Last night, the Friends of The New Criterion congregated at a secure undisclosed location to listen to John O’Sullivan talk about his new book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World. Kenneth Minogue, reviewing the book in The New Criterion, noted that in the second half of the twentieth century, appeasement solidified as the default response of the West, especially the Anglophone West, to the world. It is worth noting that appeasement is not always ill-advised. Judiciously deployed, it can be a wise and disarming response to certain threats. But when exercised habitually, as it increasingly was in the 1970s, appeasement becomes, as Minogue puts it, "a moral sickness all the more sinister because it [comes] dressed up as a form of moral generosity." (The review is here, but registration is required.) Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher strode on to a world stage cluttered with the spiritual, economic, and political casualties of appeasement, and they set about cleaning house with a vigor and success that stunned our enemies and amazed the world.
Events stamp themselves with the impress of inevitability, and at this remove, nothing seems more natural than that Reagan, Thatcher, and Karol Wojtyla (as John Paul II was then) should rise to become world leaders. But as O’Sullivan shows in this brilliant and compulsively readable book, at the time their rise totally confounded the conventional wisdom. Reagan was an aging actor uncertainly connected to the Republican establishment; Thatcher was conservative provincial and, what’s more a woman; and Wojtyla was a staunch anti-Communist and a Pole--who had ever heard of a Polish Pope? One of the joys The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister is watching O’Sullivan rehearse the story of how the seemingly impossible gradually shaded into hopeful probability and, ultimately, an "I-told-you-so" explosion of triumph as Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II faced down the "evil empire" of Soviet Communism and numbing appurtenances of moral and economic paralysis it dragged in its wake.
The world looks very different today from the way it looked in 1980--in many ways, it looks a lot more parlous. But it is one of the many virtues of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister that it reminds us of how regularly danger calls forth the redemptive talent and courage that, only yesterday, seemed nowhere to be found. As we look around the world in the West today, we find a disconcerting compact between extraordinary affluence and enervating uncertainty--uncertainty about our values, our obligations, our future. No-one, I think, has lately arisen to speak with the infectious confidence of a Reagan, a Thatcher, or a John Paul II. There is certainly reason for concern. But there is also reason to hope. As O’Sullivan notes at the end of his book, "We have an advantage that [Reagan, Thatcher, and Wojtyla] never had. We have their example."
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