Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

This was an absurd way to manage world trade and international money. It also encouraged mathematical-minded parasitism on an enormous scale. At a scrape with a felt-tip pen in Japan, or by a fax, or the touch of a computer button, elsewhere, huge sums of money could move from one currency to another, in search of a profit based on some even tiny movement of interest rates or bond yields. By 1992, $880bn went through the machines every day — one third of the value of the whole of the world’s annual trade. In 1987 that process was already well under way, when it amounted to a tenth of world trade. This was in effect a huge and grotesque comment on the ‘Triffin Dilemma’, and that man had identified the central problem of Bretton Woods almost before the ink was dry on it. The Americans themselves suffered 30 per cent inflation in the 1960s, and yet unemployment reached 6 per cent in 1971 and New York City went bankrupt in 1974. Latin American countries borrowed joyously in paper, built upon paper, and ran into great trouble, as their rich just moved the money out, into property in Miami, where a crime wave emerged. Here were contradictions of capitalism in neon lighting, and most media commentators on the Continent scoffed. Could not Europe produce a currency that meant something? The Mark (the Swiss franc played a similar role) might then represent real, sensibly managed money. One way was the setting-up of a European currency, a standard in a fluctuating world. They tried. It was not easy, because Carter was rather stupid. Schmidt had to repeat things to him, more than once, for him to understand, and the two men ended up regarding each other with wonder, the one in a cloud of cigarette smoke, and an experience of the Eastern Front of the Second World War, the other with very little experience of anything at all except his mother.

Meanwhile, the oil money was floating around, waiting to land wherever it could find even a tiny percentage of profit, and it moved into Latin America and central Europe, especially Poland, the rulers of which were projecting themselves as a new Japan. When Citibank left Okęcie airport at Warsaw, after signing the deal, the plane was delayed on departure because a drunken baggage-handler crashed his vehicle into it. That debt built up, and up, and even Professor Congdon worried enough about it, in 1986, to write an alarmist book. It was not necessary: the debt was simply not paid, or, rather, the American taxpayer paid it. The West, in the summer of 1979, was in poor condition, and Europe was not producing the answers. Creativity would have to come from the Atlantic again, and it did. Margaret Thatcher emerged in May, and Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher each brought to bear some of the core beliefs of their civilization, which included (among others) Hollywood and a belief in facts. Ronald Reagan had been an actor, a Rooseveltian Democrat, and he had escaped from a past in a way that commanded respect — his father a drunken failure, his mother a shrew. He had pushed his way forward, via a degree in simple-minded verities at an obscure college, through sports-commentating, to Hollywood. There, he had been repelled at the tactics of the Left, in the actors’ milieu. Actors’ politics are generally repellent: in the Middle Ages they were refused a proper burial, and in the French Revolution they had been well to the fore in revolutionary activities. The Revolution did not have a sense of humour, but they had been given the job of enforcing the price-maximum in grain. Peasants, to avoid selling the grain, had fed it to their animals, which at least they could consume, and a trick was to detect the grain husks in the animals’ excrement, a task for which actors were especially selected by the reigning revolutionaries.

In the later forties in Hollywood, the McCarthy scare fell darkly upon the land, and there were victims, none of whom lost his life, though some, in employment, were for a time under an eclipse. It was certainly true that, as Vladimir Bukovsky says, if you looked at the twentieth century through Hollywood, you would have no idea what it was about. Its wallet, as was said about the Third Republic, was on the Right, but its heart was on the Left, and it felt guilty if in, say, The Killing Fields or Dr Zhivago Communists were mentioned in a bad light, or even at all. In that period Reagan seems to have guessed that these actors were being manipulated, and he became spokesman for the Republican cause: he was even divorced for ‘extreme mental cruelty’, his then wife tending to go along with the martyr-histrions. He had many gifts, especially as a talker. Provincial American politicians tended to be lecturing and charmless. Jeane Kirkpatrick, for instance, talked as if she had a carriage-shift bell in her larynx and qualified for the French phrase, ‘She listens to herself talking.’ Reagan was not like that: he told funny stories, and even, against his opponents, acted them out. There was a revealing scene when Berkeley students protested against his proposals to make them pay money for their education: past screeching demonstrators, Reagan adopted a creeping pose, and said, ‘Shsh,’ That disarmed even the screeching protestors, and worked very well on television, which, of course, Reagan had had in mind. As Governor of California, he had known how to goad his enemies into making allies for him. When the time came, in the crisis-ridden atmosphere of Carter’s America, he quite easily defeated any north-eastern and moderate Republican candidate, and was adopted. In his way, Reagan was a Nixon with charm, for he did not lock himself away, like Nixon, and there was an element of steel as well, in the sense that he knew that the United States represented something. He had charisma, such that people around him delivered, without quite knowing why. He was also quite indolent, and would semi-doze through Cabinet meetings, eating endless jujubes, a habit he had taken up in order to stop the cigarettes that everyone had smoked in earlier decades. Not for him the Carter regimen of rising at six and ploughing through endless paper, before jogging scrawnily in shorts, holding his wife’s claw-like hand, around the grounds. Nancy Reagan was no doubt a facelift too far, but she had seen him through crises, and knew how to deal with the Californian tuxedos whose activities had not made good publicity for Nixon. The White House machine, by now very large, worked messily, and there was a constant changeover. There were complaints. Apparently more efficient machines, both his predecessor’s and his successor’s, consisted of clockwork but worked to little effect. Ronald Reagan managed to get the big things right, sometimes despite crushing bombardments from people who ostensibly knew them much better than he did. In 1987, for instance, the most respected financial expert on Wall Street, Felix Rohatyn, wrote a vast article in the New York Review of Books to explain that the debt and the deficit would wreck the country. Reagan sailed on regardless, and was proved to be quite right. East-coast America was nonplussed, and was vengeful enough to have Reagan missed off the guest list for the Harvard Tercentennial celebration in 1993, whereas a parade of mediocrities such as Ford and Carter was welcomed. In fact, Carter was so full of sour grapes that he did not even give Reagan more than an hour or so of preparatory talk when the changeover occurred, and was appalled that Reagan did not take notes. Reagan had his revenge. Carter had asked him to send a telegram to the South Korean president, asking for an opposition leader’s life to be spared. Reagan sent it, but added that he so wished that he, too, could deal with university mayhem by conscripting students. Americans were good at everything, except losing. They were about to win an enormous victory, and the most interesting question about 1981 is why it did not foresee 1989.