The Comment Factory

A furious Margaret Thatcher insisted that London should “no longer turn the other cheek” when faced with US criticism of Britain’s role in Northern Ireland, as the issue strained the allies’ “special relationship”.

The 1979 papers show that Anglo-American relations came under pressure after the US government decided in July that year to withhold export licences for the supply of arms to the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

In a letter from the Foreign Office to Cyrus Vance, the then US secretary of state, about the restriction of export licences, UK exasperation is clear.

“It would without doubt be seen as a sharp shift in the US policy, and would certainly give encouragement to the Provisional IRA, who would exploit it to the full,” the letter said.

Mrs Thatcher, the newly elected prime minister, remarked in a private meeting that it should be “brought home to the Americans that for so long as they continued to finance terrorism, American lives as well as those of others would be lost”.

She also reacted angrily to a request from Hugh Carey, the governor of New York, to meet in the US. Mrs Thatcher sought to remind him that Northern Ireland was part of the UK, and that “she herself would not think of discussing with President [Jimmy] Carter, for example, US policy towards their black population”.

The British appeared hopeful that the decision, which had not been publicised, would soon be made public. “There will surely be a reaction in the British parliament when this becomes public and it will be healthy for congressmen to feel this blast, the stronger the better,” the UK embassy in Washington noted.

The British ambassador said in a memo that Zbigniew Brzezinski, US national security adviser, had advised him to fudge the issue. “The reality was that there was a large Irish-American lobby in the US which was sympathetic to the IRA,” he quoted Mr Brzezinski as saying. The problem could be resolved “if the British government, rather than the RUC, ordered these arms without specifying where they were going to be used”. He did not think “the US authorities would wish to inquire where they were going”.

The relationship between Mr Carter and Mrs Thatcher became frayed over the issue, with the British leader schooling the US president on the conflict after he admitted not knowing much about the situation in Northern Ireland.

Ms Thatcher sent four papers detailing UK policy. In a letter, she told Mr Carter: “It is an unhappy fact that perspectives on Ireland – and not only in the United States – are still apt to owe more to the 19th century than to the facts of the present-day world.”

The issue dominated a large part of her first trip to the US as prime minister in December 1979. The minutes of her initial meeting with the president reveal that she “handled both the gun which the RUC at present used and that which was on order. There was no doubt that the American Ruger was much better.”

President Carter said during the same meeting that he “would like to approve the sale but did not wish to be defeated in Congress or to have a major altercation with them”.

In spite of her pro-unionist position, unfriendly letters were exchanged at the time between Mrs Thatcher and the Reverend Ian Paisley, the staunch Protestant and Democratic Unionist party leader. In a July letter to Mr Paisley, the prime minister wrote: “For the moment it seems unlikely that we would have anything to gain from a meeting on security.”

Mr Paisley replied: “Thank you for your note which, being a statement of facts already within my knowledge, was hardly illuminating.

“Neither does it reassure either myself or the people of NI that their continuing plight is a matter of your urgent personal concern.”

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Unrated Reagan

The British embassy in Washington was disparaging of Ronald Reagan’s presidential bid , writes Matthew Kennard. Briefings in April, before Margaret Thatcher replaced the ambassador that year, called her future ally a “liability” because of his age. They advised that Reagan must pick a running mate carefully because voters would be expecting someone “to step into his shoes when the old man keeled over”.

Reagan is accused of “over-simplifying complex issues, verging at times on demagogy”, a “propensity to indulge in sabre-rattling to the outside world”, and a “reputation for laziness”.

The briefings cautioned against assuming that “Reagan would necessarily be regarded in the US as an extremist, doomed to Goldwater-type obliteration”. During the campaign Reagan “made some uncharacteristically mature statements on international affairs”, they noted.

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Originally published in the Financial Times