Arab-Israeli War (1956)

Arab-Israeli War (1956)

The nationalization of the Suez Canal was the ostensible cause for the 1956 Arab-Israeli War. After the United States refused aid for building the Aswan Dam on July 26, the anniversary of the 1952 revolution, Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal to finance building of the dam, Nasser’s dream project.

Egypt managed to keep the canal running, much to the consternation of France and Britain. In announcing the canal’s nationalization, Nasser had carefully adhered to international law. The United States, especially the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, an expert in international law, opposed the use of force to retake the canal and instead proposed a diplomatic settlement.

The oil shipped through the canal was vital to the British and French economies, and it was apparent that the United States, then self-sufficient in oil, did not intend to supplement any possible oil losses to its European allies. Great Britain and France were determined to take back the canal by force.


The British prime minister, Anthony Eden, personally detested Nasser, and his conservative Tory government was reluctant to cede British imperial control. The French were angry over Nasser’s support for the Algerians in the ongoing war there. Israelis feared Nasser’s growing popularity in the Arab world and wanted him removed from power before he could unify the Arabs and possibly form a united front to attack them.

The Israelis secretly approached the French with a proposal for a joint military action against Egypt; the French then brought Great Britain into the plan. Although some British cabinet members opposed joining the alliance, Eden was determined to bring Nasser’s regime down, and the tripartite agreement of the French, British, and Israelis was concluded.

According to the plan Israel was to launch a tripronged attack across the Sinai Peninsula, quickly take the territory, and stop the offensive prior to reaching the canal. The British and French would bombard Egyptian airfields and parachute forces along the canal on the supposed excuse that they were there to stop the war between Egypt and Israel.

Operation Musketeer 1956

The Israelis launched the attack in October 1956, quickly cut through Egyptian defense lines, took the Sinai, but then stopped before reaching the banks of the canal. The British and French were late in launching their attack but ultimately took control of the canal.

The war was a clear-cut military victory for Israel, Britain, and France, but Nasser immediately accused the three nations of collusion. Although Eden and the French for years publicly denied any collusion, ultimately firsthand accounts by Israeli and other military and political leaders revealed the secret agreement.

With some justification, Nasser argued that the attack proved that Britain and France still had imperialist designs on the Arab world and that Israel was also a threat to its Arab neighbors. Nasser thus turned a military defeat into a political victory and became the most popular man in the Arab world. Contrary to Western and Israeli hopes, Nasser was not overthrown, and he consolidated power after the 1956 war.

The war placed the United States in the awkward position of having to condemn its closest allies in the United Nations. The Soviets gained popularity in the Arab world by supporting Egypt. The war also diverted world attention away from the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolt by Soviet forces.

In the face of international condemnation, Britain and France were forced to withdraw in December 1956, and the canal reverted to Egyptian control. Subsequently Eden, suffering from ill health in part brought on by the stress of the conflict, stepped down as prime minister. The Israelis were reluctant to withdraw from the strategic area of Sharm al-Sheikh in the south of Sinai and the Gaza Strip.

President Eisenhower intervened and threatened to cut off all United States economic aid if they did not return all the territories to Egypt. Israeli forces finally left in March 1957. However, Israel did gain a unilateral agreement from the United States that the Gulf of Aqaba up to the southern Israeli port of Elath was to be considered an international waterway.

Egypt and the Arab states never recognized the legality of Aqaba as an international waterway but for a decade did not challenge Israeli shipping through the gulf. Israel made it clear that any future closure of the waterway would be casus belli, or cause for war, and its threatened closure was one cause of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

Baghdad Pact/CENTO

Baghdad Pact/CENTO

The Baghdad Pact, also known as the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO) and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), was a mutual defense treaty that aimed to encircle the southwestern flank of the Soviet Union. The United States viewed the treaty, similar to NATO, as a means to prevent possible Soviet expansion into the vital oil-producing region of the Middle East during the cold war. It also enabled the United States to establish a military presence in member nations.

CENTO began with a series of treaties of mutual cooperation between the United States, Pakistan, and Turkey in 1954 and a military assistance agreement with Iraq in the same year. In 1955 Turkey and Iraq signed a mutual defense treaty creating the foundation for the Baghdad Pact. In the same year Britain, Iran, and Pakistan joined the Baghdad Pact, which guaranteed economic and military assistance to any country in the pact that was threatened by communism.

In 1958 a coup in Iraq ousted the pro-Western government, and the following year Iraq withdrew from the treaty, prompting the change of its name to the Central Treaty Organization. The effectiveness of CENTO was lessened during the Indo-Pakistani Wars of 1965 and 1971; neither party to the treaty rushed to assist Pakistan even though India was at the time an ally of the Soviet Union.


Following the overthrow of the proWestern Pahlavi dynasty and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Iran also withdrew from CENTO. Along with the failure of CENTO members to assist Pakistan, the withdrawal of Iran and Iraq from the treaty led to the treaty’s demise.

Commonwealth of Nations

The Commonwealth of Nations, formerly the British Commonwealth, is a loose cultural and political alliance of former British Empire territories. The idea of the commonwealth continually evolved after its origins in the mid- to late 19th century. The term referred to the settler colonies: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, Newfoundland, and South Africa.

But in the 1920s the settler colonies and Britain began to meet in Imperial Conferences, which provided the structure for the later Commonwealth of Nations. The commonwealth shifted from a community of British-populated independent nations to a proposed economic bloc, and finally to a multicultural community of nations.

The concept of commonwealth described the unique constitutional relationship between Great Britain and the settler colonies; Parliament and the Foreign Office presided over foreign affairs that involved the colonies, but the colonial parliaments controlled their own internal affairs. In the 1926 Imperial Conference, the Balfour Declaration acknowledged that Britain and the settler dominions were “equal in status” to Britain.


After the Statute of Westminster in 1931—which gave the dominions of Canada, Newfoundland, South Africa, and Ireland legislative independence—the commonwealth officially became a political organization consisting of the United Kingdom along with its former colonies.

The British tried to make the commonwealth work as a large trading bloc, with trade preferences between the former colonies as well as the formal colonies. Britain’s imports and exports to and from the colonies never amounted to more than a third of Britain’s trade. Also, such countries as Australia, New Zealand, and Canada became more dependent upon the United States for trade, especially after World War II.

Commonwealth map

The sudden decolonization of the British colonies in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s created the foundations for the current commonwealth. India’s decision to stay in the commonwealth in 1949 provided a precedence for later nonsettler colonies to join the commonwealth after independence.

In order to keep its political sovereignty while still allowing for cultural ties, India accepted the king of England as the symbolic head of the commonwealth. In 1949, when India accepted the king as the symbolic head of the commonwealth, the British Commonwealth of Nations changed its name to the Commonwealth of Nations, so as not to imply that its peoples were all of British ethnicity.

As a number of newly independent countries applied to join the commonwealth after they gained independence, the composition of the commonwealth shifted from a meeting of predominantly white countries to a multicultural organization.


At the Heads of Governments Conferences in Singapore in 1971 and in Ottawa in 1973, the general consensus was that the commonwealth should be a loose political association of the former British Empire. The Commonwealth of Nations continued to uphold these principals into the 21st century.

As of 2006 Queen Elizabeth II, the queen of England, held the title head of commonwealth. The commonwealth heads of government decide who will be the next commonwealth secretary-general, the official who leads the Commonwealth Secretariat, the decision-making body of the Commonwealth of Nations. Every five years the heads of government elect a new secretary-general at the Commonwealth Secretariat meeting.

Members as of 2006 included Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Botswana, Brunei Darussalam, Cameroon, Canada, Cyprus, Dominica, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tanzania, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, Uganda, United Kingdom, Trinidad and Tobago, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Falklands War (1982)

Falklands War

The Falklands War was a short war between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), occurring between March and June of 1982. The Falklands consist of two large—and many small— islands in the South Atlantic Ocean east of Argentina, rich in subaquatic offshore oil reserves.

Disputes over the sovereignty of the islands have occurred since the 18th century, as the islands are actually located within the Argentinean continental platform. However, in spite of many Argentinean claims, in 1833 British troops and inhabitants took possession of the islands.

At the beginning of the 1980s Argentina’s military government had become less powerful. Argentina faced a devastating economic crisis and large-scale civil unrest, with many people clamoring for the return of democracy. As a way of recovering some power and maintaining the military dictatorship, the Argentine government—headed in 1982 by General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri—decided to play off long-standing feelings of nationalism by launching what it thought would be a quick and easy war to reclaim the Falkland Islands.


Most of Argentina’s military experts likely misjudged the political climate in Britain and did not anticipate that the British would move their fleet halfway across the globe to reclaim their rights over the islands.

After days of tension, the war finally began on April 2, 1982, when General Galtieri ordered the invasion of the Falkland Islands, triggering the Falklands War. During the first weeks Argentina’s troops moved quickly, invading the islands, defeating the improvised British troops, and gaining domain of the islands.

Britain quickly organized a naval task force, consisting of the HMS Conqueror submarine, helicopters, Royal Air Force bombers and fighters, destroyers, and a large number of naval fighting boats. In comparison to Argentina’s task force technologically, in quantity, and in the areas of military professionalism and experience, British troops by far were better prepared than the Argentinean troops.

British troop

Although there was a huge difference in military power between the two forces, the war lasted four months and resulted in 255 killed and 746 wounded on the British side and 655 killed, 1,100 wounded, and 11,313 prisoners on the Argentinean side.

One of the war crimes most sadly remembered by the Argentineans was the sinking of the General Belgrano light cruiser. The cruiser was located in the “total exclusion zone” of 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) that had been established by the British before commencing operations in order to keep neutral shipping out of the way during the war.

In spite of that, on May 2 the British HMS Conqueror submarine fired torpedoes, hit the boat, and sank it, taking the lives of 321 Argentinean soldiers. In response to that, the Argentine air force launched an air attack and sank the destroyer HMS Sheffield. As a result, 22 British sailors were killed and 24 were injured.

Given the difference in military force between the sides, the war quickly turned in Britain’s (United Kingdom’s, or U.K.’s) favor. In addition to their military advantage, the U.K. government received strong international support from the United States, France, and Chile, among other countries.

Legally the United States had military treaty obligations to both parties in the war, bound to the U.K. as a member of NATO and to Argentina by the 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (the Rio Pact).

However, the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty only obliged the signatories to support if the attack occurred in Europe or North America above the tropic of Cancer. The Rio Pact obliged the United States to intervene if an adherent was attacked; the U.K. never attacked Argentina, only Argentine forces on British territory.

French President François Mitterrand gave full support to the U.K. in the Falklands War. France provided the U.K. with aircraft, identical to the ones it had supplied to Argentina, for British pilots to train against and also provided intelligence to help sabotage the Exocet missiles it had sold to the Argentine air force.

In Latin America, Argentina’s neighbor country Chile also gave its support to the U.K. by providing important logistical support during the war and strategic help by threatening an invasion on the west border of Argentina.

Argentina’s only support was military assistance from Peru and Venezuela. This came in the form of critical aircraft supplies like long-range air fuel tanks. Cuba and Bolivia also offered ground troops, but their offers were seen as political propaganda and not accepted. Only after the war was over did the Brazilian air force send some reinforcements.

The British eventually prevailed, and the islands remained under British control. On June 14, 1982, after the final battle in Port Stanley, the commander of the Argentine garrison in Stanley, Mario Menendez, surrendered to Major General Moore of the Royal Marines.

From the British point of view, the Falklands War was one of many small military conflicts in which the U.K. has been engaged. For Argentina, the war remains the country’s main military conflict and is very much present in the people’s memory. As of 2006, Argentina still showed no sign of relinquishing its claim to the Falkland Islands.

Irish Republican Army (IRA)

Irish Republican Army (IRA)

The Irish Republican Army (IRA) is a clandestine para-military organization that devoted itself to the removal of the British presence from Northern Ireland and the ending of the partition of the island.

Though it was active since the Anglo-Irish War (1920–21), it gained international notoriety only in the last four decades of the 20th century. This campaign was waged against a number of (Protestant) loyalist militias, as well as the British army itself.

The group’s aims were shared by the Sinn Féin political party, which was labeled the IRA’s “political wing” but that always officially disavowed any such connection. Although both groups claimed to speak for all of Ireland, neither enjoyed the support of more than a minority of Northern Ireland’s Catholic population.


The roots of the IRA can be traced back to 1919. In that year, nationalist leader Michael Collins melded the various nationalist militias who had participated in the 1916 Easter Rising into a guerrilla army that would supplement the parliamentary maneuverings of the Sinn Féin–dominated Irish Daíl (parliament).

Collins ordered the IRA against, first, the British intelligence and police forces in Ireland, and then the “Black and Tan” auxiliary forces that were deployed against them by the British government. Ultimately the IRA succeeded in forcing a truce with the British, the result of which was the negotiation of an Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921.

Unhappy with the terms of this treaty, a minority of deputies, led by President Éamon de Valera, walked out of the Daíl and vowed to continue fighting for a republic. The IRA split as well. This led to the Irish Civil War (1922–23), in which the pro-treaty Free State forces defeated the anti-treaty Republicans.

After the civil war the Free State forces became the regular Irish army; the IRA was driven underground. This situation did not improve when de Valera and his new political party, Fianna Faíl, entered the Daíl in 1927 and were elected to power in 1932.

Relations between de Valera, now a constitutional Republican, and the IRA worsened until finally, in 1935, the de Valera government declared the IRA an illegal organization. The 1938 Irish constitution achieved many of de Valera’s (and the IRA’s) stated objectives. However, it did not end partition, and thereafter the IRA’s sole raison d’être would be directed toward that end.

The organization engaged in a bombing campaign on the British mainland during the late 1930s and gave some material support to German agents operating both in Britain and in the republic during World War II. Neither of these actions proved successful, and by the 1950s it was hard to view the IRA as anything but a spent force.

The IRA was reborn out of the crisis that beset Northern Ireland in the late 1960s. Inspired by the U.S. Civil Rights movement, Catholics in Ulster began to demonstrate for better access to housing and fairer wages.

In August 1969 the demonstrations deteriorated into rioting, police repression, and the eventual deployment of the British army. Initially the IRA was caught unawares, as the Belfast graffiti “IRA = I Ran Away” testifies. Largely as a result of this embarrassment, the IRA split in 1970.

A group calling itself the “Provisional IRA” (or “Provos”) broke off and rededicated itself to a united Ireland through terrorist activity. Within two years the Provos had far surpassed the Officials in popular support, and the three-decades-long war that came to be known euphemistically as “the Troubles” had begun.

In August 1971 the British government introduced a policy of internment of IRA suspects without charge for up to seven days. When by 1972 these methods had not deterred the IRA or contained the crisis, the Loyalist parliament at Stormont fell; Britain introduced direct rule of Northern Ireland from London, and internment was phased out.

Beginning with the Troubles, IRA prisoners had enjoyed the status of political prisoners. In 1976 this status was abolished. The IRA turned to hunger strikes. Bobby Sands’s 66-day-long hunger strike, which lasted until his death on May 5, 1981, attracted international publicity.

Any lasting benefit that might have resulted for the IRA was canceled out by the negative reaction to the IRA’s assassination of Lord Mountbatten of Burma in August 1979, and its near miss of Margaret Thatcher in October 1984.

Away from the world stage the cycle of attacks by, and reprisals against, the IRA continued apace. Hope for an end to the struggle surfaced in 1994, with a cease-fire brokered by Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, British prime minister John Major, Irish taoiseach Albert Reynolds, and U.S. president Bill Clinton.

After the ratification of the Good Friday accords in 1999 and the progress of the Northern Irish peace process, the relevance of the IRA was called into question. In 2005 the provisional IRA announced the end of its armed campaign. The organization surrendered its weapons under the supervision of United Nations inspectors.

Lord Louis Mountbatten - British Political Leader

Lord Louis Mountbatten - British Political Leader

Lord Louis Mountbatten was the youngest son of Prince Louis of Battenburg and Princess Victoria of Hesse. His mother, a granddaughter of Great Britain’s Queen Victoria, was the daughter of Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Princess Alice, who, in turn, had married Grand Duke Louis IV of Hesse.

The Battenberg family was descended through morganatic marriage from the grand duke of Hesse and by Rhine. Lord Mountbatten was born on June 25, 1900, at Frogmore House, Windsor, England. His family included his sisters Princess Alice, the mother of Philip, duke of Edinburgh; Queen Louise of Sweden; and a brother, George Mountbatten, later the second marquess of Milford Haven.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Mountbatten entered the navy in 1913 and saw service on the Lion and the Elizabeth during World War I. His father was first sea lord at the outbreak of conflict, but because of his German ancestry was forced to resign.


Anti-German feeling grew during the course of the war, and this led King George V to relinquish all German names and titles. Accordingly the royal family name became Windsor, and Battenburg became Mountbatten.

In the interwar years, Lord Louis continued his career in the navy. He married Edwina Cynthia Ashley in 1922. Although Mountbatten’s marriage lasted until the death of his wife in 1960 and appeared a close one, there remained claims of adultery and sensational affairs on both parts throughout the course of the marriage.

A captain at the start of World War II, Mountbatten commanded destroyers, losing the destroyer Kelly in battle off Crete in 1940. During these early years of conflict he saw action in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Western Approaches.

He became a commodore in 1941 and rose to become, in a relatively short period, chief of combined operations. In this post he took on a key role in planning for the Allied invasion of continental Europe. His appointment as supreme allied commander, South East Asia Command, in 1943 gave him the rank of acting admiral.

Consequently he was instrumental in Allied operations to drive the Japanese from Burma, and in 1945 he accepted the Japanese surrender in Malaya. His command required diplomatic skills to balance the different Allied commanders in this theatre of operations.

Mountbatten’s distinguished wartime service was awarded with nobility, becoming first Viscount Mountbatten of Burma in 1946 and then Earl Mountbatten of Burma and Baron Romsey in 1947. In the same year Mountbatten was appointed viceroy of India, and after partition he remained as governor-general until 1948.

This meant overseeing the Indian and Pakistan drive to independence, and in this process he became a close friend of the Indian National Congress leader Jawaharal Nehru. Apparently this close relationship did not extend to Pakistan’s Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

The partition of India was not an easy affair, and much violence and death came as a result. Some critics held Mountbatten responsible for these difficulties because he rushed partition and independence without proper security arrangements being in place.

After India, Mountbatten remained in the navy and performed a number of critical duties. He became first sea lord in 1955 and served in the important post of chief of defense staff from 1959 to 1965.

Mountbatten was assassinated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army on August 27, 1979, while on vacation in County Sligo in the Republic of Ireland. A bomb was planted on his boat. The explosion killed his eldest daughter’s mother-in-law, the Dowager Baroness Brabourne; his elder daughter’s fourth son, Nicholas Knatchbull; and Paul Maxwell, a crew member.

The murder was widely condemned by both the president and the prime minister of Ireland. Mountbatten was buried in Romsey Abbey. The investigation that followed led to the arrest and conviction of Thomas McMahon in 1979 for the murders; although given a life sentence, he was released from prison following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Margaret baroness Thatcher of Kesteven

Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, helped reverse the economic decline of her country. Even her enemies grudgingly respected the strong-willed "iron lady". She rejected the "consensus" politics that had characterized Britain since World War II in favor of polarizing "conviction" politics.

During her 10 years as the head of the British government, she created a successful free-market economy, but at a high price: deindustrialization of many old factory towns and, for several years, massive unemployment. Strongly nationalistic, Thatcher fought for Britain within and sometimes against the European Union.

She was lucky that the main body of the Labour Party moved to the left and Labour moderates broke away to form their own party; she defeated her divided opponents at general elections without ever winning over a majority of the voters. She also was lucky to have the opportunity to fight a short, successful, and very popular war with distant Argentina, whose brutal military dictatorship had seized a sparsely populated and almost unknown British colony, the Falkland Islands.

Labour eventually accepted her basic policies. She succeeded in changing the language of political discourse. Except for those from a few stubborn socialists, proposals for the nationalization of major industries disappeared from the debate over public policy.


In part because Thatcher was personally abrasive, she was controversial in her own Conservative Party. It was a rebellion among her nominal supporters that ended her political career. According to rumor, moreover, she did not get along with the other important woman in the British government, Queen Elizabeth II.

Intelligence and hard work, not family connections, explain Thatcher’s rise to power. Her principles owed much to the middle-class values of her upbringing. Thatcher was born Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, a small town in eastern England. Her father was a grocer, and the family lived over his shop. Active in civic affairs, her father served for many years on the city council and at one point held the title of mayor.

After attending local state schools Margaret Roberts studied chemistry at Somerville College, a women’s college that was part of Oxford University. Already politically minded, she was elected president of Oxford’s student Conservative organization in 1946, the year after Labour had crushed her party in the general election that followed the defeat of Nazi Germany.

After university she worked for several years as a research chemist. In addition, she stood for Parliament, always for seats that were hopeless for her party. During her political campaigns she met Dennis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman, whom she married in 1951. She left her first career as a research chemist to study law.

In 1953 she gave birth to twins, Carol and Mark. Thatcher was in her mid-30s when in 1959 she was elected to the House of Commons for the safe Conservative seat of Finchley in north London. Two years later she was appointed to a junior position in the Harold Macmillan government as parliamentary secretary at the ministry of pensions and national service.

Thatcher’s first cabinet office came in the Edward Heath government. In 1970 she was appointed minister for education. As part of broader cuts in spending she eliminated free milk for school-children. The Labour Party attacked her as the heartless "Thatcher, the milk snatcher".

Heath’s failure to stand up to the trade unions successfully and his defeat in two 1974 general elections cost him the support of many Conservatives. Despite his weakness, his principal colleagues were reluctant to challenge him. Thatcher, a midlevel figure in the Conservative Party with limited ministerial experience, dared in 1975.

After the first ballot Heath withdrew, and on the second ballot Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party. Four years later, the Conservatives won the general election, and Thatcher became prime minister. She also led her party to victory in the next two general elections.

Her policies during her more than a decade as prime minister came to be called "Thatcherism". She acknowledged that many of her ideas came from an older Conservative politician, Sir Keith Joseph. He argued that Britain needed to revive its entrepreneurial spirit.

Thatcher became prime minister during a two-sided economic crisis: a depression accompanied by rising prices. She made her first priority fighting double-digit inflation. She cut government spending, with higher education suffering particularly hard.

She increased interest rates and sales taxes and eventually income taxes too. Manufacturing shrank, and several million workers lost their jobs. It took years for this bitter medicine to cure runaway inflation, but it did. Some members of Thatcher’s own party thought that the human cost of her policies was unacceptable.

Convinced that the welfare state had ruined Britain, Thatcher wanted to encourage individualism and discourage reliance on the state. Consequently, she made it easy for tenants in council houses (public housing) to buy their homes. Pressured by an increase in rent, hundreds of thousands did. As property owners, they were more inclined to vote Conservative.

Committed to competition and capitalism, Thatcher regarded the nationalized industries as a dead weight handicapping the British economy. In the early 1980s she sold off minor parts of the state’s array of industries, such as the railroad hotels, but it was not until the mid-1980s that privatization became dramatic. At this time Thatcher sold the telephone system, the gas industry, the principal automobile and truck manufacturers, the steel industry, and water companies.

Thatcher worried that the power of Britain’s militant trade unions crippled the economy. She decided to tame them. In 1984 Parliament enacted legislation that required a majority vote by secret ballot for a legal strike. In the same year, the leader of the coal miners challenged the management of one of the last nationalized industries. He hoped to block the closing of unprofitable mines.

He used outside militants to intimidate working miners. These tactics offended public opinion. Worried about their own jobs, few other unions supported the miners. After nearly a year, the strike collapsed. As a result of competition from oil and natural gas, the coal mining industry soon shrank to almost nothing.

Priding herself on her decisiveness and rarely conciliatory toward opponents, Thatcher did not care how many people she alienated. She rejected compromise as weakness. Victory over Argentina in the Falklands War was perhaps her only success that nearly everybody applauded.

She refused any compromise when members of the Irish Republican Army, imprisoned in Ulster, started a hunger strike to be recognized as political prisoners. Ten IRA men died of starvation. Labour controlled many local councils, including that of greater London.

Thatcher considered their spending profligate, and so she had Parliament abolish the troublesome councils. She regarded the European Community without enthusiasm. Protective of British sovereignty, she was suspicious of the trend toward economic and political centralization within the European Union.

In contrast to her ambivalence toward Europe, she was a staunch ally of the United States. She was particularly close to President Ronald Reagan. Although they were much alike in their economic and foreign policies and their insistence upon law and order, Thatcher did not share Reagan’s concern for moral issues in politics.

She voted to decriminalize homosexuality and to legalize abortion. Thatcher’s relationship with the United States was, in part, the result of political realism. The world’s most powerful nation was a useful ally. Her realism also showed in her conciliatory relationship toward Mikhail Gorbachev, the last ruler of the Soviet Union.

She recognized the importance of the reforms that he advocated in changing the nature of communism in his powerful country and the flexibility that he showed outside the Soviet Union. Unlike Reagan, she was not so entranced with Gorbachev as to propose mutual nuclear disarmament, but she did think the Soviet leader was somebody with whom she could "do business".

In her last years as prime minister Thatcher blundered politically, which gave an opening to her numerous enemies within the Conservative Party. In her biggest mistake, she proposed a reform of local government finance widely denounced as an unfair poll tax. Except for the well-off, nearly all households would pay more than they had in the past.

Perhaps because she was preparing for war against Iraq in alliance with the United States, Thatcher paid insufficient attention to the political situation at home. She also erred by making provocatively anti–European Union remarks that caused her foreign secretary to resign. One of her old enemies, a former defense secretary, challenged Thatcher for the party leadership in late 1990.

When she failed to win on the first ballot, she withdrew and threw her support to one of her loyalists, John Major. After Major became Conservative Party leader and prime minister, Thatcher quickly alienated her one-time favorite. Calling herself a "good back-seat driver", she interfered too much, undermining the new prime minister’s authority.

In retirement Thatcher took a nonhereditary peerage (baroness Thatcher of Kesteven) that made her a member of the House of Lords. She also wrote her memoirs. She outraged public opinion by visiting the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet while he was under house arrest in Britain. Most people believed that he was guilty of torturing and murdering opponents in his home country.

By the first years of the 21st century, Thatcher’s physical and mental health began to fail. She rarely made public appearances and no longer gave speeches. Her husband died in 2003, and her children sometimes proved to be an embarrassment.

Her son, Mark, became involved in an abortive coup against an African government. Her daughter, Carol, appeared on a widely viewed and undignified "reality" television program. According to her, Thatcher suffered from a form of dementia that destroyed her short-term memory.