbed Thatcher the 'Iron Lady' - a label which she herself soon seized upon. So clear was she in her preference for the free world over the socialist model, she made it her ambition not to contain communism, but to destroy it.
Like Ronald Reagan, Thatcher had no patience for the view that the strength of the West was responsible for tension with the communist world. The notion that "if we wanted peace we should not prepare for war, if we wanted security we should not threaten, and if we wanted cooperation we should compromise ... was entirely wrong," she wrote.
Thatcher views the current conflict with Islamic radicalism similarly to how she viewed the conflict with the "Evil Empire" of Soviet Communism. "The Devil's hand," she has said, "is clearly recognisable in the works of Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network." She rejects the notion that America and her foreign policy are to blame for the terrorism she faces.
Resolve: With this moral confidence came the courage to show strength. Famously, Thatcher warned George H. W. Bush not to "go wobbly" over the Persian Gulf. Five years ago, she made equally robust recommendations for dealing with the threat of a Persian nuclear bomb in the hands of an Iranian regime: "The West should send unambiguous signals to the regime in Iran that ... we are not prepared to envisage its becoming a nuclear state."
In dealing with domestic terrorism, Thatcher also remained resolute in the face of human rights lawyers, prisoners on hunger strike and terrorist apologists who sought to grant special legal status to IRA bombers and kneecappers. In prosecuting the war on terror, she would make little time for those whose chief cause is to prevent the rendition of terrorist suspects or improve conditions in Guantanamo Bay. Instead, her response to court rulings favorable to terrorists has been the exhortation that "Conservatives everywhere must go on the counter-offensive against the New Left human rights brigade."
The UN and the US: In reference to the United Nations and to the International Criminal Court, Thatcher wrote: "because there is no world 'nation', no world political identity, no world public opinion," the only way to enforce the will of international institutions would be "to suppress democratic instincts, resist democratic pressures."
Adopting Thatcher as a model means speaking and acting in defense of American global leadership and entertaining no illusions about any supposed 'moral authority' to which the United Nations might lay claim.. As Thatcher simply put it, "America alone has the moral as well as the material capacity for world leadership."
If Margaret Thatcher is Hillary Clinton's model when it comes to security, defense and personal strengths, the policy direction this would suggest is clear: a confidence in American global leadership and an acknowledgement of American moral superiority over her enemies; a refusal to take orders from the United Nations, and a general skepticism of international institutions; a robust approach to domestic terrorists and a refusal to "go wobbly" over threats such as Iran.
This Thatcherite approach is certainly a formidable and attractive foreign policy on which to run for President. It presents only one problem for Sen. Clinton: making it through the Democratic primaries with a platform anything like it.
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