Evening. April 25, 1982. London. In the face of much doubt from friends and foes, Margaret Thatcher stood resolute on the steps of Downing Street. British forces had just recaptured South Georgia. Victory in the Falklands War was now more likely.
After his brief statement to this effect, John Nott, Thatcher’s defence minister, was asked by a journalist: “What happens now?”
The response of the British prime minister, cutting across Nott, was pure Mrs Thatcher: “Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces and the marines.”
As she made to re-enter her residence, more questions were hurled by a sceptical press. Turning back to them, Thatcher replied firmly: “Rejoice!” Her enemies later mythologised this into “Rejoice! Rejoice!” Denis Healey, a former Labour chancellor, said it epitomised her triumphalism and disregard for the war dead. “Glorying in slaughter,” he called it.
In fact, South Georgia, as Charles Moore’s superb biography of Thatcher reminds us, had been recaptured without loss of life on either side, “and this, Mrs Thatcher considered, was worth rejoicing about”.
Afternoon. June 12, 1987. Berlin. After weeks of wrangling and caution from his advisers, Ronald Reagan seemed to have folded. He would not stand in front of the Brandenburg Gate at the Berlin Wall and chastise his communist enemies. “Es gibt nur ein Berlin” (There is only one Berlin) seemed to be the limit of his willingness to be controversial. But minutes later he delivered the greatest line of the whole Cold War.
“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation, come here to this gate. Mr Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
If Nikita Khrushchev’s admonition in 1956 that “We will bury you!” was the darkness, Reagan’s “Tear down this wall!” was the light. The Soviet Union, one of the great immiserators of mankind, collapsed 54 months later.
I’ve been mentally replaying the moral belligerence of Thatcher and Reagan since Israel began its great war for democratic security. While Israel’s supporters need to be wary of declaring victory too soon, its haters surely now must wrestle with their moral poverty.
Thatcher and Reagan were reviled, hated, loathed by the political and academic left. Their stands against what was perceived as a permanent feature of international affairs – the Soviet Union – were seen as jingoistic. But they were right.
For all the supposed intellectual sophistication of academic leftism – from Marxism and environmentalism to critical race theory and decolonisation – has any ever delivered the human freedom that Thatcher’s and Reagan’s simple maxims, brave oratory and war leadership did?
The hegemony of these on campuses across the West has produced students fearful to question them. Lecture theatres are full of eggshells. The mental health of our elite young men and women is in crisis. Progressive students are markedly unhappier than their conservative peers.
The Albanese government, increasingly full of bureaucrats trained in these progressive dogmas, is no campus radical. But it is prone to Wongism: the belief that negotiation and restraint is the solution to every conflict. We have lost the stomach for armed confrontation and have defunded the Australian military to prove it.
Did Israel just call a halt to all that? This little liberal democracy, which is 10 times smaller than the state of Victoria, has done more to advance the rights progressives demand – gender equality, LGBTQ+ liberation, religious freedom – in an Iranian theocracy designed against them.
In Israel’s latest hour of maximum danger, Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to join Thatcher and Reagan in his contribution to civilisational flourishing.
It is conservative nationalists like them whose homespun propositions and courage have outdone every trendy post-colonial assertion of Houthi-Hamas-Hezbollah “resistance”.
Thatcher’s resistance against Argentinian aggression helped topple a fascist regime. Reagan was instrumental in the fall of communism. Bibi’s strikes may well be about to liberate millions of Iranian women from Islamist penury.
Their reward was and is to be condemned by their enemies for their success.
Few democratic leaders ended the careers (and lives) of more fascists than Thatcher after 1982 and Netanyahu since last weekend. But it is their detractors who claim to be principled anti-fascists.
Morning. June 16, 2025. Truth Social. With the scale and success of Israel’s war becoming apparent, the leader of the free world posts: “Iran and Israel should make a deal, and will make a deal, just like I got India and Pakistan to make, in that case by using TRADE with the United States to bring reason, cohesion, and sanity into the talks with two excellent leaders who were able to quickly make a decision and STOP!”
Israel is not just seeking a better deal. It does not want an Obamian accommodation with a neighbour sworn to its destruction. Israel’s is a moral war. It is testing a proposition familiar to Americans: that any nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to liberal democratic principles can long endure.
Trump needs to embrace it. His Sunday morning transactionalism failed to meet the moral imperatives of the moment. This was not his “Rejoice” or “Wall” moment. It might have been. It could be yet. Everything is set up for Trump to emulate Thatcher and Reagan.
His whole career has Iran undergirding it. In 1979-80, he watched as Jimmy Carter vacillated in the face of Iranian revolutionaries. He resolved to be the anti-Carter thereafter. He showed great resolve in assassinating Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian shadow commander, in 2020.
He needs to rediscover that version of himself, the first-term president who warned Tehran “that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD”.
This is the ally Israel needs. It is the one Australia needs, too. It is the one the oppressed men and women of Iran are desperate for.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of political science at the University of Melbourne.
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