Empires rise and fall. They don’t last forever. Imperial declines follow a gradual shift of economic tides, but are also marked and defined by critical turning points.
There are many differences between The Suez Crisis in 1956 and the US war against Iran today, but the similarities in the larger context suggest that United States it is facing the same kind of “end of empire” moment that the British Empire faced in that historic crisis.
In 1956, the British Empire was still resisting independence movements in many of its colonies. The horrors of the British I would like to concentration camps in Kenya and Britain’s brutal guerrilla warfare in Malaya continued throughout the 1950s, and, like the US today, Britain still had military bases around the world.
Egypt’s imperial dominance began with Egypt’s purchase of 44% of the French-built Suez Canal in 1875. Seven years later, the British conquer Egypt took over the management of the Canal and controlled access to it for 70 years.
after The Egyptian Revolution overthrew the British-controlled monarchy in 1952, the British agreed to withdraw and close their bases in Egypt by 1956 and return control of the Suez Canal to Egypt by 1968.
But Egypt was increasingly threatened by Britain, Franceand Israel. Throughout 1955 The Baghdad Pactrecruited the British TurkeyIraq, Iran and Pakistan to form the Central Treaty Organization, an anti-Soviet, anti-Egyptian alliance modeled on niton in Europe. At the same time, Israel was attacking Egyptian forces in Gaza Disappear and France was threatening Egypt for supporting Algeria’s war for independence.
Egypt’s President Nasser responded by forming new alliances with him Saudi Arabia, SYRIAand other countries in the region and, after failing to secure arms from the US or the USSR, Egypt purchased large shipments of Soviet arms from Czechoslovakia.
Upset with the new alliances of Egypt, the United States, Great Britain and The World Bank withdrew their funding from Egypt’s Aswan Dam project on the Nile. In response, Nasser stunned the world nationalizing Suez Canal Company and pledging to compensate its British and French shareholders.
British leaders saw the loss of the Suez Canal as unacceptable. Chancellor Harold Macmillan has written in his diary, “If Nasser ‘gets away’, we are finished. The whole Arab world will despise us… and our friends will fall. It may be the end of British influence and power forever. So, in the last resort, we must use force and defy opinion, here and abroad.”
British Prime Minister Anthony Eden hatched a secret plan with France and Israel to invade Egypt, seize the Canal, and attempt to overthrow Nasser. The US rejected military action against Egypt, and President Dwight Eisenhower said at a press conference on September 5, 1956, “We are committed to a peaceful settlement of this dispute, nothing else.” But the British assumed that the US would eventually support them once the war started.
Israel conquered Gaza The Sinai Belt and Peninsula, and then Britain and France landed forces at Port Said at the northern end of the Suez Canal, under the pretense of defending the Canal from Israel and Egypt.
But before Britain and France could take full control of the Channel, the US government stepped in to stop them. The US began selling its British currency reserves and blocked an emergency IMF loan to Britain, causing a financial crisis. At the same time, the USSR threatened to send forces to defend Egypt and even hinted at the possible use of nuclear weapons against Britain, France and Israel.
The UN Security Council used a procedural vote – which Britain and France could not veto – to call a special emergency session of the General Assembly under the “Union for Peace”. the process. Resolution 997 called for an armistice, a withdrawal to the armistice lines, and the reopening of the Canal, and was passed by 64 votes in favor.
Four days later, Prime Minister Eden announced a ceasefire. British and French forces withdrew six weeks later, and the Channel was cleared and reopened within five months. Egypt then managed the Canal effectively and did not block British or French ships from using it.
The Suez Crisis was the pivotal moment when the British government finally learned that it could no longer use military force to impose its will on less powerful countries. Like Americans today in Iran, the British public was well ahead of its government: polls found that 44% opposed the use of force against Egypt, while only 37% approved. As Prime Minister Eden fretted over the UN ceasefire order, 30,000 people gathered in an anti-war rally in Trafalgar Square.
Eden was forced to resign and was replaced by Harold Macmillanwhich withdrew British forces from bases in Asia, accelerated independence for British colonies around the world, and repositioned Britain as a junior partner of the US.
This new role included arming British submarines with American nuclear missiles, which is now one violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But Macmillan’s successor, Labor Party leader Harold Wilson, would later keep Britain out Vietnam.
Britain engineered a successful transition to a post-imperial future through its relationship with the United States and the British Commonwealth – an association of independent states that maintained British influence in its former colonies.
On the domestic front, there was broad political support for a mixed capitalist-socialist economy that included free education and health carepublicly owned housing and utilities, nationalized and strong industries trade TRADE UNIONS.
Macmillan was re-elected in 1959 with the slogan, “You never had it so good”. When a cartoonist mockingly called him “Supermac,” the nickname stuck.
Britain’s Tories were dyed in the wool the imperialistsmuch like Trump and his motley crew today. But they did not allow their imperial worldview to blind them to the lessons of the Suez crisis. They could see that the world was changing and that Britain had to find a new role in a world it could no longer dominate by force.
Most Americans today have learned similar lessons from the failed, disastrous US wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But like the British people who resisted Eden’s invasion of Egypt, Americans have been drawn repeatedly into war by the secret machinations of leaders blinded by anachronistic, racist, imperial assumptions.
Trump is now facing the same kind of international pressure that forced Britain and France to abandon the Suez invasion. Another special emergency session of the UN General Assembly and a new “Union for Peace” resolution could also be helpful.
But ultimately, the resolution of this crisis, and the future of the US in today’s developing multipolar world, will depend on whether American politicians are able to make the kind of historic political change that Macmillan and his colleagues did in 1956 and the years that followed.
Macmillan was not an opposition politician, but a senior member of Britain’s Conservative government, up to his neck in the Suez fiasco. The secret plot with the Israelis was his idea. President Eisenhower personally warned him in The White House that the US would not support a British invasion of Egypt.
But unlike the British ambassador, who sat in on the same meeting, Macmillan assumed that, when the chips were down, Eisenhower would stand by his old World War II allies. Perhaps it was the shock of it all going so wrong that convinced Macmillan and his colleagues to take a fresh look at the world and fundamentally rethink British foreign and colonial policy.
The crisis with Iran is at least as disastrous for the US imperialism as the Suez crisis was for the British Empire. The question is whether anyone in Washington today it is able to grasp the weight of the crisis and make the required policy change.
To follow the example of Britain’s Suez means closure the US military bases around the world; relinquishing the unlawful threat and use of military force as the primary instrument of US foreign policy; and relying instead on multilateral diplomacy and UN action to resolve international disputes.
But where is Macmillan in The Trump administration or to The Republican Party? Or Harold Wilson in Democratic Partywhose leaders have not even attempted to formulate a progressive foreign policy since the turn of the century in 2009 The Cold War? Obama’s delayed arrival to Cuba and Iran in his second term were their only flirtations with a new way forward.
The only silver lining in the current crisis is that it may mark the final collapse of the neoconservative imperial project that has dominated US foreign policy since the 1990s and has now thrust Trump into a “damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.” ElEctions between an unwinnable war with Iran and a historic diplomatic defeat.
Americans should insist that this crisis sparks a radical overhaul of US politics, economics, and international relations that is taking place in both parties have obstructed for decades.
Trump’s Gulf blockade must also be the final end to this ugly, criminal neocon era and the beginning of a transition to a more peaceful future for Americans and all of our neighbors.
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace. She is the co-author, with Nicolas JS Davies, of The War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022.
Nicolas JS Davies is a freelance journalist and a researcher with CODEPINK. He is co-author, with Medea Benjamin, of The War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022, and author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.“
