The Reagan, The Thatcher,and The Internal Settlement.

OK, so if the stars line up properly, and this could come to pass. Some of us old line conservatives still lament the loss of Rhodesia. Of course, it was doomed to failure from the beginning, the numbers just weren't there. But what if the western powers had gone all out to promote the Muzorewa government in the summer of 1979? Is there any way it could have worked? Could anybody have twisted Joshua Nkomo's arm enough to have gotten him onboard? How can we come up with a solution to prevent this clusterf**k that is today's Zimbabwe? Thoughts, please?
 
Sorry. This assumes that Reagan was president when the Internal Settlement was implemented. In OTL it was Jimmy Carter, who probably thought that Mugabe was a wonderful fellow. [wonder what he thinks today?] Reagan would not have been so fooled.
 
OK, so if the stars line up properly, and this could come to pass. Some of us old line conservatives still lament the loss of Rhodesia. Of course, it was doomed to failure from the beginning, the numbers just weren't there. But what if the western powers had gone all out to promote the Muzorewa government in the summer of 1979? Is there any way it could have worked? Could anybody have twisted Joshua Nkomo's arm enough to have gotten him onboard? How can we come up with a solution to prevent this clusterf**k that is today's Zimbabwe? Thoughts, please?

I definitely agree that getting Joshua Nkomo on board is necessary, as Muzorewa didn't have sufficinent popular support among black Zimbabweans to be able to rule on his own.

However I still think it is unlikely to occur. Given that even Margaret Thatcher didn't support the Internal Settlement, I find it unlikely that many other Western powers would.

You must remember that in the late 1970's there were many in the West who thought quite fondly of Mugabe; at one stage the black nationalist forces were actually given both political and economic support by the Swedish government under Olof Palme. Therefore I find it unlikely that Britain or even the USA would risk alienating itself from so much of the rest of the world by supporting what would still remain essentially a pariah state.
 
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