Seventy Years on: The Fateful Legacy of Suez

As dawn broke on 5 November 1956 paratroopers from Britain’s 3 Para regiment dropped from their Vickers Valetta transport aircraft on to Egypt’s El Gamil airfield. They were joined by helicopter-borne troops of 45 Royal Marine Commando. French paratroopers and sea-borne forces landed at the northern end of the Suez Canal.

The Anglo-French attempt to take back control of the canal from Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser would end in humiliation within 48 hours. Setting a pattern for western intervention in the Middle East that has endured through the succeeding 70 years, initial military success was followed by dismal political defeat.

There was nothing to justify the invasion hatched by Anthony Eden’s government in collusion with France and Israel. Britain’s power in the Middle East was waning. For Eden, retaining control of the canal was a matter of perceived national prestige as much as strategic necessity. Something of the same can be said about Donald Trump’s war against Iran.

The Suez plot was hatched in a sea of deception, locking out most of Eden’s own cabinet as well America’s Dwight Eisenhower. Militarily, it went to plan. The catastrophic failure lay in the refusal to admit that the world had changed. Eden found that the international uproar against such imperial adventurism was matched only by US fury that it had been kept in the dark.

Along the way the Soviet Union had been given cover to quash the pro-democracy uprising in Hungary and Washington had been badly wrong-footed in its attempts to counter Soviet influence among the nations emerging from the break up of the old empires. Eisenhower’s angry response was to shut off the international funding Britain needed to halt a run on sterling. Eden dumped the alliance with the French and surrendered to the US Treasury. By January 1957 he was gone from Downing Street.

The legacy of Suez outlives the immediate furore. Most obviously, the debacle sounded the last trumpet of empire. Former British colonies in Africa and Asia soon followed India to independence. France battled vainly to hold on Algeria. Britain could no longer sustain the postwar pretence of remaining a great power on a par with the United States and Soviet Union. As for the “special relationship” forged by Churchill and Roosevelt to fight the Nazis, it was evident to all but wishful thinkers in London that sentiment would not survive a collision with America’s national interest.

Britain has confronted the lessons only with reluctance. The nation’s economic performance still struggles under the weight of its international pretensions. Remember Boris Johnson’s ludicrous claim that leaving the European Union would see the rebirth of something called Global Britain? A decade later, Andy Burnham’s government declares that it will do whatever it takes to stand up to Vladimir Putin’s Russia - anything, that is, except find sufficient money to properly rebuild the nation’s defences.

Harold Macmillan, Eden’s successor, responded to Eisenhower’s ruthlessness by drawing still closer to the US, striking a pose as Greece to America’s Rome. Then came the nod to Europe. But forty years as a member of the European Union failed to persuade a succession of prime ministers from forever doffing their caps to the occupant of the White House.

And now? In less than two years Donald Trump has brutally upended the work of decades spent shoring up the claim to be Washington’s most important ally. Yet, despite all, you can still find deluded policymakers in Whitehall clinging on to the hope that all can be well again once Trump leaves the White House.

The sadness is that it has taken the combination of Trump, Putin and the reckless slef-harm of Brexit to expose the organising geopolitical reality that might have been recognised in the aftermath of Suez. However much it hankers after the past, Britain can claim a voice in the world only if it exercises influence in its own neighbourhood. British prosperity and security are indivisible from those of Europe.

France’s response to Suez - to build Europe as a counterweight to the US - has fared better. Trump offers validation of the Gaullist suspicion of American intentions. The strategic autonomy sought by Emmanuel Macron no longer sounds an eccentrically French idea. As for the perfidious British, though, France needs them. Germany may be rearming, but a credible European deterrent against Putin’s revanchism requires a Franco-British spine. It might be said that there have been some encouraging straws in the wind. The RAF recently joined the French air force in a joint nuclear exercise.

The real irony of the Suez saga, though, is that the actor in the drama who forced its abrupt end seems to have learned least. By forcing Britain and France out of the Middle East, the US assumed for itself the role of defending western interests in the region. Within a year of Suez the US president had admitted as much with the “Eisenhower Doctrine”, offering a security guarantee to Arab allies.

But, like the British before them, the Americans have consistently over-estimated the efficacy of of their own military power and the resilience of their adversaries. In Iraq George W Bush’s “shock and awe” was followed by humiliating retreat eight years later. For a time last year Trump exulted in American bombing of Yemen’s rebels Houthis - until the futility of the exercise became inescapable. And so it is been with Iran. A war calculated to celebrate America’s power has become a demonstration of Trump’s powerlessness.

First published on Inside-Out, Philip Stephens’s Substack