NATO AND ITS FRIENDS 85be enormous. Such gains as had been made in relaxing the tensions
between the two military blocs in Central Europe were tossed away
along with the benefits from the growing financial linkage with West
Germany. Soviet leaders had misjudged President Carter. Far from
lacking the stomach for confrontation, he aimed to make the USSR
pay dearly for its latest military challenge. And the Kremlin’s dispatch
of air and ground forces to the Afghan war later in the same month
only stiffened his determination.
Communist parties and groups had never thought well of Carter,
and Reagan’s reaffirmation of the plan to deploy Pershing-2s and
Tomahawks increased their campaign against the American military
bases on the continent. Other parties on the left had similar objections
to NATO’s policy, and the fact that a sizeable proportion of the elec-
torates voted for them complicated the situation for Reagan. West
Euro pean governments wanted the security of the American nuclear
‘umbrella’ but wanted to specify how the President should hold it over
them.
Margaret Thatcher had swept to political victory in Britain in 1979
and was one of Reagan’s few close European allies. When he entered
the White House, the social-democrat Helmut Schmidt was Chancel-
lor in Bonn; and in March 1981 the socialist François Mitterrand was
elected French President. In Italy, the Christian Democrats had domi-
nated cabinets since the Second World War but in August 1983 they
were supplanted by the Socialist Party under Bettino Craxi. Reagan
was pleasantly surprised when he and Craxi met: ‘He’s a different kind
of Italian official. He’s socialist but totally anticommunist.’^3 From
Reagan’s viewpoint, the situation improved somewhat when Helmut
Kohl and the Christian Democratic Union, together with the liberal
Free Democratic Party, won power in West Germany in October 1982.
Schmidt as Chancellor had been a solid advocate of the NATO alliance
(Reagan had recorded: ‘Found ourselves in agreement on future
course with regard to Russia’^4 ), but Kohl was a conservative who sym-
pathized with a broader range of objectives. Reagan had met him in
October 1981, and there had been a meeting of minds: ‘[Kohl] said
that the 250,000 demonstrators in Bonn against the US came from all
over Europe and it was an affair orchestrated by the Soviet U[nion].’^5
Once Kohl became Chancellor, Reagan took pleasure in their encoun-
ter in Washington: ‘We did hit it off and I believe we’ll have a fine
relationship.’^6
Even Thatcher and Kohl, however, held reservations about