Cap Recalled

Oliver Kamm remembers an encounter with Caspar Weinberger. He quotes from Weinberger's political memoir, "Fighting for Peace," in reference to a memorable public debate in Britain in 1984:

I had long been committed to a debate at the Oxford Union Society of Oxford University. The subject was 'Resolved, there is no moral difference between the foreign policies of the US and the USSR', and my opponent was to be Professor E.P. Thompson, a prominent Marxist (his own designation) and Oxford Professor. [Weinberger was mistaken on the second point. Thompson was not a Professor, and was careful to correct opponents who addressed him that way, nor was he at Oxford.]

Our Embassy in London and several others warned me that this was a foolish risk, that such a debate could not be won and that the loss would be a big story, at least in Europe. I felt fully committed, however, by my agreement with the students and went ahead with it, although I had only been on my feet in the Union five minutes when I knew the Embassy was absolutely right.

To which Oliver adds:

In his later memoir In the Arena (2003), Weinberger reproduced a long extract from his speech on that occasion (and also mischievously recalled a Union officer of radical left-wing views, who appeared later to undergo a change of heart, one Andrew Sullivan). He argued for a fundamental difference between an open society and a totalitarian one, and concluded: '[Y]ou can't have a moral foreign policy if the people cannot control it.'

I was in the audience that evening, and well recall the speech. Weinberger was outstanding; he clearly won the argument, and to everyone's astonishment, won the vote as well. It took place in the term I was Chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club, when Labour, with disastrous electoral consequences and indifference to its traditions, was formally committed to expelling US nuclear bases from the UK. Thompson, it is worth recalling, was supposedly one of the more reasonable nuclear disarmers, in that he was not actually among the pro-Soviet elements within that movement. Instead, he expounded a view, which he called 'exterminism', that both sides in the Cold War were committed to a supposed ideology of nuclear weaponry as a means of intimidating popular dissent. It was as comprehensively refuted a notion as any in recent history when it became clear, with the collapse of Communism, that nuclear weapons were not a cause of international discord, but symbols of irreconciliable ideological differences. Removing the cause of that discord meant defeating Communism with the idea of liberty. When that happened, the underlying shift in relations between states robbed the nuclear issue of its salience that it was accorded in the Cold War. Weinberger argued the case with skill and eloquence; I'm relieved to recall that, while a man of the Left (as I still am), I voted on his side in that debate.

The struggle against totalitarianism was a clash of ideas more than of states. Weinberger was an unusual statesman in being willing to argue publicly with his critics. He deserves credit for his contribution to the most successful liberation movement in history, the Atlantic alliance of liberal democratic states.