ABSTRACT
The Americas were crucial to Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s. She looked most naturally for support and friendship to Ronald Reagan, US President from 1981 to 1989, a like-minded right-winger, though the mind at his disposal was a good deal less powerful than hers. Her political fortunes were rescued from what seemed terminal decline in early 1982 by a brief and successful war with Argentina over sovereignty in the Falkland Islands. She is both temperamentally and materially drawn to the United States, as her phenomenally lucrative and empathetic lecture tours there during the 1990s has demonstrated. ‘Atlanticism’ was a key element in British foreign policy during the 1980s.
