I realized what a great man Caspar Weinberger was when he had the courage to stand up in the home of lost causes and argue for the moral superiority of American foreign policy in Oxford Union in the early 1980s. I went looking for an account of that debate and, serendipitously, found one in an Amazon book review by Oliver Kamm. Oliver summarizes perfectly:
I have no doubt, however, of the highlight of the book. Weinberger recounts a debate he took part in at the Oxford Union in 1984 with the Marxist historian E.P.Thompson, then a leading figure in the British and European anti-nuclear movement. Weinberger gives a nice vignette of the debate – in which Thompson proposed the motion that there was no moral difference between the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union – and quotes his own speech at length on the fundamental difference between an open society and a totalitarian one. Weinberger remarks accurately and with incontrovertible logic, “[Y]ou can’t have a moral foreign policy if the people cannot control it.”
I attended this debate and recall Weinberger’s speech well. He was outstanding; to the surprise of many, and against the advice of the US Embassy not to take part, he won the debate. I was Chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club at the time, when the Labour Party was far to the Left of where it stands now and was formally committed to removing American nuclear bases from British soil. I am relieved to recount that, having already made my break with the Marxist and anti-American Left, I had just enough grasp on reality to vote on Weinberger’s side that evening. But never before had I heard so plausible and articulate a defence of western defence and foreign policy, and so principled a grounding of collective security in the very notion of political liberty. It is this aspect of Weinberger – his willingness to take on the intellectual arguments of his opponents, wherever they may be, and defeat them with cool rationality – that is a particularly attractive feature of the man. (Famously, Weinberger did the same with the historian Theodore Draper – a far more formidable critic of US defence policy than Thompson – in the pages of the New York Review of Books, where he presented a cogent and effective refutation of the many misconceptions Draper had been labouring under.)
Caspar Weinberger was given an honorary knighthood by Her Majesty the Queen. He deserved it.