Cambridge's Churchill Archives Centre, in partnership with the Howard H. Baker Jr. Public Policy Center at the University of Tennessee, hosted a two-day conference this week about 'The Cold War and its Legacy'.

On Wednesday, several of the conference's headline speakers offered Varsity their views on the Cold War and its relevance to modern students. This is the first in a series of five interviews.

Lord Charles Powell, former Private Secretary and foreign affairs advisor to Margaret Thatcher, said he believes it is "extremely important [for students] to understand the Cold War.”

"It's been classically a failure of the British education system that it doesn't tend to do too much on up-to-date history. But it's important because it helps tell you where you're going - it's a chance to avoid the past.

“The Cold War was a pretty defining period, stretching over 40 years of head-to-head confrontation of two vast military alliances, with a constant sense of impending danger and even the possibility of nuclear annihilation."

Asked why it might be difficult for modern students, many of whom did not live through the Cold War, to understand the blustery rhetoric of Western Cold War leaders, Powell responded, "You've got to understand why Thatcher and Reagan used that rhetoric.

"It was because in previous years both the United States and Britain and Europe had been greatly weakened - they had a tremendous series of crises. There was a loss of self-confidence in the US and the UK, and to a degree in Europe. And before you can do anything about a communist system like the Soviet Union, you have to rebuild the national strength and confidence, which of course Reagan and Thatcher were about: rebuilding a solid foundation for going beyond détente, on to dialogue.

“Their rhetoric was aimed at restoring strength and self-confidence to Western society. It might sound dated, but I think it's important to understand it had a very important purpose, as the basis for winding down the Cold War very successfully by 1990.”

One key to the resolution of the Cold War, Lord Powell argues, was the fact that dialogue between the West and Mikhail Gorbachev was "of a quality which had never existed before.”

“Dialogue with the older Soviet Union was a pretty pointless exercise. With Gorbachev, you were dealing for the first time with a Western-style politician. I think Gorbachev realised that if the Soviet Union was not going to enter the twenty-first century as a third-world country, it would have to change radically. Also, the Soviet Union would not be able to go on matching American strength.”

Lord Powell’s thoughts on national self-confidence and the quality of dialogue between the West and Gorbachev inspire two questions. First, is the UK in the same position (that is, lacking confidence) now as it was at the beginning of the Cold War - and would a change of Government next year make any difference in this respect? Second, can Britain and the US have the same kind of dialogue with Russia now that they had with Gorbachev in the 1980s?

Powell takes them one by one. "First, yes, we are in a bit of a low period now. I wouldn't say for a moment it's all the fault of the Government here. I don't think it is. There are much wider forces at work.

“We are at a risk of going back to the state we were in in the 1960s and '70s: weakness, inability to act.

“The first thing a new Government here will have to do, provided there is a new one, will be to create a new basis of strength and confidence. What Margaret Thatcher set out to do in 1979 was to rebuild the British economy; it was only when that was done that we were able to help create a sense of confidence.

“Here, it is the same: we're going to have to spend several years, I suspect, rebuilding the country's economic strength. I would not expect much change in basic foreign policy because of a change in Government. Yes, there will be a change in attitude towards the European Union - but not in the wider context of relations with Russia, China, and other countries. But we'll be rather on the back foot because of our current weakness.

“Could we have the same sort of dialogue with Putin now as we had once with Gorbachev? The answer is no, we can't, because I think Putin is a reversion to type - the conservative nationalist authoritarian type, with whom it is very hard to have a sensible, productive dialogue.

“The interesting question is, how are we in the West essentially responsible for that? Did we, in a way, rape Gorbachev by rolling over him so much? You could argue that maybe it wasn't our job to keep Gorbachev in office, and his ambition of reforming the communist system was always hopeless. But the relative weakness of the democracy that emerged post-Gorbachev owed something to the lack of support from the West over the years."