Smoke rises over Port Said, Egypt, near the Suez Canal during the Franco-British invasion in October 1956. Despite battlefield success, the Suez Crisis ended in a political defeat for both countries, with lessons for the United States today. (Imperial War Museum)

The Suez Crisis and the Iran War

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Seventy years ago today marked the beginning of the “Suez Crisis”—and the end of the British Empire as a global superpower. What can American strategists learn from it?

In 1956, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser had a problem. Newly inaugurated as Egypt’s president on the heels of a nationalist military coup against the pro-British monarchy, he had expressed a desire to mend fences with the United Kingdom and seek aid from both the Soviet Union and the United States. At the same time, however, he had launched a series of overtly anti-Western foreign policy moves: aiding rebels against the French colonial government in Algeria, signing a massive arms deal with Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia, and recognizing the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong. These moves soured his relationship with the West, and in July 1956, the United States canceled a plan to fund a dam at Aswan along the Nile river—apparently dooming the project, as he had already pledged most of Egypt’s discretionary budget to the Czech arms deal. How could Nasser, who had staked his reputation on modernizing and industrializing Egypt, build the dam if there was no money for it?

To solve this problem, Nasser turned his sights on the Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and Asia. The canal, one of the world’s most valuable waterways, had been built by an Ottoman-French consortium in the 1860s and governed by the Franco-British Suez Canal Company since its opening in 1869. The 99-year lease negotiated between France and Ottoman-era Egypt ran until 1968, but on July 26, 1956—one week after the US loan application was refused—Nasser declared that Egypt would nationalize it 12 years ahead of schedule, using its shipping tolls to fund the dam’s construction.

Nasser’s announcement was wildly popular in Egypt, which had viewed continued Anglo-French control of the canal as an insulting relic of the colonial era. Yet the UK and France were outraged, noting that the Egyptian leader had earlier made an explicit promise to leave the canal’s existing arrangement in place until 1968. After the announcement, British prime minister Anthony Eden compared Nasser to the fascist dictators of the 1930s: “[Nasser] has torn up all his country’s promises to the Suez Canal Company and has even gone back on his own statements. … We cannot agree that an act of plunder which threatens the livelihood of many nations should be allowed to succeed.”

The specter of 1930s fascism, and of prewar appeasement, drove the United Kingdom and France to plan a military operation to seize the waterway. They found an eager partner in Israel, which sought to secure its western frontier against Egyptian and Palestinian guerrillas operating from Egyptian-occupied Gaza. In mid-October at a secret conference in Sèvres, France, the three countries finalized a plan of attack: Israel would invade and occupy Sinai from the east, and the United Kingdom and France would intervene militarily in order to “protect” the canal from the Egypt-Israel war, with no intention of returning it once hostilities concluded. Beyond securing control over the canal, the ultimate aim of the plot was to humiliate Nasser and engineer his fall from power in favor of a more amenable Egyptian government.

The three nations launched the plan on October 29, 1956, when Israel seized on a dispute in the Red Sea-adjacent Straits of Tiran as a casus belli to invade Sinai. Two days later, after Egypt refused to accept military neutrality for the canal at the United Nations, the United Kingdom and France launched their own invasion, dropping paratroopers along the canal and seizing it from Egyptian forces.

On both the Sinai and the canal front, the Suez operation was a clear military victory—but it soon fell apart in the geopolitical realm. The Arab world reacted to the invasion with fury, instituting an oil embargo against the UK and France. The Soviet Union, seeking to make diplomatic inroads into the Middle East and hoping to distract the world........

© The National Interest