If there can be said to be a popular view of the connection between Margaret Thatcher and the Anglo-American Special Relationship, it would almost certainly be that the former was the latter’s strongest exponent among postwar Prime Ministers, sometimes to the point of sacrificing British national interests to wider alliance and U.S. ones. Mrs. Thatcher’s relationship with Ronald Reagan is sometimes depicted in that light, especially by domestic Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians. Around the time of the Grenada crisis, Denis Healey famously said, “When President Reagan says ‘Jump,’ Mrs. Thatcher asks: ‘How high?’ ” Friendlier Tory critics, too, such as the historians John Charmley and Max Hastings, have argued that Mrs. Thatcher placed an undue or even mistaken priority on the Special Relationship and in consequence was too ready to support Ronald Reagan on such policies as the Strategic Defense Initiative and the bombing of Libya.
These views are less accepted than they were when she was still in Downing Street, but they persist and it must be acknowledged that there is a substratum of truth in them. But they amount to a truth not confined to Margaret Thatcher. All British Prime Ministers since Winston Churchill (and arguably since Lord Salisbury) have yielded ground to the United States, both when it was a rising power and when it was a dominant one, in what they judged to be either wider alliance interests or overriding long-term national ones. Mrs. Thatcher was, as we shall
