You're severly underestimating the will of the English. Are they glad the soviets got a black eye? yes. Are they glad Romania is free? Yes. Will they give up their safety to let Romania join? NO. The IRA is a terror organisation who already bombed hundreds and caused mass terror and bombings for decades and here comes a country supporting them and giving them legitamacy. The only way Romania gets to enter is if they give all info of the IRA they have and agree to not support them. The safety of one's own nation always trumps the nation on the side of the continent. And with the Iron Lady she will make her voice heard.
She will be heard, but given the US is the one who backed them in the first place through the CIA, to have Romania denied admission based on stuff that reportedly happened
after their involvement, that Irish companies are doing a lot of reconstruction efforts, and maybe one or two are only
suspected of IRA involvement, I very much doubt that the Romanians would be capable of officially providing them IRA members when, again, its only suspected that the IRA is still present in the country
and they currently lack the necessary manpower to launch an LEO manhunt when the majority of the law enforcement officers (who survived or were replaced in the purge) are likely aiding in providing security to reconstruction efforts and the borders, with the bare minimum left to protect and serve.
At most the Romanians would give them would be to allow a couple agents in the country under supervision.
I got family too over there. And yes they generaly don't give a shit and even try to extort a bribe from you, the thing is when there is an emergency and their boss's boss is breathing down their neck they suddenly do give a shit.
How would they enter Yugoslavia? Tito is a dictator he does not like non-state actor's moving into his nation especially terror organisation known for bombings. Tito can allow the CIA limited freedom with oversight but not terrorist. So the moment they tried to enter Slovenia without a VISA they should be kicked out and if they to enter via smugeling to enter Yugoslavia how would they cross into Romania probably the most secured border in Europe? It needs multiple people fucking up to such a large degree that it does not make sense.
You're assuming that at the border, a guard who is likely a nobody, even on shift, who definitely does not have access to the level of intelligence or technology necessary to figure out that a group of ordinary men, presumably in business suits, have ties to the IRA, a non-local terrorist group that have committed nothing to Yugoslavia.
If these men were good at their job, and given they are foreign gun runners that have operated for decades at this point so that they presumably are, they would fall under the category of private citizens with too much money.
There's literally an old Irish saying for this, that I'm probably gonna butcher: "It is best to be unknown to the Law."
It's not even the first time a NATO member has been petty. Greece for 27 years refused Northern Macedonia to enter NATO because they got triggered over the name and claimed that Macedonia has no right to calling itself that or that they're not true Macedonians and then trying to claim that everything in Macedonian history is purely Greek with no separate identity. Not to mention they claimed that Macedonia was going to be a source of irredentism when Macedonia had no power to launch wars of expansion and Greece was a NATO member so it's territory was already safe.
I know what you're trying to get at, but the North Macedonians never been Greek in origin, and are in fact a Slavic ethno-group that only adopted the name in the 19th century because a group of intellectuals elsewhere in the world, such as Sofia and St. Petersburg, decided to designate themselves that as such, because in the words of the most prominent of them, Petko Slaveykov, "they did not want to be recognized as Bulgarians" which was accomplished by them adding to their cultural myth that they were decendants of Ancient Macedon.
What they were called before that is unknown, likely due to a much smaller, agrarian population, but it pissed the Greeks off something firece because they see it as further theft of their cultural identity during a time they were still struggling to win their independence from the Ottomans as a distinct ethno-group and identity.
So while it's shitty that they denied them membership like that, it's completely understandable.
This isn't even Thatcher being petty. She has very legitimate reasons to oppose Romania if they support the IRA because IRA are terrorists who have killed hundreds of British citizens. American funding is bad enough, an entire NATO member openly supporting the IRA would be something she would not tolerate and Thatcher would be supported widely by the British public and Labour. When it comes down to it, Carter or Reagan will always chose the UK and their special relationship over Romania. If Romania does join NATO, I expect it would happen after Thatcher has extracted numerous concessions from the White House to get the British vote.
I never said she was being petty, I just said that based on the information that Magoose had given us, it was unlikely that Thatcher would oppose the Romanians joining because the way he had written the story suggests that they had largely gone to ground by the time of their reconstruction, and that even if there were still sympathies and ties left behind in the region, it wouldn't be something directly tied to the new government, and that trying to denounce their joining based on the idea that a company that had, suspected and not confirmed, ties to the IRA, it would burn up her political capital something fierce.
