A Special Relationship
Hugh Carey's first foreign visit was, of course, to next-door Canada, and his first overseas visit that followed would be a straightforward trip to the United Kingdom, then Brussels for a NATO conference, and then on to Germany to meet with the rather interesting new Chancellor Franz-Josef Strauss before stopping over in Paris for a quick bilateral with the newly-reelected Valery Giscard d'Estaing and then heading home. The foreign tour was meant to introduce a new era of foreign policy to the three most key European allies and "establish relationships between the White House and our most important partners in the Atlantic alliance." The back half of the tour was fairly unremarkable; like most NATO leaders, Carey was put off by Strauss during their "walk in the park" in Munich, while his time with VGE was polite and boringly constructive.
London proved to be the highlight, both for Carey personally and for the transatlantic alliance. Carey was treated to an audience with the Queen, with whom he came away impressed by, and though a brief jaunt to his ancestral Ireland was not on the cards in this trip, he spoke at a press conference of "my love for the entirety of this island chain, and my intent to spend more time in it." The famously ruthless British press made some mockery of Carey's gruff, stiff posture and compared his thick eyebrows to those of Prime Minister Healey, but on more substantive grounds did pointedly ask the question on everybody's mind - to what extent did Carey sympathize with Irish republicanism, him being a devout Irish Catholic himself? The question of Irish-American attitudes towards "the six counties" was considerably more live in 1981 than it had been when John F. Kennedy visited Ireland twenty years earlier in his own Presidency, with the Troubles having erupted in 1968 and still simmering a decade after their most intense year; indeed, Michael Foot and the Home Office had just through cautious negotiations barely avoided another publicly embarrassing hunger strike by IRA prisoners just weeks before Carey's visit.
[1] It was widely known to British policymakers that a fair amount of
Sinn Fein's funding came from Irish-Americans romantically attached to their homeland and ignorant about what the IRA actually stood for, and indeed there were more than a few people, even in Labour which was less reflexively Unionist (indeed, Foot privately thought that Northern Ireland should be Dublin's problem rather than London's, and had said as much to his Cabinet colleagues on several occasions)
[2] who were actively worried that the election of an Irish-American "hard man" from New York who was very close politically and personally to the three powerful Irish-American Democratic legislators Ted Kennedy, Daniel Moynihan and most importantly Speaker Tip O'Neill meant a wrinkle in the US-UK relationship over Ireland; Francis Pym, the Tories' Shadow Foreign Secretary, went so far as to describe this quartet as "the Four Horsemen of the Ulster Apocalypse."
As such, before the first face-to-face meeting between the occupants of the White House and Number 10, there was tension and mistrust in the air between the two principals. That said, historians have cast doubt on the extent of this. Healey, like Callaghan before him, had got on quite well with Gerald Ford and had been the first foreign leader to call Carey to congratulate him on his victory over Ronald Reagan. Beyond that, Foreign Secretary David Owen - widely thought to be doing everything in his power to set himself up as Healey's successor as Labour leader in four to five years' time, as Healey was not expected to want to serve to the age of seventy and Owen was nearly twenty years his junior - had made a point of becoming good friends first with George Bush and now with Nicholas Katzenbach in a short period of time, coming to dominate the foreign portfolio as he spent nearly every other week abroad on diplomatic assignments as possibly the most hard-charging Foreign Secretary since World War II, which had served to lay a tremendous amount of groundwork for the meeting. In person, though, Carey and Healey hit it off. As old-fashioned men of a similar age who had come of age with the mid-century Old Left, they shared a mutual distaste for the rising "New Left" ascendant in both their parties and Healey openly joked about "all these Trots Tots around us." Carey was impressed by Healey's voluminous knowledge of European figures, and leaned on him and Owen both for their thoughts on how best to handle Strauss, whom nobody in Washington seemed quite sure what to do with (Carey went so far as to jokingly call him "Kraut Nixon.") Healey earned from Carey a key commitment on the matter most personal to him, which was "the peaceful transition of Eastern Europe from Soviet communism to democracy," not precisely a controversial stance in the United States but one that committed Labour to a much more muscular role in Cold War affairs than perhaps the Militant faction and the Bennites just a tick to their right were comfortable with. Beyond concluding that Andropov was best not to be trusted, the meeting did much to cement a positive relationship between two men who were largely aligned politically and whose cooperation and partnership would come to define the US-UK alliance in a way few leaders had since LBJ and Harold Wilson.
[3]
The immediate point of agreement both leaders arrived at, however, was pushing forward with securing an end to apartheid in South Africa. The "Free Nelson Mandela" movement had grown dramatically in the course of the last two years, boosted in part by an innovative public relations campaign by OR Tambo in London as well as international outrage still lingering from the Soweto Uprising. That negotiation with South Africa was possible had been proven by BJ Vorster's participation in securing Zimbabwe's Internal Settlement, and though the Muzorewa regime's commitment to democracy was increasingly questionable ever since incorporating the Nkomo faction into government, the "Rhodesia Model" was one both Carey and Healey gave much credit to, in large part as Healey had been instrumental during his time as Foreign Secretary in securing it. Now as Prime Minister, Healey's great desire in international relations was to use the British Commonwealth actively to promote freedom, equality and democracy abroad rather than simply serve as an old clearing house for the former Empire.
It was not as simple as Healey thought, though, to simply copy what had worked in Rhodesia and transplant it to South Africa. The apartheid government was much more sophisticated, internally strong and dogged in its refusal to budge than Ian Smith had been, and Vorster had been toppled internally in a scandal and been replaced by PW Botha, who was a thorough hardliner. Tambo's reputation after a freak poisoning incident that had killed hundreds of ANC members had also declined sharply, and Mandela was twiddling his thumbs on Robben Island. International contempt for South Africa was much higher, too; Mandela was a considerably more sympathetic figure abroad than Mugabe and Nkomo had been, and Rhodesia a more obscure corner of the world, meaning all eyes were on what happened there. In particular, US Congressman Andrew Young of Atlanta had made it his personal mission to secure severe sanctions against Pretoria and personally regarded Rhodesia's Internal Settlement as disgraceful, and opposed any such solution in South Africa.
[4]
The pressure was on, then, in the early 1980s for a novel solution to the problem, but both leaders came away from their multi-day meetings in London with the agreement that South Africa, rather than an anti-communist bulwark, was a pariah regime that needed to be brought to heel and that doing so was a high priority for both of them...
[1] So Bobby Sands is alive, IOW. A lot of what drove the second hunger strike was Thatcher's people not coming to the table after the IRA blew up her Northern Ireland hand and good personal friend Airey Neave (one of the few things I actually learned about watching the dreck that was
The Iron Lady, good as Meryl is in it) right after the 1979 elections. So between the IRA not blowing up Neave
and Mountbatten in 1979, the early 80s are a lot more pacific in Northern Ireland, even though the situation is still pretty tense.
[2] To what extent Foot actually believed this, I don't know, but from what I recall reading this was a point of view ascendant in Labour at the time
[3] Of course Ford and Callaghan had a lot more mutual overlap here than IOTL, but they were not of the same political persuasions
[4] As UN Ambassador, Andrew Young was a big part of sinking the flawed but workable Internal Settlement, paving the road for Mugabe's takeover