Richard Aldous Analysis

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Yui Kiyama Aldous, Richard. Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship. W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Random House, 201 Richard Aldous argues that political titans clashed repeatedly as they confronted the greatest threat of their time: the USSR. He obviously admires both leaders but merely wishes to point out, often through the use of recently declassified documents, that theirs was on occasion "a fractious alliance" rather than what Mr. Aldous calls "the merely love-struck political marriage of contemporary myth." In the 1990s, Sir Nicholas Henderson, British ambassador, said that "If I reported to you what Margaret Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage Anglo-American relations, " (page2). …show more content…

These included reducing the role of the state and centralized planning in economic life through privatization or deregulation, cutting income tax, encouraging free markets as one aspect of a free society, changing political attitudes about public expenditure, controlling inflation, increasing the military strength of the West, and supporting the perestroika policy of Gorbachev. According to the USA TODAY, they also mentioned that Reagan and Thatcher's special relationship which is doing well. When she visited the White House for the first time, they didn't find they will have a good relationship exactly. After both of them had become President and Prime Minister, Thatcher said "As soon as I met Governor Reagan, I knew that we were of like mind, and manifestly so did he, we shared a rather unusual philosophy and we shared something else rather unusual as well: We were in politics because we wanted to put our philosophy into …show more content…

Thatcher sneered at Britain's welfare system, calling it the "nanny state." It was not always smooth sailing between Thatcher and Reagan, whose countries traditionally enjoyed what has been dubbed a "special relationship." Washington was initially reluctant to help Thatcher's 1982 military excursion to eject Argentina's forces from the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, and Britain was angered by Reagan's decision to invade the Commonwealth island of Grenada after a military coup a year later. Since this, the two leaders fought over almost every international