National Interest

by Trevor Filseth

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 from its imminent invasion of rebellious satellite Hungary, likewise condemned the action as an imperialist plot and threatened to use force to oppose it.

    Far more problematic for the British and the French, however, was the surprise opposition of the United States. The crisis had already put the UK at significant financial risk: a combination of the canal’s wartime closure and the Arab oil boycott led to a short-term fiscal emergency for London. Eden assumed that the strength of the US-UK “special relationship” would ensure a bailout from the US-led IMF. He also assumed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who shared his antipathy for Nasser, would support the invasion, or at least accept it as a fait accompli after its successful completion. Eden was so certain of this outcome that he did not notify the Americans about the impending attack. In fact, Eisenhower’s calculations were considerably more nuanced than Eden realized: while the general-turned-president was conscious of the special relationship and had no love for the Egyptian revolutionaries, he was also intensely sensitive to public opinion in the Arab world, particularly amid Soviet moves there in the context of the broader Cold War.

    That sensitivity won out. When Eden went to the IMF for stopgap funding, the Americans blindsided him by refusing to support the loan until London agreed to a ceasefire in Egypt. To make matters worse, Eisenhower ordered the US Treasury Department to prepare to sell British bonds if it refused to withdraw—a step that would have devalued the pound sterling and led to a full-on financial crisis for the UK.

    Trapped, the British and French agreed to a ceasefire on November 6 and began to hand over their positions to a UN mediating force. The final Franco-British forces left the canal in late December and after Israeli forces withdrew from Sinai in March, the canal reopened in April, now under full Egyptian control. Humiliated by the failure of the operation, Eden resigned from office in January; his successor, Harold Macmillan, was far more prosaic about the UK’s capabilities in the postwar era and refrained from any further adventures of the kind. And Nasser built his dam.

• How the UK Failed at Suez

    The Suez debacle is widely regarded as the end of the British Empire as a global superpower. More broadly, it was a catastrophe for the West; it led to a trans-Atlantic rupture and divided public opinion at the same moment the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Hungary in its own quasi-imperial war, stymying an organized NATO response. The crisis transformed Nasser into an idol in the Arab world, strengthening nationalist movements across the Middle East and ensuring the Egyptian leader would remain a persistent thorn in the West’s side until his death in 1970. It also improved the Kremlin’s cachet in the region, with further deleterious effects for US and Western foreign policy there throughout the Cold War.

    These far-reaching consequences are all the more remarkable given the battlefield success of the tripartite coalition. In a military sense, the United Kingdom, France and Israel were victorious: they routed the Egyptian forces and seized the Sinai and much of the canal zone in a handful of days, with little cost in lives. Yet politically the operation was a disaster.

    How did the political disaster come about  The most fundamental mistake on the part of the Franco-British-Israeli alliance appears to have been the assumption that a swift military victory would induce a loss of confidence in the Nasser government so great that it would lead to his ouster, either through internal court machinations or through a mass public uprising. The tripartite group was so confident in this assumption that there simply was no day-after planning; they had no Plan B if the hoped-for leadership change failed to materialize.

    In fact, the invasion drove the opposite response. Rather than rising up against Nasser, the Egyptian public rallied to his support and the country’s defense—at least during the crisis and its immediate aftermath. (It is impossible to know for certain what would have happened in a long-term counterfactual scenario in which the United States supported the invasion and the Soviet Union did not intervene, leaving the UK and France free to occupy the canal for months or years. But it is noteworthy that a parallel situation took place in 1967, when Israel inflicted a similarly lopsided military defeat against Egypt and occupied the Sinai for the next 15 years. That defeat did not lead to regime change, either.)

    Furthermore, once it became clear that Nasser had beaten the Europeans, Egypt’s regional credibility snowballed at the expense of the West. The British and French not only failed to control the Suez, but also exposed the limits of their military-centric “hard power”—and in the process undermined their strategic, economic and commercial “soft power,” while simultaneously augmenting that of their adversaries.

    How could two of the world’s then-most-powerful countries make such a consequential error  Some of the elements appear to be:

1.     A (justified) confidence in military superiority, which came to cloud judgment in other areas. The fact that the British and French were so confident of military victory meant they were inclined to overlook the possibility of failure away from the battlefield.
2.     Failure to understand the mechanisms of a potential failure. In hindsight, it is easy to identify many possible points of failure in the Franco-British invasion: political or economic intervention from the Eastern Bloc and the third world; mission-critical dependencies on other countries, particularly the United States, that were not involved in the decision-making process and could not necessarily be relied upon; and even domestic political opposition within the home country or the armed forces, neither of which had been informed of the operation ahead of time and which polling suggested did not favor it. In general, London and Paris appeared to have assumed that the invasion would take place in a vacuum and other risks and exposures nominally unrelated to the Suez crisis would remain that way. This was a costly assumption.
3.     Failure to anticipate the consequences of failure, or even a delayed or only-partial success—both relative to their own public and to their relationships with other countries, as well as the broader reputational damage to the West of what many regarded as a failed attempt to turn back the clock on decolonization in the developing world.

• How the Suez Crisis Holds Lessons for America

    In 1956, the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Israel expected Egyptian military humiliation to produce political capitulation, but lacked a credible plan for how that transformation would occur. Today, some 70 years later, the United States finds itself in a similar position in its low-level ongoing war against Iran.

    President Donald Trump’s justifications for the war have shifted throughout the year, but there are two reasons to suspect that regime change was the main goal, at least at the outset.

    First, the war began directly in response to mass Iranian anti-government protests aimed at the overthrow of the Iranian clerical state. Indeed, Trump’s promise to the protesters in January that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY”—and his demand to the Iranian government that it not harm the protesters or risk US intervention, a demand the regime ignored when it murdered thousands in a violent crackdown—strengthen the case that the war was initiated for the purposes of aiding the protesters in overthrowing the government.

    Second, it is now known that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pressed for regime change during a meeting with Trump in February; the Israeli leader told Trump that a war could be quickly won and would result in a new, more pliable Iranian government. As the British and French had in Suez, the Trump administration appears to have expected military humiliation to produce quick political capitulation, without a credible plan for how exactly that capitulation would occur—and indeed was so confident in this outcome that there was apparently no backup plan for a protracted conflict.

    The military action against Iran has had some positive results for the United States. It killed longtime Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei; it has likely incapacitated his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen or heard since the start of the war; it has thinned out the ranks of the IRGC; and it has caused profound economic damage to Iran, hampering its ability to export terrorism abroad and pursue nuclear weapons. Yet in other ways the IRGC’s position has strengthened over the past year. It has thoroughly crushed domestic opposition and consolidated control over the country; it has confirmed the survivability of its command structure; it has proven that it can maintain a credible threat to oil traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, despite the best efforts of the US Navy and use that threat to manipulate the global oil trade; and it has demonstrated that the United States lacks the power to destroy an adversary nation from the air and the political will to operate on the ground.

    Trump appears to have fallen into many of the same traps Eden and his partners fell into 70 years ago. America’s generally overwhelming military superiority over Iran obfuscated the fact that Iran could exercise de facto control over the vital Strait of Hormuz, even without a functioning navy, by dint of its geography. In its decision-making in February, the Trump administration likely did not adequately consider the ways the war could (and has) hurt the United States: hundreds of billions of dollars in higher prices and lost economic productivity, the depletion of critical munitions stockpiles and the loss of military readiness in other theaters of the world and a dramatic loss of public confidence in the White House. And while the Iran crisis has yet to be resolved, it has already proven the limitations of America’s might. Other nations, particularly those in the Indo-Pacific, have certainly taken note.

    The regional consequences of the Iran war are still unclear, but are certain to be felt for many years. After the closure of Hormuz, the finances of Saudi Arabia became far more dependent on the East-West pipeline to the Red Sea. That in turn elevated the importance of the Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen, who escalated the war by bombing the pipeline and mounting strikes inside Saudi Arabia proper. Saudi Arabia’s own ability to respond to these attacks is limited. It has relied on US security guarantees for decades—most notably during the 1991 Gulf War—but Washington has been unable to provide the same protection today. The post-Suez withdrawal of the British from the Middle East left a vacuum in which regional influence was reshaped over decades. Whether the same process will play out now is too soon to tell.

    The lesson of Suez is not that hard power is useless as a foreign policy tool, or that military interventions can never achieve political objectives in the other country. It is that defeating an adversary’s armed forces is not the same as achieving one’s political objectives. The United Kingdom and France could occupy the Suez Canal and rout Egypt’s military, but they could not translate those victories into Nasser’s removal; he survived, the canal remained under Egyptian control and both European powers emerged humiliated.

    The United States now faces a version of the same problem in Iran. It can damage Iranian military capabilities and inflict economic pain, but neither outcome will deliver a government in Tehran receptive to what America wants. The ultimate test of the war will not be how much damage America can inflict, but whether it can turn that damage and the threat of further damage, into a positive long-term settlement. At Suez, the United Kingdom and France could not achieve that goal and emerged weakened. Washington’s challenge and that of the greater Middle East, will be to avoid that outcome.