Jimmy Carter Ronald Reagan George H. W. Bush William J. Clinton Edward M. Kennedy Lloyd N. Cutler Falklands Roundtable Congressional Affairs Symposium |
Oral History Program Co-Chair Stephen Knott on the Legacy of the Falklands War Falklands Roundtable, May 2003 The Falklands War was not a seminal event in American foreign policy, as Professor Lawrence Friedman, the official historian of the Falklands Conflict for the British Cabinet, has observed: "an American, talking about the Falklands afterwards, was asked, ‘I suppose this was an issue that was a bit on the back burner for you?'; to which he replied, ‘Back burner? It wasn't even on the stove!'" This sentiment was echoed by many members of the Reagan administration during the Miller Center's Falklands Roundtable held in May 2003. Despite the tendency of Americans to dismiss the significance of the Falklands Crisis, the consequences of that war reverberate to this day. One of the more interesting and in some ways troublesome aspects of the Reagan administration and the Falklands Crisis concerned the question of whether Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger authorized the shipment of critical supplies to Great Britain before President Reagan had taken a stance on whether the U.S. would remain neutral or chose to support one of the combatants. Weinberger was pressed on this question during the Roundtable, and he responded that: "[I] never had any doubts as to where the President stood. I had one or two general conversations with him about it and he was very sympathetic to Great Britain at that time . . . It is correct that I responded to British requests for military assistance, very specific sort of items, as quickly as we could. This was done from the beginning when it became quite apparent that the Argentinien arms were on the move and that there was going to be an invasion…."  Caspar Weinberger and Stephen Knott There were deep divisions within the Reagan administration over the appropriate American response to the Argentinean invasion of the Falklands (or the Malvinas Islands, as the Argentinean's prefer). It had been reported in 1982 at the time of the crisis that U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick "tilted" toward the Argentine position in the dispute over the Malvinas/Falklands, a point which she has since disputed. Ambassador Kirkpatrick was an expert on Latin America, and had established a reputation for taking a hawkish line regarding leftist insurgencies in Central America, particularly Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Argentine military was covertly involved in the training of anti-Marxist forces in both of those conflicts, and there was media speculation at the time that this influenced some Reagan administration's "hawks," particularly Kirkpatrick, to view Argentina's position on the Malvinas in a somewhat favorable light. President Reagan's biographer, Lou Cannon, unequivocally stated that Kirkpatrick supported Argentina during the Falklands Crisis, and that Secretary of State Alexander Haig attempted to have her fired as a result. It was, according to Cannon, a suggestion resisted by National Security Advisor William Clark, and by President Reagan as well, who "upbraided Haig for trying to bring her to heel." Haig, in his own memoir, notes that he received repeated complaints from British Ambassador Nicholas Henderson about Ambassador Kirkpatrick's public and private statements to the Argentineans, and claims that in National Security Council meetings she "vehemently opposed an approach that condemned Argentina and supported Britain on the basis of international law." There remain a number of unanswered questions regarding the existence of, or the extent of, the divisions within the Reagan administration over the Falklands War, including the position of Ambassador Kirkpatrick. She was asked during the Falklands Roundtable if it were true that Argentina's covert support of the Contras had influenced some members of the Reagan administration to "tilt" toward Argentina, "I very quickly heard stories that there were people in Washington . . . who had worked out a deal with the Argentines. The Argentines were going to help provide some military support to some "Central American unstated," but yes, El Salvador probably, certainly Nicaragua . . . There's nothing that I ever heard or saw or knew . . . that suggested to me that there had ever been a conversation relevant to the Falklands, or a subsequent tie that linked the Falklands and Central America. Maybe somebody in this room knows something, but I don't know it."  Jeane J. Kirkpatrick The British victory in the Falklands in June, 1982, improved the standing of the United Kingdom's military in the eyes of their American counterparts. During our Roundtable, our military respondents stressed this point repeatedly in their remarks. For instance, General Paul Gorman, who was the Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of the Falklands crisis referred to the British victory as a "triumph of ingenuity in adversity." The Falklands War halted a rather precipitous British decline in defense spending, particularly regarding the UK's naval expenditures, and it reassured the United States that it would have a partner capable of fighting and winning future conflicts. For the British, America's support for its effort to retake the Falklands exorcised the ghosts that remained from the Suez debacle of 1956 - - the United States could be counted on as a faithful ally. The implications of this are clear when one thinks of Britain's steadfast, and sometimes lonely, support for the United States during the American bombing raid on Libya in 1986 and during the latest war in Iraq. In the aftermath of the Falklands War the personal bond between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher flourished, and it continued to do so through the remainder of the 1980s, even during such stressful times as the deployment of Pershing and Cruise Missiles in the fall of 1983, a step which may well have contributed to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact later in the decade. The Reagan-Thatcher relationship has to be seen as one of the key alliances of the Cold War, (including, Mrs. Thatcher's endorsement of Mikhail Gorbachev as a man "you can do business with," which helped pave the way for the Reagan-Gorbachev summits); however, if one considers how a defeat in the Falklands would have effected that relationship, likely leading to the collapse of the Thatcher government, and a weakening of NATO's military reputation vis a vis the Soviets, then one can argue that the Falklands War was a very critical event indeed for the United States and for the outcome of the Cold War. The Falklands War, while not a major event in the annals of American history, nonetheless offers valuable lessons applicable to most conflicts: the consequences of domestic politics, particularly runaway nationalism, on the world arena; the skewed perceptions of policymakers and the public on the edge of and in the midst of war; the necessity for clear lines of communication between nations; and the importance of constantly tending to negotiation and diplomacy even when evidence of tangible results is difficult to discern. A full transcript of the Falklands Roundtable can be found here. |