Politik

In all of the excitement over the various news threads of the week, I missed the opportunity to blog about an important new piece by Aaron Ellis on the strategy of Margaret Thatcher's Britain:

"The use of force in domestic and foreign affairs was indeed crucial to the then Prime Minister in establishing a free economy and a strong state, and she often spun the fruits of force into ‘myths’ of national resurgence that helped the country and the Conservative Party. With regard to the Falklands, Thatcher used force adeptly and with strategic purpose; gradually limiting the options open to the Argentineans by gradually maximising Britain’s capacity to apply force. This approach would be repeated in a domestic context against the miners’ union two years later. And although Thatcher worded the use of force in the Falklands in ‘high’ moral language, it also served ‘high political’ aims. Success abroad helped rehabilitate the state at home and gave it the confidence to use force against ‘enemies within’, like the NUM. The successes achieved by using force in both the domestic and international spheres was then exploited by the Prime Minister to consolidate the Conservatives’ electoral hegemony, allowing them to change the political consensus in Britain."

In Ellis's telling, Thatcher emerges as a rare politician whose external and internal agenda is relatively seamless. This is exactly what Clausewitz means when he says about war being "politics by other means." Yet the domestic sources of political power are somewhat underdrawn. Contrast this with Anthony Eden's bungling of the overseas and domestic 1956 Suez crisis, which set the tone for Britain's later decline in the Third World. One of the 20th century's most underrated leaders, in that area, is China's Deng Xiaopeng, for that very same reason. Deng not only almost single-handedly set the stage for China's meteoric rise today, but did so with internal factions nipping at his heels and civil unrest a possibility---in the aftermath of one of the most traumatic periods in modern Chinese history. A very strong record.