The true lesson of the Suez crisis

‘No Americans Served Here’ read a sign outside a car showroom in Hertfordshire in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis. Many ordinary Britons shared the car salesman’s anger and so did much of the political nation: more than a hundred Tory MPs accused Washington of ‘gravely endangering the Atlantic alliance’, whilst a military inquest argued that ‘it was the action of the US which really defeated us.’ The Spectator caught the public mood in November 1956 when its cover carried the word ‘Anti-Americanism’ in bold.

Seventy years on, Suez remains a restless ghost in Britain’s relationship with America. The whole affair has mostly been told as a morality tale about the Anglo-French-Israeli collusion and Sir Anthony Eden’s disastrous miscalculation. However, Washington’s view of the crisis was not quite so farsighted as posterity has allowed, nor did Eden’s successors entirely escape the illusions that had caused Britain the Suez debacle in the first place.

Harold Macmillan had long imagined Britain as the Greeks who ran Claudius’s Roman empire. Supermac thought the Americans ‘great, big, vulgar, bustling people’, more vigorous than the British, but, as one mandarin put it, Britain’s role was to ‘induce in the Americans something of that historical sense they so sadly lacked’. A charming arrangement, largely the product of self-projection in Whitehall and Macmillan’s beloved Pall Mall clubs.

Washington might be excused for entertaining different ideas. The post-war alliance with Britain meant much less to Americans and it rested on intelligence-sharing, the occasional nuclear consultation, and Britain lending diplomatic legitimacy to America’s expanding world presence. The 5 th Marquess of Salisbury was not wrong when he remarked that ‘their idea of an alliance is so different from ours’. Most popular Nicholas Farrell How to sleep with 1,000 women Bethany Elliott Are the dirty tricks of Russia’s FSB getting even dirtier?

Melanie McDonagh A Court of Thorns and Roses gives reading a bad name The American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, personified this. A lawyerly internationalist, he regarded European colonialism as a Victorian fantasy and set almost touching store by the United Nations. After Nasser’s nationalisation of the canal, Dulles set about devising an international solution of labyrinthine complexity – supposedly he was the only man who fully understood the scheme.

The American position was, to put the matter politely, almost tragi-comic. Whilst they had little taste for, and even less patience with, British imperial habits, they were busy getting up an empire of their own. In 1953 Washington had helped Britain overthrow Mossadegh in Iran and shared in the oil spoils; the following year the CIA helped remove Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in favour of a fruit company. Across the Pacific, American bases stretched from Okinawa to the Philippines.

On the British side, Eden has been caricatured as the unreconstructed imperialist who imagined Britannia could still rule the waves. That is not quite fair. He was, for example, more realistic about Britain’s diminished position in the partnership than Churchill had ever been. At the same time, he appreciated that Britain had to strike a proper balance between standing with Washington and looking like Uncle Sam’s obedient lieutenant. Key to that was maintaining an independent sphere of action.

But in Suez this came at a cost. Eden’s tragic error, to borrow The Spectator’s imagery, was to imagine that the alliance with America could be turned off like a tap. As the tanks moved into Egypt at the turn of November, the government grew thirsty. Sterling haemorrhaged, and Macmillan went, cap in hand, to Washington for an IMF loan. When Britain reached for the tap again, it found it jammed. By mid-December the dreaded petrol coupons were back, and motorists were returning to the familiar wartime queues.

Suez had arrived at the forecourts of Hertfordshire. Anti-Americanism was, in the end, the sound of a thirsty nation kicking the pipes. This feeling spread well beyond the Suez Group and the Tory right. By February 1957, a Gallup poll found only 18 per cent of Britons describing their feelings towards America as ‘friendly’, against 26 per cent ‘disappointed’, 18 per cent ‘suspicious’, and 8 per cent ‘resentful’. More tellingly, very few thought Washington had opposed Britain simply to court Arab public opinion.

The more common suspicion was that America was pursuing a Middle Eastern position of its own. And in that the British were discovering the rather awkward fact that their allies had interests too. When Eisenhower unveiled his doctrine early in 1957, he dangled American money and military support before Middle Eastern states threatened by international communism. Britain’s disaster had opened the door for Washington to assume the hegemonic Western role in the region.

For months, Whitehall had wondered what conceivable American interest was served by pulling the rug from beneath an ally. The President now supplied the answer. It was a pity that Britain required Suez to discover something already visible in the 1940s. Nobody better symbolised Britain’s move from defiance to compliance in little more than two months than the new Prime Minister who replaced Eden. Harold Wilson’s acid description of Macmillan’s performance at Suez was ‘first in, first out’, and the Cabinet’s keenest hawk became a dove, once sterling began to buckle and Washington barked.

Of course, Macmillan did not draw the Gaullist lesson that Britain should loosen its American ties in pursuit of greater strategic autonomy, whether in Western Europe or what was left of its empire. Quite the reverse. By March, Macmillan was in Bermuda, making it up with Ike. And thus, the habit of prior consultation interrupted by Suez was restored, or rather invented. Historians like to imagine Suez as the moment Britain discovered that it was no longer a Great Power.

More revealing was the speed with which Britain decided what to do about it. Suez did not produce an Anglo-American rupture but a renewed embrace, now on terms whose hierarchy was rather harder to ignore. By the Mutual Defence Agreement of 1958, Britain’s own deterrent had come to rest on American designs and materials. After Suez Macmillan perhaps at last grasped that the Greeks had been slaves to the Romans all along.