The Suez Canal is the shortest link between Europe and Asia, responsible for 12% of global trade and 30% of global container traffic while transporting energy, commodities, and consumer goods at incredible volumes. In 1956, the Suez Canal provided a passageway to two-thirds of the oil supply to Western Europe. The political, geographical, and economic importance of the passageway is apparent to many, including Sir Anthony Eden, who newly replaced Churchill as PM in April 1955. The 1956 Suez Crisis, however, instead allowing Britain to regain control of the key trade route, represented an ugly war plot emblematic to the end of imperial power in the Middle East.
Twenty years earlier, when Eden was the British Foreign Secretary, he signed the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 with then-Egyptian premier Nahas Pasha. Under this treaty, all British troops based in Egypt were to retreat except those guarding the Suez. At that time, Egypt’s independence had been struggling with developing a fully independent political apparatus, while British occupation in Egypt ended for 54 years except for the Suez. Soon after the treaty was signed, the Egyptian government assumed control over its military forces. It then opened admissions to Egyptians with varied backgrounds, including Gamal Abdel Nasser, who joined the officer corps.
Nasser grew to seize more and more influence in Egypt, eventually claiming chairmanship of the Egyptian Revolutionary Command Council (RCC). With General Muhammad Naguib, they overthrew King Farouk in July 1952, then appointed Aly Maher Pasha as PM. Over the next two years, he gradually forced Naguib out of the picture, establishing himself as the de facto leader of Egypt through control of the RCC. In June 1956, Nasser was approved for the presidency with an overwhelming majority in the public referendum, leading to his eventual reforms towards nationalism.
In 1951, Egypt repudiated the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. As Nasser stepped into control of the government, the British agreed to withdraw all troops in 1954, and by June 1956, this completed. The implication of this withdrawal was that Egypt had gained full independence. However, Nasser had previously established the new Constitution of Egypt in January, declaring a single-party system and independent foreign policy which caused tensions with the Western Allies.
The immediate reason for the nationalization of the Suez Canal however was the US & UK withdrawal of financial support to build the Aswan Dam across the Nile as one of the world’s largest embankment dams. President Eisenhower’s diary noted as follows:
“We lost interest and said nothing more about the matter. […] Since conditions had changed markedly and we had thought the whole project dead, we merely replied that we were no longer interested.”
Nasser nationalized the Canal on 26 July 1956, 7 days after the withdrawal was announced. The rationale was that the nationalization and the creation of the Suez Canal Company was a means to fund the Aswan Dam instead of using investment. In the speech he gave in Alexandria that day, claims were made about the Egyptian right to sovereignty over the canal especially with “120,000 Egyptians [having] died building it”. The company’s chief medical officer, however, reported around 2.5 deaths per 1000 during the years of construction, giving a total death toll of c. 2500. Egypt closed the Canal from Israeli shipping on the same day.
The popularity of the nationalization was extremely high, as Nasser established himself as the “spokesman for the masses not only in Egypt but all over the Third World.” Egyptians were incentivized by the prospect of a centralized economy booming. Indeed, the GDP growth rate between 1955 and 1975 was 4.2%, which was considerably impressive compared to the rule under the monarchy. Nasser indicated an expectation of making $100 million yearly from the canal.
However, fees were raised only after nationalization, leading to a tendency for the West to believe that the Aswan Dam withdrawal was just a convenient excuse for inevitable nationalization. Eisenhower estimated that if the fees remained constant, it would have taken 367 years to fund the project completely. The British and the French, being the biggest stakeholders of the Canal, soon condemned Nasser’s action and suggested military solutions to Eisenhower. It was time-pressured as Britain had around a 6-week oil supply, while the French had even less. American anti-interventionism in the Middle East pushed Britain and France to cease communication with the US.
As weeks passed, a three-day secret meeting was organized in Sèvres, a private villa on the outskirts of Paris. Representatives sent from the UK, France, and Israel signed a document known as the Protocol of Sèvres. This would turn out to be one of the most influential war plots in the post-world-war period. The Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion, the French Defense Minister Bourgès-Maunoury, and other military men met up first on 22 October.
The general plan was for Israel to begin an invasion in Egypt, then for Britain and France to demand all troops be removed from the Suez as a ceasefire. Egypt was presumed to reject this, and when this happened the British and French invasions would commence on the Canal disguising as separating the Israeli and Egyptian forces.
The British delegate sent by Eden, Selwyn Lloyd, was reluctant to take the negotiations of the passionate French and Israelis as he arrived in Sèvres on the 24th. His bottom line was that Britain would not act unless the Israeli operation amounted to a real act of war and that consequently Britain would have a credible casus bello for military intervention. Negotiations were made on how soon aerial attacks were to be made by the British and French after the attack – the timing was set at no more than 36 hours, extended to avoid claims of collusion. The Sèvres Protocol was signed. Quite apparently, collusion was conspicuous immediately as the British and French entered the canal zone a week later.
Farcically, when Eden learned that the war plot had been recorded in a formal document, he was clearly surprised and very put out. So worried was Eden, that he ordered the delegates to return to Paris the next day to persuade the other parties to destroy the protocol. Ben-Gurion was already airborne with a copy, and the French rejected the request. Eden then rounded up all the copies in the Foreign Office and destroyed them. Two smoking guns remained.
On the evening of 29 October 1956, Israeli forces invaded Egypt, killing or capturing 30,000 Egyptians. The Tripartite Agreement of 1950 was invoked, calling Israel and Egypt to stop hostilities and withdraw from the Suez Canal by ten miles. Unsurprisingly, Israel accepted whereas the Egyptians refused.
The French and the British then intervened, justifying their entrance with the refusal of Egypt on October 31. The Soviet Union, though having just invaded Hungary, took time to address France, Britain, and the United States and threatened them of the engagement of nuclear arms if they did not withdraw from the region. This provoked Eisenhower’s great fear of increased Soviet influence in the Middle East, and he forcefully rejected the Soviet proposals of joint action to contain the European threats although not supporting the allied operation either.
Intermediation through the UN created a ceasefire on 7 November, but the British forces refused withdrawal until a peacekeeping force was in place. The newly created peacekeeping forces (UNEF) arrived on 15 November, while Britain and France withdrew.
A multitude of consequences landed for Britain and France immediately. Losing $45 million between 30 October and 2 November, compounded with a restricted oil supply due to the closing of the canal, Britain looked for assistance from the IMF. The assistance scheme was rejected by Eisenhower’s government, which even prepared to sell parts of Sterling Bond holdings of the US Government. Saudi Arabia began an oil embargo against Britain and France, and the NATO members refused to sell the oil they received from the Arab nations to Britain or France. The strength of the ‘oil weapon’ is seen again later in the Yom Kippur War against the US.
Eden was accused of misleading the parliament and resigned in early 1957. His successor, Harold Macmillan, sped up the decolonization processes and restored some of the relationship between Britain and France. Here the question surges: was this the end of imperial influence in the Middle East?
Britain intervened and suppressed riots in Jordan in 1958, and deployed troops to Kuwait in 1961 to deter an Iraqi invasion. One could then argue that the military and political outreach post-1956 signifies that imperial influence still existed and, if not more successful in reaching intended outcomes, as they preserved King Hussein and prevented the invasion of Kuwait.
Meanwhile, the relationship between Britain and the US was repaired quickly. There was an incentive for the US to restore the prestige of its closest ally, and they were boosted by the friendship between Macmillan and Eisenhower. Examples include the first British hydrogen bomb test, Operation Grapple, which led to the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defense Agreement. The British Naval Ballistic Missile System, or the UK Polaris program, followed the Nassau Agreement engaged by Macmillan and JFK, which sold top missile technology at moderate rates to the UK.
These events demonstrate the remaining influence of Britain in the East and its affection with the US. However, a distinction between whether they were subject to imperial interventionism, or simply diplomatic or global roles is needed, because imperial influence is not congruent to independent national intervention, or cases that aren’t strictly military interventions.
For example, with the 1958 Jordan Crisis, the British proposed Operation Fortitude (synonymous but completely different from the WWII operation), which directed British forces not to intervene directly. They rejected the Baghdad Pact which PM Samir Rifa’i cited to negotiate for direct intervention, and the request to man the borders between Syria and Israel. Instead, the plan was to protect the palace and an airbase in Amman. Therefore, it is debatable whether such decisions were still representative of an imperial approach to protect regimes, because of the British reluctance to repeat the Suez Crisis and avoid direct interventionism. Nasser however did attack Jordan and the Hashemite Arab Federation as “collaborators of imperialism [pleasing] imperialist masters”. The scale of imperial intervention between the Suez Crisis and the Jordan Crisis seems obvious, but again there remains the essence of imperialism in the intervening strategies. The key difference in the two crises however lies in the British need for approval, indicative of the argument against remaining imperialism. Specifically, the success of Operation Fortitude owed greatly to Israel’s decision to allow British and American overflight to reach Amman. With Britain, Israel has learned of its limited power, leading to more cooperation with the US instead. Internationally, the Jordan Crisis revealed British dependence on US approval to intervene. Macmillan notes in his memoir that the failure of Operation Fortitude would have “resulted in the collapse of all our policies and the fall of the Government.”
The more moderate approach to whether imperial intervention remained after the Suez Crisis would be to claim that there was no clear on/off transition between imperialism and “second tier” global power. Phases of crises and liberated colonies transitioned Britain away from an empire. The Suez Crisis did however globally indicate the empire’s decline and increased US and Soviet influence as superpowers in the Cold War era. This point was driven deeply by the Jordan crisis in 1958, and the accompanying independence of various colonies later in the century constricted the global influence of the British Empire.
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