Читать книгу Statecraft - Margaret Thatcher - Страница 9

At the time of writing these lines I have just learned that my portrait has been moved from the ‘Contemporary’ to the ‘Historical’ Room of London’s National Portrait Gallery. This is perfectly fair. After all, eleven years have passed since I left Number Ten Downing Street. The world has, as they say, ‘moved on’ in all sorts of respects.

For example, in 1990 we could not have foreseen the huge impact which the information revolution would have upon business, lifestyles and even war. We could not have imagined that the mighty Japanese economy would have stalled so badly, or that China would have risen so fast. We could not have envisaged that perhaps the most chilling threat to Man’s dignity and freedom would lie in his ability to manipulate genetic science so as to create, and re-create, himself. Nor, needless to say, would even the most far-sighted statesman have predicted the horrors of 11 September 2001.

But it is always true that the world that is can best be understood by those conversant with the world that was. And ‘the world that was’ – the world which preceded today’s world of dot.coms, mobile phones and GM food – was one which saw a life-and-death struggle whose outcome was decisive for all that has followed.

Of course, just to speak of the ‘Cold War’ nowadays is to refer back to an era which seems a lifetime, not a mere decade and a half, ago. In truth, as I shall argue at many stages in this book, the underlying realities have changed rather less than the rhetoric. But changes there have been – and, on balance, ones of enormous benefit to the world.