She didn’t foresee the collapse of the east

The quotes are from 1989, i.e. during the collapse of the east.

The USSR had apparently proposed to allow German reunification

I don’t believe that Ms Thatcher was somehow unable to conceive the fundamental differences between Stalin’s March Note from 1952 (which was a ploy from a position of Soviet strength) and the situation 1989 (where the Soviet Union formally abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine due to their lack of strength).

I have a British uncle who’s now in his early 80s who spent his career in the UK’s Ministry of Defence, and I remember discussing this issue with him about 1980, so I think I understand the scenario Thatcher was so afraid of. The USSR had apparently proposed to allow German reunification, but the terms would be that NATO would have to withdraw all troops and Germany would have to be strictly neutral. However, the concern of the hawks (like Thatcher) was that the USSR would try to subvert the unified country, that the communists would advance electorally, that the reunified country would turn hostile to the West and fall under the Warsaw Pact’s sphere of influence, or that fascism could re-ignite.

To people like Thatcher, the Russians were ten feet tall. She didn’t foresee the collapse of the east, and the 1980 Thatcher would be shocked to see a reunified Germany firmly anchored to the West and part of NATO.

I think that by the time Reagan was saying “tear down this wall”, things had changed, and the hawks could smell a Soviet defeat.

Traveling around Europe then was quite bizarre then, and difficult.

I’ve always thought the procedure entering East Germany as a West German was the pinnacle of paranoial mindset and red tape, but visiting the USA with ESTA, Form C 6059b and Form I 94W, and US-VISIT is catching up lately in that regard.

@ DrDick. I’ll be around with the stake when the lady pops her clogs, for her wrecked National Health Service making me wait A YEAR (June 1996 to June 1997) for a scan of a prolapsed spinal disc. The wait for a scan last month: five days.

This was amusing to my little brother who decided I couldn’t speak French at all. Until we took the morning train to Paris together, arrived at the Gare du Nord, and got directions easily in the Metro to the Eiffel Tower. I followed them flawlessly, much to the little brother’s dismay. It wasn’t until he asked me where we were headed that I realized that, for the first time abroad, I’d had an entire successful conversation with a total stranger in French.

I spent a lot of time in France that summer. They spoke the French I’d learned to speak. Not like the Belgians, whose French sounds like German, whose German sounds like Dutch, and whose Dutch sounds like Walloon. All of which they speak, but with the inflection and accent of the others.

Speakers of the “language of romance”, and yet the French can deal out some truly nasty insults.

My first memory of arriving in Belgium was an afternoon celebrating the Fourth of July out in the suburbs … It didn’t seem to me to be the way to spend a summer in Europe, palling around with a bunch of Americans in their made-to-order ghetto.

They shouldn’t be expected to let you pall around with a bunch of horse eaters now, could they? /snark

I have never gotten over that French epithet for the Belgians. It’s so rude.

My first memory of arriving in Belgium was an afternoon celebrating the Fourth of July out in the suburbs with a bunch of my Dad’s workmates’ families. I was not alllowed to sit in the car, but was also not required to return either. It didn’t seem to me to be the way to spend a summer in Europe, palling around with a bunch of Americans in their made-to-order ghetto.