EE.UU./RUGB: ¿Una alianza indisoluble?

Una pregunta fundamental para la estrategia argentina respecto a la recuperación de Malvinas: ¿Cuán sólida es la alianza Londres-Washington? La opinión mayoritaria es que ella es muy sólida, tanto hoy como en el pasado. Sin embargo, hay opiniones disidentes como la del presente artículo.

With Friends Like These

By RICHARD ALDOUS

Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Una linda "pareja" estratégica.

AS the 30th anniversary of the Falklands Islands war approaches, tension in the South Atlantic is rising once again: Britain is deploying the destroyer Dauntless to the area, along with Prince William, the second in line to the throne, which has Argentina crying foul about British “militarization” and a royal “conquistador.”

The American response has been decidedly neutral, encouraging “both parties to resolve their differences through dialogue” — a sentiment reminiscent of the crisis in 1982, when the United States did everything possible to avoid war and having to choose between key allies.

These days we remember things a bit differently: The conflict is often hailed as a high point of the “special” bond between President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister. And yet America’s response at the time, and the subsequent attempts to revise it, exemplifies how complex and even fractious that historic relationship really was.

By the time Reagan took office in January 1981, Mrs. Thatcher had already been in power for more than a year and half. They proclaimed themselves conservative soul mates. “Your problems will be our problems,” she told him at their first meeting in Washington, “and when you look for friends we will be there.” Afterward James S. Brady, the White House press secretary, quipped that “it took a crowbar to get them apart.”

During the Falkland Islands war, however, it seemed more likely that Mrs. Thatcher would attack the president with that same crowbar.

Though most Americans never really understood the fuss over the Falkland Islands, for the British the Argentine invasion of the wind-swept islands was serious business. “It’s all over,” exclaimed Alan Clark, a Conservative member of Parliament. “We’re a third world country, no good for anything.”

Mrs. Thatcher, facing pressure to resign, had expected resolute support from Reagan in retaking the islands by force. Instead what she got was studied neutrality. “We are friends with both countries,” the president breezily remarked. Was it really worth going to war over what he called that “little ice-cold bunch of land down there”?

Reagan’s folksy rhetoric obscured a strategic dilemma. The United States had a longstanding alliance with Britain, but by 1982 the right-wing junta in Argentina had become a key cold war ally in Latin America.

Before the invasion, when Argentina’s leadership asked Reagan’s roving ambassador, Vernon Walters, what would happen if Argentina took the Falklands, he told them the British would “huff, puff and protest, and do nothing.”

That calculation was, of course, incorrect. Mrs. Thatcher sent a task force to reclaim the islands and was “horrified” when Reagan pressed her not to fight. Alexander M. Haig Jr., the secretary of state, shuttled thousands of miles between Washington, London and Buenos Aires in a failed attempt to force a deal. To greet him at 10 Downing Street, Mrs. Thatcher put out paintings of the Duke of Wellington and Lord Nelson, two of Britain’s greatest military heroes, as a signal that the country was ready for war.

Mrs. Thatcher let Mr. Haig know that she was “dismayed” by Reagan’s attitude and the “constant pressure to weaken our stance.” When Reagan telephoned on May 31 urging her “to show we’re all still willing to seek a settlement,” the prime minister finally lost patience. “This is democracy and our island,” she thundered, “and the very worst thing for democracy would be if we failed now.” What would the United States do if Alaska were invaded, she demanded to know.

Battered into near silence, Reagan stumbled off the line. “The president,” reported a listening official from the National Security Council, James Rentschler, “came off sounding like even more of a wimp than Jimmy Carter.”

This attitude stood in stark contrast to that of the Socialist president of France, François Mitterrand. “In so many ways,” wrote John Nott, the British defense secretary, “Mitterrand and the French were our greatest allies.”

Britain defeated Argentina in June 1982, but victory could not hide the fracture between Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher. When George P. Shultz replaced Mr. Haig as secretary of state the next month, he found the president “fed up with her imperious attitude.”

In front of the cameras, the pair continued to present an image of personal and political comity. “It is special,” Mrs. Thatcher said of the relationship in 1985. “It just is. And that’s that.”

But behind closed doors, the two leaders fought over almost every international decision they confronted: imposing sanctions on the Soviet gas pipeline, budget deficits, arms control, the Strategic Defense Initiative and even the 1983 American invasion of Grenada, which, like the Falklands crisis in reverse, left Reagan astonished by Mrs. Thatcher’s lack of support.

Tensions were particularly high over Reagan’s relationship with the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, not least at the Reykjavik summit in 1986, where Mrs. Thatcher believed Reagan’s aggressive push for nuclear disarmament came within an inch of betraying the entire Western alliance.

It all pointed back to the dictum of Lord Palmerston, the 19th-century prime minister, whom Mr. Gorbachev had surprised Mrs. Thatcher by quoting at their first meeting. “Nations have no permanent friends or allies,” Palmerston had said, “they only have permanent interests.”

These interests often required Mrs. Thatcher to keep her thoughts on Reagan to herself. Those who saw behind the facade knew differently. When Sir Nicholas Henderson, the British ambassador to Washington during the Falkland Islands war, was asked in the 1990s whether he had ever known anything absolutely secret, he replied, “If I reported to you what Mrs. Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage Anglo-American relations.”

Richard Aldous, a professor of British history and literature at Bard College, is the author of “Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship.”