Margaret’s Ironies, aka Maggie we hardly knew ye

The law, or at least the likelihood, of unintended consequences rarely worked so well for humanity, I would say, as in the case of Margaret Thatcher. As I wrote earlier in a discussion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War, Thatcher’s massive budget cuts drastically reduced Britain’s naval presence in the Falklands, budget cuts that she pursued even while being warned that Argentina’s colonels were likely to respond with an invasion. When they did, Maggie the Knife didn’t hesitate to incur an ocean of red ink in the name of British glory and some worthless real estate in the South Atlantic, eagerly wrapping herself in the robes of Pitt and Churchill, and ignoring Ronald Reagan’s desperate pleas for a negotiated peace.

But everything turned up roses, except for the poor unfortunates who got killed. The Argentine Junta did fall, as the Reagan Administration feared, but instead of being replaced by commies, the democratic regime that took power was reassuringly moderate. In Britain, Thatcher’s popularity soared. Nobody seemed to notice the billions of pounds that had been, and would be, wasted, on keeping the Falklands British.

Ronnie quickly copied Maggie’s splendid little war, invading Grenada, a member of the British Commonwealth, in 1983, after telling Maggie he wouldn’t, a fib that for some reason left her a little sour on the cowboy, though she didn’t let it show in public, just as she also concealed her irritation at Ronnie’s unwillingness to crack down on the IRA’s open fundraising and scarcely concealed weapons purchases in the U.S., even after the IRA almost killed her in 1984.

Thatcher quite possibly owed her second electoral success, in 1983, to the Falklands War. To my mind, she played an essential role in winding down the Cold War by deciding that the West could deal with Mikhail Gorbachev, and then convincing Reagan of that fact. If a commie-hater like Maggie was sold, then Gorbie had to be the real deal. In fact, like the quintessential anti-communist Winston Churchill, Thatcher was always more than ready to deal with the Soviets. Unlike the U.S., Britain felt the Cold War as a massive financial burden, which they were anxious to put down.

The end of the Cold War was a massive win for humanity, which now we barely notice, preoccupied as we are by a massively stalled world economy that clearly won’t be going places any time soon. I won’t resist noting that Keynesian America seems to be more than a nose ahead of austere, if not entirely Hayekian Britain.

In the UK itself the left will never forgive Maggie for cutting their budgets and exposing their incompetence and impotence, their socialist dreams shattered on the ash heap of history. Thatcher was a bad winner, smug and self-righteous, with a narrow, self-congratulatory compass. But her opponents had nothing.