Sixty years ago this July the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. Nasser needed revenue to fund construction of the Aswan dam and an ambitious programme of weapons purchase and reconstruction. The British prime minister interpreted the Egyptian takeover as a personal affront, Anthony Eden’s behaviour throughout the crisis belying his reputation as a skilled diplomat and man of principle. Nasser’s action triggered a four-month crisis that culminated in the United Kingdom and France aborting their attempt to regain control of the waterway. An Anglo-French seizure of the Canal Zone in October 1956 was ostensibly a peace-keeping exercise to separate Egyptian and Israeli forces. Military intervention was justified on the grounds that only Israel adhered to a deliberately one-sided ultimatum: Egyptian forces had to retreat deep inland but the Israelis could retain control of the Sinai peninsula, with an obvious strategic advantage. From the outset opponents of the operation claimed collusion between France, Israel and the UK, and they were right. Yet, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, Eden always denied a deal was done with the Israelis.
Facing fierce criticism from Washington, from opposition parties and increasingly from within the cabinet, Eden backed down. Once the British bowed to American pressure Guy Mollet’s Socialist government was forced to acquiesce. At the UN the United States had supported a Security Council motion condemning seizure of the Canal Zone’s northern ports. Meanwhile the White House encouraged a run on the pound, its support for an IMF rescue package dependent on Eden ordering a British withdrawal from Port Said.  A reluctant France followed suit: having speedily seized the east bank’s Port Fuad battle-hardened veterans of Indo-China and Algeria were incandescent when ordered to abort their rapid advance south.
As the man who masterminded Nazi Germany’s defeat in the west and served as NATO’s first supreme commander Dwight D Eisenhower was seen in Whitehall as a guarantor of the ‘special relationship’. The British political establishment failed to recognise that even an anglophile like Eisenhower would always place American interests first, testing the transatlantic partnership to its limits: this relationship was a lot more ‘special’ in Whitehall than in Washington. As a president facing re-election he had urged old friends from the wartime alliance to pursue a diplomatic solution and avoid war with Egypt. Hawks like Eden and his Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, ignored the message, complacently assuming American support once seizure of the Canal was a done deal. It was a fatal miscalculation.
Eisenhower’s Republican administration cultivated the oil-rich Arab states, saw a revived Anglo-French presence in the Middle East as destabilising and viewed Israel with deep suspicion. Prime minister David Ben-Gurion’s Mapai party embodied a progressive, social democratic strain of Zionism that alienated conservatives in the United States but found sympathy in a France mortified by collaborationist involvement in the Holocaust. By the mid-fifties a technocrat-orchestrated recovery in manufacturing had seen the Fourth Republic wean itself off dependence on American aeroplanes and ordnance. Eager to export arms, especially combat aircraft, the French found an unlikely ally in Israel and a ready customer for hi-tech weaponry.
Ironically, both Labour and Conservative governments shared America’s antipathy towards Israel. A scarcely disguised dislike of ‘the Jews’ and painful memories of the Palestine Mandate’s final bloody days contrasted with longstanding Arabist sympathies inside the Foreign Office and treaty obligations to the Hashemite kingdoms in Jordan and Iraq. A threatened invasion of Jordan made war with Israel a more likely scenario than joining the French in a clandestine joint operation to destroy Cairo’s aggressively pan-Arabic regime. France’s incentive to join Israel in removing Nasser was Egypt’s support for the Front de libération nationale, engaged in a brutal struggle to secure Algerian independence. Mollet’s government happily conspired with the Israelis, but the British scarcely disguised their distaste at dealing with old enemies like the IDF chief of staff Moshe Dayan.
Commentators describe Keir Starmer’s defence of the Chagos Islands agreement and his forceful rejection of Donald Trump’s claim to Greenland as the most serious rupture in Anglo-American relations since Suez. There have unsurprisingly been other moments of tension such as the Reagan administration’s initially hesitant response to Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982, followed eighteen months later by the White House failing to forewarn Mrs Thatcher of a Maduro-style intervention in Grenada. The last year has of course seen sharp differences over Gaza and recognition of a Palestinian state, seen most clearly in votes of the Security Council. What was significant about Suez was the timing, only eleven years after the end of the Second World War and seven years after the creation of NATO – Eisenhower destroyed a delusion, rooted in Churchillian rhetoric, that the Americans would stand by the British through thick and thin.
Yet not every architect of British foreign policy had signed up to the myth. In 1945-6 Labour’s Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, had no illusions about the Americans, not least because he and Truman’s first Secretary of State, James Byrnes, loathed each other. Bevin envisaged the United Kingdom as a ‘Third Force’ in global politics: in hock to neither the Soviet Union nor the United States, a social democratic Britain would focus on European security and enlightened colonialism, ideally in partnership with the French. Critically, Bevin convinced Attlee that the UK could not rely on American protection in an atomic age. Labour committed vast resources to developing an independent nuclear deterrent, and that commitment continued after Churchill returned to power in October 1951 – the British built atom and later hydrogen bombs, along with a V-bomber force capable of reaching Russia. In the end of course American forces did remain in western Europe with a direct line drawn from declaration of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, through the 1948 Marshall Plan and the Berlin blockade, to the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in April 1949. Yet American engagement was by no means inevitable, as Bevin recognised: the 1948 Western Union is a precedent for those currently urging EU and non-EU nations to forge a fresh pan-European/Canadian security framework that works alongside or within NATO, or even replaces a moribund Atlantic Alliance.
Had he still been alive Ernie Bevin would have been scathing about the Suez adventure. In its aftermath a broken Eden was replaced by Macmillan. The new prime minister’s priority was to repair relations with Washington. Eisenhower and Macmillan had worked closely together during the war, and warm words ensured a public display of business as usual. A key player was Admiral Lord Mountbatten, a familiar face on the Washington circuit. As First Sea Lord and then as Chief of the Defence Staff, ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten was characteristically indiscreet about having opposed Eden’s plan to topple Nasser.
The British needed access to American know-how, starting with nuclear-powered submarines. Collaboration between the Royal Navy and the US Navy signalled the potential for submarine-based ballistic missiles as a second-generation nuclear deterrent: improved Soviet defences meant the RAF could no longer guarantee a minimum number of aircraft would reach their target, the notorious ‘Moscow criterion’. The failure of the Skybolt air to ground missile, and the Americans’ tardiness in informing the British, once more tested the ‘special relationship’. Attention now focused on the Polaris ballistic missile system, with Kennedy appeasing an indignant Macmillan at Nassau in December 1962. Through Polaris, Chevaline and Trident, and for the foreseeable future, the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrence boasts British submarines and British warheads; but in the final analysis it depends upon American missiles, American servicing and a de facto American firing control. Factor in an imbalance in intelligence exchange and a massive reliance on American conventional weapons, not least state-of-the-art combat aircraft, and it’s no wonder every British leader treads softly when dealing with the White House. It’s Keir Starmer’s bad luck that he’s dealing with Donald Trump.
Contrast the United Kingdom’s response to Eisenhower’s Suez veto with that of France. All parties came together in insisting that never again would France be dependent upon the Americans. The French were already exploring the military application of their civil nuclear provision, but in December 1956 Guy Mollet authorised a dedicated programme of weapons development. When Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958 the creation of a genuinely independent nuclear deterrent was well advanced. Gaullism and the Fifth Republic became synonymous with a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine fleet, the famous force de frappe. Although briefly tempted by transatlantic collaboration, de Gaulle maintained a strategic commitment to domestic weapons procurement. Since the 1960s that commitment has remained a keystone of French national security. Dealing with Donald Trump is always a risky business, but Emanuel Macron knows France’s level of exposure is a lot less than that of the UK. The Suez debacle cast a long shadow but for the French the outcome proved ultimately advantageous – the harshest of reality checks meant that six decades later their leader can exercise significantly more leverage than his painfully vulnerable British counterpart.
