Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970

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595 / The third world power, 1951–1959

Council had one ambition – to get the British troops out and end any

risk of British intervention in Cairo. The delicate balance of Egyp-

tian politics, in which Revolutionary Command Council rule coexisted

uneasily with the monarchy (only abolished in July 1953), the Wafd

party and the Muslim Brotherhood, sharpened their fear of a British

‘coup’ on the one hand and popular outrage on the other. They dreaded

being painted as pro-British puppets betraying the national cause. They

were determined not to let any British military units, however disguised

as ‘technicians’, remain in the Canal Zone. On the British side, when

deadlock was reached in the middle of May, a new wave of violence was

feared. ‘Serious trouble may now be imminent’, warned the Joint Intelli-

gence Committee.

Despite Churchill’s reluctance to make any further

concessions, a new round of talks was begun, with the outgoing British

commander-in-chief in Egypt, General Sir Brian Robertson, negotiating

soldier to soldier. With MEDO now dead (the ﬁnal rejection came in

July), disagreement was centred on how the base would be managed

once the British withdrew, and how large a force of technicians would

be required to maintain it. The discussions struggled on. In September,

the Egyptians raised a further objection: the British technicians must

be in civilian clothes. In London, the Cabinet decided ﬁrst to break off,

but then to press on. But, as the year came to an end, they had little

to show. The Egyptians were willing to let the Canal base be used if

an Arab state was attacked, but not Turkey or Iran, the Soviet Union’s

Middle East neighbours. They wanted a swift British withdrawal and

a minimal presence of non-uniformed technicians. They would only

consider a seven-year agreement.

The reaction in London was frustration and rage. From the

Cairo embassy came a bitter reﬂection on the futility of continuing the

search for agreement. Even if one were made, wrote Robin Hankey,

then in charge at the embassy, it was highly doubtful that the Egyptians

would honour it. ‘If after making the new defence agreement we are

held in the same utter contempt as we seem to have been since the

Sudan Agreement, no favourable outcome in the Canal Zone can con-

ceivably be hoped for’.

The agreement, anyway, was most unlikely to

be renewed and ‘may well be turned into a farce before its expiry’.

In Hankey’s grim view, ‘the effect . . . on our position in the other

Arab countries and on our whole position in the Mediterranean, in the

Persian Gulf and in the Indian Ocean would be incalculable . . . it would

far surpass the effect of Abadan or Palestine’.

Churchill’s impatience

596 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

now boiled over. He had carefully distanced himself from Eden’s diplo-

macy and what he called ‘your treaty’. He was much more receptive

than Eden had been to the ﬂouts and jibes of the ‘Suez Group’, the forty-

one Conservative MPs led by Charles Waterhouse and Julian Amery

who opposed evacuation, and may even have hinted at his private

approval. As the Queen’s ﬁrst minister, he did not wish to preside over

the liquidation of the Suez Canal base, that great symbol of empire. Like

Hankey, he feared that, once a withdrawal began, it would become a

rout. Then ‘many in our own party will be able to say “I told you so”,

and the others will mock’. Churchill’s solution was to make a clean

break but exact a revenge: to redeploy British troops to bases elsewhere

in the region, but send reinforcements to Khartoum. Egypt would thus

forfeit its Sudanese prize. Once this was done, ‘all the Conservative

troubles here would be quenched . . . There is no alternative except a

prolonged humiliating scuttle before all the world’.

Eden rejected this view completely. To leave the Canal Zone

without an agreement would be ‘less satisfactory from the point of view

of our continuing authority in the Middle East’.

This was his real con-

cern. He had told Churchill earlier that a unilateral withdrawal posed

considerable risks. ‘It could be very damaging to our whole reputation

and position if it looked like running away . . . It could destroy all hope

of maintaining our position in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.’

Nor would

it help matters to arouse the suspicions of Sudanese nationalists that

London meant to renege on the promises made in the Sudan agreement.

Like his ofﬁcials in Cairo, Eden was inclined to lay much of the blame

for Egyptian intransigence on American disloyalty and their tacit sub-

version of British prestige. ‘The American position over Egypt becomes

increasingly unhelpful’, he minuted bitterly. ‘The Americans will have

no friends left if they go on in this way.’

What was becoming uncom-

fortably obvious was that without American backing there was little

that could drive the Egyptians to sign. Lord Salisbury, Eden’s stand-in

during his long illness in 1953, had made the point bluntly. ‘If we reach

an agreement with Egypt’, he told the Cabinet in July 1953, ‘it will . . . be

essential that the Americans underwrite such an agreement if there is to

be any prospect of the Egyptians keeping it.’

Churchill now pressed

Eisenhower to refuse the Egyptians economic aid until they agreed on

a treaty, but the reply was guarded. How far, Eisenhower asked, was

Britain willing to go to support American efforts to isolate ‘the bloody

Chinese aggressor’ and oppose its admission into the United Nations?

597 / The third world power, 1951–1959

Had not the British been happy to trade with China? The implication

was obvious. Perhaps it was this that occasioned Eden’s anti-American

outburst.

He had little choice, however, but to rehearse to his colleagues

the urgency of reaching some kind of agreement: ‘If we do not suc-

ceed, we are in a bad position.’

Failure would mean the more or less

rapid erosion of Britain’s Arab prestige. It would reduce Britain’s claim

on the support of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. And, if

the Suez base were simply abandoned, it would be almost impossi-

ble to persuade British opinion to accept other commitments in the

Middle East. When the Chiefs of Staff weighed in with a warning that a

withdrawal agreement was of the ‘utmost importance’, a subtle change

could be seen coming over the British approach. However useful the

Canal base might be in a general war (now thought less likely), it was

more important to get out – to save money, men and morale. Indeed,

in the spring and summer of 1954, geostrategic change suggested that

the base was now of secondary value at best. Its exposure to air attack

was greatly enhanced – or so it was argued – by the advent of the

hydrogen bomb. Secondly, the strategic defence of the Middle East

was conceived more and more in terms of the ‘Northern Tier’ states –

Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan – backed up by the use of tactical

nuclear weapons and local air bases: the drift of American thinking

since mid-1953. What mattered most to the British was a digniﬁed exit

from the Canal Zone and (increasingly) reassurance that their use of

the Canal would not be affected by a military withdrawal. When the

Americans promised to delay any aid until Egypt signed up, and Nasser

let it be known that an attack on Turkey would permit reactivation of

the base, a light seemed to glint at the end of the tunnel. But clinching

the deal seemed as elusive as ever. In Cairo, General Neguib was ﬁrst

removed as the leader of the Revolutionary Command Council and

then restored. The transfer of power to civilian rule and a return to

party politics were promised and rescinded within a matter of days.

It was only during April that Nasser’s authority seemed ﬁrmly estab-

lished. The British still fretted over how to present the concessions they

were now willing to make (the use of civilian labour to service the

base) and how to ensure that, with no military presence, the Egyptians

could be held to their promise to maintain the base and respect free

transit through the Canal. Churchill and Eden now agreed (Eden with

some show of reluctance) to seek more explicit American help. At the

598 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

Washington conference in June (mainly taken up with discussion of

Churchill’s scheme for a summit conference with the Russians), Dulles

and Eisenhower gave the vital assurance: Nasser would be told that

all American aid would depend on his keeping the promises made in

a treaty.

The British agreed to give way on the uniforms question.

Within three weeks, the ‘heads of agreement’ had been signed in Cairo.

The British would pull out completely over the course of twenty months

(by June 1956), leaving civilian contractors to look after the base. They

could use the base to help defend either Turkey or an Arab state from

attack. But the treaty would last (as Nasser insisted) not twenty years

but seven.

It is an intriguing question as to what persuaded Churchill to

give his reluctant assent to the retreat he disliked. In his public defence

he stressed the impact of the new H-bomb as making the Canal base

redundant. But, if that were the reason, as a Tory critic remarked later,

why was so much of the treaty concerned with its future use?

In the

Cabinet discussion, there is more than a hint that the H-bomb was a

rabbit pulled out of the hat: it gave Churchill the escape route that he

(and the government) needed, dousing (for the moment) the smoulder-

ing backbench rebellion. Churchill may also have wanted to clear the

decks for his real ambition – the summit with Stalin’s successors. The

more interesting question is what the agreement meant for Britain’s

Middle Eastern position – the main justiﬁcation that Eden advanced.

Leaving the base was meant to give Britain’s regional imperium a

new lease of life, not to signal a general retreat. It did not turn out

like that.

In fact, the Canal base agreement embodied a transfer of power

as important as any that was made in the retreat from empire after 1945,

with the single exception of the withdrawal from India. This was veiled

at the time from the makers of policy (although not from their critics).

They averted their eyes from the three critical factors that governed

the course and outcome of their diplomatic ordeal. The ﬁrst was the

change in the nature of Egyptian politics. Disillusioned with the Wafd

and the king, the British were not unsympathetic to the military rulers

who replaced them. Nasser, they thought, was a ‘realist’ and honest. The

political turmoil of 1952–4 made it harder to see that the chaos and cor-

ruption of ‘liberal’ Egypt was making way for an authoritarian regime

driven restlessly forward by populist nationalism and geopolitical

599 / The third world power, 1951–1959

ambition. The Canal base agreement was its ticket to power. The British

liked to think that Nasser would be a new Ataturk, the Turkish strong

man with whom they had come to amicable terms after 1922. Nasser,

they thought, would follow the Ataturk model, and devote his politi-

cal energy to internal reform. It was a drastic misjudgment. The second

great shift may have been easier to see but harder to acknowledge. Again

and again the men on the spot had complained that their efforts to make

the Egyptians see reason had been frustrated by the nods and winks of

the American ambassador, Jefferson Caffery. At a much higher level,

the British were dimly aware that Washington was pursuing a different

agenda, that they could not match its promise of aid, and that without

American backing the treaty they sought would be hard to achieve and

worse to enforce. The Canal base agreement was a silent reminder that

British authority now needed the weight of American power, and was

unlikely to ﬂourish without its support. The third was the change from

Egypt to Iraq as the strategic pivot of the British position. The growing

importance of the ‘Northern Tier’ states (Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pak-

istan) as the main barrier to a Soviet advance had helped to devalue the

Canal base and ease the pangs of the British withdrawal. It made the

British now eager to build up Iraq as the main Arab component of a new

Middle Eastern alliance, and to attach as many Arab states as they could

to what became known as the ‘Baghdad Pact’

of which they them-

selves would also be members. This would be the new platform of their

Middle Eastern position: an Arab ‘bloc’ of which the ‘Hashemite’ king-

doms of Iraq and Jordan and the Syrian Republic (domination of Syria

was an old Hashemite aim) would be the core members. But, between

the Hashemite kings and the Iraq ‘strong man’ Nuri as-Said on the one

hand, and Nasser on the other, there was little love lost. Both claimed

the leadership of the Arab world. Thus the curious sequel to the British

agreement with Nasser was their strategic partnership with his bitterest

enemies.

In earlier times the British might have laughed at Cairo’s annoy-

ance. But now they could not afford to do so. An intelligence brieﬁng in

late 1954 spelt out their dilemma. The political threat from the Soviet

Union, declared the Joint Intelligence Committee, could be intensiﬁed

at any time and no Arab state had the means to resist it any more

than it could beat off a military assault. British help was needed, but

‘xenophobia is endemic in the Middle East as a whole’, while the end

600 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

of the Raj ‘had undermined conﬁdence’ that British power would be

used to restrain or protect the Middle East countries’.

Britain’s posi-

tion was not getting easier; it was now more precarious. But its stake

in the region seemed greater than ever: the Western interest in exclud-

ing Soviet inﬂuence; the British need to be seen as the West’s regional

guardian; and Britain’s share of the oil industry, much of it located in

northern Iraq. In April 1955, Eden, now at last prime minister, com-

mitted Britain to the Baghdad Pact and to building a new Arab alliance.

Nasser’s riposte was not long in coming. By the following Septem-

ber he had arranged to buy arms from the Soviet bloc and break the

embargo that the West had imposed. The Soviet entr

ee had begun in

earnest. Nasser’s prestige and Egypt’s military power were now certain

to grow. Nasser proclaimed himself champion of the pan-Arab cause

and denounced Britain’s friends as betrayers and toadies. The Baghdad

Pact was a ‘relic of colonialism’. Whether Iraq, Britain’s main Arab ally,

and its tight oligarchic regime under Nuri as-Said, would survive the

political storm seemed uncertain at best. ‘If we lose Egypt’, minuted the

British ofﬁcial in charge of Middle East policy, ‘we shall lose the rest

of the Arab World.’

This was the setting in which the British began

their ‘descent to Suez’.

The stages passed in rapid succession. By October, the British

had begun to fret over their oil supplies if Soviet inﬂuence and Egyptian

hostility continued to grow. ‘Our interests’, said Eden (in what proved

to be a prophetic phrase),

were greater than those of the United States because of our

dependence on Middle East oil, and our experience in the

area was greater than theirs. We should not . . . allow

ourselves to be restricted overmuch by reluctance to act

without full American concurrence and support. We should

frame our own policy in the light of our interests in the

area.

In December, Nasser, with Saudi support, raised an outcry in Jordan

and blocked the kingdom’s accession to the Baghdad Pact. The British

were furious. In March 1956, while the British Foreign Secretary was

actually visiting Cairo, the British commander of the Jordanian army,

General John Glubb, was dismissed – a move widely (but wrongly)

attributed to Nasser’s machinations. In the same month, Plan Alpha,

601 / The third world power, 1951–1959

the Anglo-American effort to draw Nasser into peace negotiations

with Israel and lance the boil of anti-Western feeling, broke down

completely. Today, recorded Evelyn Shuckburgh, head of the Foreign

Ofﬁce’s Middle East department on 8 March, ‘we and the Americans

really gave up hope of Nasser and began to look round for means of

destroying him’.

For Eden, especially, the destruction of Nasser had

become a priority. ‘It’s either him or us, don’t forget that’, he said.

But, as the British pondered how to isolate Nasser, events in the region

spun out of control. When the United States blocked the funds for the

Aswan High Dam, Nasser’s grand project, his response was even more

daring than the Soviet arms deal. On 26 July, with all British troops

safely out of the Canal Zone, he nationalised the Suez Canal Company,

an Anglo-French enterprise with a substantial British government hold-

ing. It was an astonishing move. It seemed to prove beyond doubt that

his ultimate aim was to drive Britain out of the Arab world bag and

baggage.

It was now that the weaknesses of the British position, painfully

exposed in the Canal Zone diplomacy, made themselves felt. The Cab-

inet agreed straightaway that Nasser should be made to back down, if

need be by force and by Britain alone. But the coercion of Egypt was not

going to be easy. It would mean a major invasion with repercussions

elsewhere on British commitments. It might mean the occupation of

Egypt until a compliant government was formed – if indeed one could

be found. It would deeply embarrass Britain’s closest Arab allies and

vindicate Nasserite claims that they were colonialist toadies. Above all,

perhaps, although there were signs that Nasser’s removal would be wel-

comed in Washington, American backing for a British invasion was out

of the question. Paratroop diplomacy, in Washington’s view, would be

a crime and a blunder, and wreck Western inﬂuence at a critical time.

The British hoped for international action, but the legal case against

Nasser was transparently weak (the Suez Canal Company was after all

an Egyptian company). Once Dulles made clear that he did not favour

action against Nasser to extract the Canal dues (reversing the effect

of nationalisation), Eden’s position was desperate. No British leader

had been more deeply committed to upholding Britain’s Middle East-

ern imperium as an ‘empire by treaty’. Now that Nasser had revealed

it as a house of cards, his authority as prime minister could hardly

survive.

602 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

Although Eden could not or would not admit it, his position

was so difﬁcult as to be almost impossible. Awareness of his own part

in handing back the Canal Zone, and thus freeing Nasser to act, may

have made matters worse. How far he acknowledged that the scheme

to invade Egypt in concert with France, drawn up and agreed on by

the middle of August, was based on very fragile assumptions is unclear.

But it may explain his reluctance to consult more widely among his col-

leagues and ofﬁcials. Indeed, it seems clear that, insofar as they grasped

his intentions, these aroused doubt and uncertainty. The Foreign Sec-

retary (Selwyn Lloyd), the Minister of Defence (Walter Monckton), the

Lord Privy Seal (R. A. Butler), the First Lord of the Admiralty (Lord

Hailsham) and the Chief of Naval Staff (the redoubtable Lord Mount-

batten) were all of this number. But neither doubts nor doubters had

any effect.

Part of the reason was that few outside a very small circle knew

enough of the detail of what Eden intended or had enough status to

voice their dissent. To challenge Eden’s authority in a period of crisis

would have been exceptionally dangerous, especially for one of his Con-

servative colleagues. As Churchill’s successor, Eden had stepped into his

shoes as the great anti-appeaser, and champion of British world power.

Moreover, a very strong group in the Cabinet endorsed his decision to

erase Nasser’s inﬂuence, and to do so by force. They could not have

ignored the risks that this ran. But the real question they faced was what

else could be done. Any compromise deal (of the kind Selwyn Lloyd

hoped for) that left Nasser in power would not meet their purpose – to

uphold what Eden called Britain’s ‘Middle Eastern position’. They may

have accepted, like Eden himself, that the jumble of treaties, alliances,

protectorates, colonies, bases, gunboats and garrisons that made up

this undeclared empire could not stand the challenge that Nasser’s deﬁ-

ance would pose; and that without this undeclared empire Britain’s

world power could not survive long. For behind the dire warnings

about the Canal and Nasser’s hand on ‘our windpipe’, this was the real

issue.

On one point at least, Eden knew he was vulnerable. He needed

a pretext to launch an invasion or risk being denounced as an imperialist

aggressor. This would have been deeply embarrassing both abroad and

at home, where the cross-party support he had enjoyed at the outset

could not have survived. To escape this dilemma he embarked on what

603 / The third world power, 1951–1959

came to be seen as the most reckless gamble of all. On 13 October, as

the decision to launch the invasion grew nearer, he was urged by the

French to make a secret arrangement with Israel, which was also eager

to weaken Nasser, and willing to strike.

The sequel is infamous. On 22 October, the British and French

(who had their own quarrel with Nasser) made their secret pact with

Israel to occupy the Canal Zone in concert with an Israeli invasion

of Sinai. The prize for all three was the elimination of Nasser. On

29 October, the Israeli attack began. On 1 November, when Nasser

rejected their demand to stop ﬁghting, the Anglo-French intervention

began. Egyptian airﬁelds were bombed, and on 5 November British

and French troops landed in Egypt to seize the Canal. But, in a matter

of days, intense pressure from Washington and the threat of sterling’s

collapse without dollar support forced ﬁrst a ceaseﬁre and then the

withdrawal of the Anglo-French forces, to be replaced by a ‘peace-

keeping’ contingent under United Nations authority. Eden’s health now

collapsed and so did his premiership. The confrontation with Nasser,

on which he was set, consigned him to oblivion and raised Nasser to

power as the pan-Arab hero.

In less than two years, the Iraqi regime

on which Eden’s policy was centred had been destroyed in a coup. The

British fell back on Southern Arabia and the Gulf. The British ‘moment’

in the Middle East, when they had been the authors and arbiters of its

regional politics, was over.

‘Anthony, are you out of your mind?’ was how Eisenhower put

it to Eden when he learnt of the British invasion. There was certainly

much about Eden’s conduct of policy that was reckless and irregular. He

chose to ignore the widespread misgivings among both his military and

his diplomatic advisers over the use of force against Nasser: whether

it was justiﬁed legally and morally; whether it was practicable mili-

tarily; whether it could work politically to produce a replacement for

Nasser; whether it would wreck Britain’s standing in the Arab Middle

East more surely than compromise, however unpalatable. Eden’s secre-

tive style, the exclusion of almost all of his expert advisers, his highly

strung manner, the rough edge of his tongue, and his over-vehement

language, unnerved many who saw him as to his balance and judgment.

If it had been known more widely that he had concealed his intentions

from Washington’s eyes, let alone colluded with France in an Israeli

invasion, opposition to his policy inside and outside the government

604 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

would have been much greater. Eden was unlucky that his Suez expe-

dition coincided with the popular uprising in Hungary. This raised the

temperature of East–West relations and fuelled Washington’s fury at

the ill-timed embarrassment to Western diplomacy that Eden inﬂicted.

But his misjudgment of Eisenhower was a catastrophic mistake, and so

was the assumption – on Macmillan’s advice soon retracted in panic –

that sterling was strong enough to ride the political storm.

But should Eden’s actions be seen as the great aberration in

Britain’s last phase of imperial power? Only if we subscribe to the his-

torical myth of ‘managed decline’. In this fanciful tale, (most) British

leaders responded pragmatically to the symptoms of weakness: pulling

back here; devolving power there; carefully cutting their coat to the

available cloth; steering their bark towards the safety of Europe. Eden

stands out as the reactionary relic, impervious to reason. But the tortu-

ous approach march to the crisis at Suez (and not just the crisis itself)

gives little comfort to this sanctimonious legend. The assumption that

Nasser could and should be removed extended far beyond Eden. Eden

himself had been the apostle of pragmatism in the wearying struggle for

an Anglo-Egyptian agreement. At the Geneva conference in 1954,his

restraining inﬂuence on the United States, and his support for a com-

promise peace, played a key role in bringing the ﬁrst Indochina war

to an end. His metamorphosis into a war-mongering imperialist less

than eighteen months later seems hard to explain. Invoking his health,

or his need to appear ‘strong’ for party political reasons, may have

some virtue but misses the main point. For Eden had always been clear

that settling the Anglo-Egyptian dispute would mark a new phase in

Britain’s Middle Eastern diplomacy, but not a retreat. With the Canal

base disposed of, and Egyptian resentment subsiding, the British would

be in a far better position to ‘manage’ the region’s affairs. He was

acutely aware of how vital it was to make good Britain’s claim to be

the regional ‘guardian’. Without it, the inﬂuence he was able to wield

(not least at Geneva) was bound to decline sharply, while American

power would rise in proportion. He was convinced from the outset

(so his actions suggest) that the British position, already under siege

from American, Soviet and Arab nationalist pressure, could not survive

Nasser’s challenge, and certainly not once he took the Canal. Eden’s

tragedy was that most of the means to bring Nasser to heel had already

dissolved – the hidden lesson of 1954. The informal ‘empire-by–treaty’

which he had hoped to construct was already dying or dead. It was the