Obviously great.(Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World)(Book Review)

Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World By Margaret Thatcher Harper Collins, 512 pages, $34.95

In her latest book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher offers an approach to foreign policy and national security that is both practical and principled. "The demand that power be limited and accountable," she writes, "the determination that force shall not override justice, the conviction that individual human beings have an absolute moral worth which government must respect ... are the bedrock of civilized statecraft."

The Iron Lady's discussion of Western aid to the Third World provides an example of how she derives policy from principle. She relies on the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who taught that "the highest level [of charity] consisted of raising the recipient up to the point at which he was self-supporting--a charity that removed the need for future charity." The Thatcher prescription: "A limited amount of assistance strictly targeted at helping ... create the right framework for free-enterprise capitalism."

Mrs. Thatcher offers five conditions necessary for successful free enterprise: "private property," "a rule of law," "`culture' ... conducive to free-enterprise capitalism and thus to economic progress," "diversity and competition between states," and "an encouraging framework of tax and regulation." Foreign aid that fosters such conditions will help the Third World care for its own far better than state-to-state transfers that reward misgovernment. As Thatcher notes, "The Third World is very much like the First World--just poorer: What works for the West will work for the rest as well."

Elsewhere Thatcher takes on another leftist sacred cow. She explains that "the current obsession with human rights" makes her "uneasy" because "rights no longer seem to mean what they used to do, and are being used to diminish not expand liberty."

She argues that the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights confuses liberty

 
   with other things...which may actually 
   be opposed to it. For example, 
   the Convention proclaims such 
   rights' as `social security' ... `the 
   right to work ... and to protection 
   against unemployment' ... `the right 
   to rest and leisure' ... `the right to a 
   standard of living adequate for the 
   health and well-being of [oneself] 
   and [one's] family,' and to `education; 
   which among other things 
   should `further the activities of the 
   United Nations for the maintenance 
   of peace.... The document ... displays 
   a catch-all approach, in which 
   numerous ... aims are declared 
   `rights,' without recognition that 
   their fulfillment depends upon circumstances 
   and, above all, upon the 
   willingness of one group of people to 
   accept burdens on behalf of another.