Strengthening the Special Relationship with Ronald Reagan 27 Strengthening the Special Relationship with Ronald Reagan THE GOLD SEAM AND THE FAULT-LINE In her second term there were important new challenges on the international stage for Margaret Thatcher. She tackled them from a position of greater prestige than any British prime minister since Winston Churchill. For her triumph in the Falklands had given her the status of a superstar in the foreign-policy and geopolitical power elites of the world. She understood how to parley this stardom into global influence.
There was a gold seam and a fault-line in Margaret Thatcher’s conduct of foreign policy. Both owed a great deal to her Grantham upbringing at the height of the Second World War. The gold seam was her instinctive respect for the United States combined with a genuine if occasionally exasperated friendship with its fortieth president, Ronald Reagan. Together they created the strongest chapter of the US–UK ‘special relationship’ since the days of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
