Thatcher's Cold War

A provocative and timely history of how Margaret Thatcher used the Cold War for her own ends: to take on her (largely domestic) opponents and to advance her own political agenda.While Margaret Thatcher's embrace of the 'Special Relationship' with the United States and the overall trajectory of her foreign policy are well known, her careful and calculated use of the Cold War is often misunderstood. Thatcher first used the term 'the battle of ideas' explicitly to describe the Cold War in a speech in Ottawa, Canada, in September 1983. This was a direct response to the comment made by Soviet leader Yuri Andropov earlier in the year about the competition for 'hearts and minds' in an 'ideological struggle'. But the term also encapsulated the way in which Thatcher had increasingly understood the Cold War from the late 1940s: as a global fight against socialism and state control and for both the market economy and political democracy.Tracing the development of her arguments over time for the first time, acclaimed historian of British political history Paul Corthorn probes Thatcher's views on the economy and international relations (including their theoretical underpinnings) and more specifically on a range of other issues: the empire and Commonwealth; the European Community/Union (including the centre-right grouping of political parties in the European Democrat Union); nuclear weapons and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; nationalism; and religion. Thatcher's Cold War sets Thatcher's position in the connected context of inter- and intra-party politics, and the longer-term development of Conservative ideas, including interwar anti-socialism. In this way, it offers an accessible, wide-ranging, and detailed examination of a succession of advisors, comprising academics, writers and journalists as well as party figures, civil servants and diplomats, in helping to formulate Thatcher's much misunderstood but crucially important Cold War position.