The foreign policy of Margaret Thatcher was the foreign policy of the United Kingdom from when Thatcher's premiership commenced in May 1979, until November 1990. Her foreign policy has been described as "having helped the US stare down and defeat the Soviet Union". As Thatcher pointed out herself "The United States and Britain have together been the greatest alliance in defence of liberty and justice". From her first days as Prime Minister of Great Britain, she criticised Western societies (thus referring not only to British voters and citizens) for their "self-questioning" that has gone too far that it causes paralysis, and that action should substitute introspection at the beginning of a "dangerous decade" that challenges Western security and way of life; among other international problems she points the "immediate threat from the Soviet Union" which is "military rather than ideological" at the end of the 1970s. These words were a cornerstone to Thatcher's later foreign policy as a Prime Minister. Together with US President Ronald Reagan they made an enduring effort to bring freedom to people in the Eastern Bloc and under communist regimes that will refuse them such primal human rights as freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of movement, et al. This effort will later result in the Fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism as well, and the dissolution of Soviet Union.