The Suez Crisis of 1956 - Professor Vernon Bogdanor

ladies and gentlemen this is the second of six lectures on post-war political crises in Britain and this lecture is on the Suez Crisis of 1956 a crisis that began with the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company in which Britain and France had a controlling interest in July 1956 by Egypt's leader Colonel Nasser and it led to military action by Britain and France in collusion with Israel at the end of October 1956 and that military action failed largely because of the opposition of the United States now so is was the most divisive foreign policy issue in British politics since the war exceeded only since then perhaps by the Iraq war and it led to furious arguments between families and friends and it also led to the most serious breakdown in anglo-american relations since the war and displayed for all the world to see British weakness when faced with the opposition of the Americans and so it was from this point of view a turning point in British post-war history now in my last lecture on the National Health Service I said the crisis of 1951 was a pointer to the whole future of a National Health Service and the problem of running a Health Service free at source for which demand was in theory unlimited and today I want to show that Suez was a pointer to the future of international relations and the threat to world order posed by radical third-world nationalist leaders but we can only understand so is if we look at the context of the times the world of 1956 was a very different world from that of today and during the immediate post-war years Britain saw herself not primarily as a European power which perhaps she does now but as a global power a super power with worldwide interests we were still an imperial power though admittedly an imperial power in the process of winding down our commitments and this was symbolized by the granting of Independence to Indian Pakistan in 1947 but the African Empire remained largely intact with a single exception of the Sudan which had gained its independence in 1954 largely through the influence of Sir Anthony Eden who was prime minister during the sewage crisis now some people in thinking about so is thinking think of Anthony Eden as an imperialist but he appreciated that the era of imperialism was over and then it was no longer possible in the modern world to rule over others without their consent and that indeed was the general view of what might be called the British establishment but we still thought that we could retain our global influence in other ways firstly by holding on to a ring of strategic positions such as the Suez Canal and secondly by ensuring that there were friendly governments in areas of strategic importance such as the Middle East and after the withdrawal from India the Middle East and particularly Suez were even more important to Britain because of the link with Asia and Australia that it provided now in the Middle East the Arab countries were not colonies in the sense that they were ruled directly from Britain but they were mostly at that time ruled by friendly and subordinate governments which were so to speak advised by the British and that policy came under great pressure after World War Two and the first problem came in Palestine in 1947 which the British evacuated and handed over to the United Nations to deal with because Britain was too weak to resolve the problems and one of the few things uniting Jews and Arabs in Palestine was hostility to Britain the Arabs were hostile because of the Balfour Declaration and Jewish immigration to Palestine Israel because she saw the British government as Pro Adam and in the outer world hatred of Britain was particularly strong in Egypt because of the long British patient now when the British withdrew from Palestine there was a war in 1948 in which the Arabs led then by Egypt sought to destroy Israel but in fact it ended with an Israeli victory and a ceasefire though none of the Arab states recognized Israel and said they were stood in a state of war with her and the West for once perhaps in that area had United response to the problems which the Americans tried to raise in the sewage crisis and that response was in the form of the tripartite declaration of 1950 of Britain France and America and they said together they would preserve the status quo in the region and come to the aid of any country attacked by another and that they would also control the supply of arms to both sides so that no side would be able to achieve a superiority over the other one so Palestine was the first pressure point the second was Iran in 1951 when a radical nationalist government nationalized the British oil company and that occurred in the last days of the Labour government and the Labour government thought of using force but by contrast with Suez did not do so in large part because the Americans were opposed to it but the British troops guarding the oil refinery at Abaddonn were ordered out and they then went to Suez as a fallback position and I think the success of the Iranians probably did encourage the Egyptians in 1956 to tweak the Lions tail it were a bit further but then the rise of Egyptian nationalism caused further problems to Britain in 1952 there was a revolution in Egypt the monarchy was removed and an army junta took power rapidly came to be controlled by Colonel Nasser who established a dictatorship in Egypt and this proposed new and very difficult problems for Britain which had a close relationship with Egypt from imperial times largely due to the need to control as Britain saw the Suez Canal now in 1875 Disraeli had brought in the Suez Canal Company for Britain so the company became a joint British and French enterprise and to ensure that the canal was not threatened by Egyptian nationalists Gladstone's Liberal government in 1882 instituted a temporary what it called a temporary occupation of Egypt to ensure stability that temporary occupation lasted fifty-four years until 1936 but even after that Britain had a strong though undefined role in Egypt and in Egyptian monarchy and Britain retained a base in what was called the Suez Canal Zone which was actually quite wide stretched from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and westward almost to Cairo and that was to protect the Suez Canal by 1954 there were 80,000 British troops there so to that extent Egyptian independence was limited now there was only one occasion on which the two antagonists in suez crisis met Sir Anthony Eden the British prime minister and kill NASA the Egyptian leader and that was in early 1955 and they had dinner in the British Embassy in Cairo and Colonel Nasser said he'd always wanted to visit the place from which Egypt had been governed for so many years and Eden replied not governed advised perhaps now the Egyptians wanted to remove Britain from the canal base and they instituted guerrilla warfare to get the British out and the Americans also took the view that Britain should leave because they argued that the British presence encouraged Egypt and other third world countries to believe that the West was still colonialist and so that helped the Soviet Union so the Americans argued and Antony Eden's foreign secretary in 1954 signed an agreement with drawing British troops from the base over a period of two years and he believed that we couldn't maintain our position in the Middle East by the methods of the 19th century but to maintain our influence we must try and harness the nationalist movements to our own interests rather than struggle against them so come to terms with a nationalism withdraw British troops win goodwill from new nationalist leaders and then you can preserve British interests not through imperialism but through goodwill moreover in a nuclear world it seems that overseas bases were pointless now if that failed there was a safe a safeguard in the treaty because it said that British troops could return in the case of an attack on Egypt by an outside power or by Turkey now Eden negotiated that agreement in 1954 as foreign secretary and his Prime Minister Winston Churchill was very unhappy about it he thought it was scuttled and he was supported by around 40 conservative MPs who called themselves a sewage group and very remarkably Churchill's private secretary rang one of them up after the backbencher had made a speech in the Commons and told him that the Prime Minister agreed with a backbenchers criticism of his own government and Churchill said unkindly to Eden that he had not realized that Munich was on the Nile and that was a that was a reference to the Munich conference of 1938 which had marked the climax of appeasement now this is important because from this time Eden was under threat from the right wing of the Conservative Party as an appeaser who was unwilling to defend British interest abroad and the feeling that he was weak increased after Churchill's retirement in 1955 and Eden succeeded as Prime Minister because many backbenchers contrasted Eden's consensual rather Molland style with a more armed Busta's approach of Churchill and throughout the Suez Crisis Eden was under pressure not from the left urging him to reach a peaceful solution but from his right wing that he shouldn't surrender British interests and this pressure was also strong from within the cabinet and in particular from his Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan who was a second most powerful man in the government very much Eden's rival and indeed was eventually to supplant him now the one important effect of British withdrawal from the base it removed a buffer between Israel and Egypt and in consequence Egyptian commando raids began in Egypt so were in Ithorian to Israel so worsening the arab-israeli dispute there were but a continual border raids but for the moment Eden won over doubters with the argument the agreement protected British interests because we could always return to the base if there was trouble but he didn't answer the question if we couldn't hold the base while there against a hostile population how on earth could we return to the base against the wishes of the Egyptians and the idea that we could return was a hollow pretense and the truth is the agreement was sold to the Conservative Party on the basis that NASA was a reasonable man and that once his grievances were dealt with he would take a reasonable approach on relations with Britain and one can't understand Eden's actions in 1956 and this one remembers this it was a bit like Neville Chamberlain after the Munich Agreement in 1938 Chamberlain had said that Hitler was a reasonable man his word could be trusted now Chamberlain's hopes were shattered when Hitler occupied Prague in 1939 and so Eden's hopes were shattered by the nationalization of the Canal Company which occurred just two weeks after last British troops left the base in July 1956 and even felt he'd been personally cheated now the aim of the 1954 agreement had been to win Egyptian goodwill that didn't happen and there was continual Egyptian propaganda against Britain and the Egyptians thought to undermine the pro-british regimes in the area and they sought the unity of the radical Arab regimes so that Israel could be destroyed so avenging defeat of 1948 and so Nasser to British eyes seemed less of a nationalist than an Arab imperialist now even worse from the point of view of Britain and the Americans that NASA began to purchase arms from countries in the Soviet bloc and this brought the Soviet Union into the Middle East which hitherto had been a Western sphere of influence and it made the tripartite declaration useless because the West could no longer control the balance between the two sides and NASA said he was doing that because the French were selling arms to Israel so tisha Slee with the encouragement of America and that was not in accordance for the tripartite declaration so of course there were faults on both sides still Egyptian friendship with the Soviet bloc annoyed the British and the Americans and they began to wonder whether they shouldn't cut aid to Egypt as a result and in particular whether they shouldn't end the financing of the Aswan Dam in Egypt which they had promised and the British and Americans consulted and decided jointly to let the loan wither on the vine and fade away as it were but the Americans faced a particular problem from the cent which was extremely annoyed at Egypt's flirtation with a Soviet bloc and asked quite reasonably why countries which were hostile to America should get as much aid as countries which were friendly to America and the Senate Appropriations Committee was proposing that no funds be spent on aid to Egypt without specific congressional approval and the American Secretary of State the last thing he wanted was for his foreign policy to be determined by the Senate so Britain and America agreed they should terminate the loan pretty quickly and this was done by the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles but he did it in an abrupt and humiliating way and he could indeed be very tactless and churchill referring to Dulles said that he was the only bull who carried his own china shop around with him and what he should have said to the Egyptians was that they wouldn't get the money because they were being helped by the Russians but what he said instead was the Egyptian didn't have the technical understanding to run the dam and obviously that and very insulting and the response was of the Canal Company was nationalized now NASA has said this was in response to the drawl of the funding of the dam but there is evidence to believe that he was going to do this in any case and he later admitted that we would the Egyptians would have taken some similar action in the future now the canal was Egyptian sovereign territory but the company which supervised the operations of the canal was controlled by the British and French and was meant to secure international control of it so it was not under the policy of any particular country so its status was different from that of a Panama Canal which had been leased to the Americans and was at that time therefore an American and not an international waterway but still some could argue that if Panama was under the unfettered control of a single country why not also Suez but of course Suez was nowhere near as important the Americans it was two Europeans and Britain and France thought the international stage of the Suez Canal was at risk and the canal was very crucial to them at that time because a quarter of British imports and two-thirds of her oil passed through the canal and they were very worried that it could come under the control of a hostile power Egypt perhaps with Soviet influence and earlier in 1956 the Soviet leaders Khrushchev and bull garland had come to Britain and Antony Eden had told them and I quote that the uninterrupted supply of oil was literally vital to our economy I said I thought I must be absolutely blunt about the oil because we would fight for it now the travel was it was not clear that what NASA had done was actually illegal because he seemed to be doing no more than buying out the assets of the company and offering full compensation to those affected and most international lawyers though not all but most believe the act was not illegal in international law and the British Cabinet which met the day after the nationalization say significantly and I quote from the minutes we should be on weak ground in basing our resistance on the narrow argument that Colonel Nasser had acted illegally the Suez Canal Company was registered as an Egyptian company under Egyptian law and Colonel Nasser had indicated he attempted to compensate he intended to compensate the shareholders at ruling market prices from a narrow legal point of view the action amounted to no more than a decision to buy out the shareholders when the cabinet then went on to argue our case must be presented on wider international grounds an argument must be that Egypt could not be allowed to exploit it for a purely internal purpose the canal was a vital link between East and West it was not a piece of Egyptian property but an international asset of the highest importance and it should be managed as an international trust in other words should not be allowed to be in the hands of a single power now the West wasn't in a very strong position I think to insist on this because NASA had refused to allow Israeli ships to use the canal saying he was till at war with Israel now some international lawyers supported that position but most did not and Egypt had been condemned by the UN and told it had an obligation to admit Israeli ships it did not do so and no one did anything about it now even if nationalization of the canal was not illegal it was condemned by almost everyone in Britain by politicians of both right and left as an act of plunder that could not be allowed to succeed and one of the leaders of the British left at that time the Labour politician are now in Bevin said if the sending of one's police and soldiers into the darkness of the night to see someone else's property nationalisation then Alibaba used the wrong terminology and NASA's action reminded many people of the 1930s and none more so than the Prime Minister Anthony Eden who'd been deeply scarred by the events of that decade now even had first become foreign secretary in 1935 at the early age of 38 and he'd been foreign secretary in 1936 when Hitler had reoccupied and re militarized the Rhineland he felt very guilty that he'd done nothing to resist this though in my view there was no support in Britain for such resistance his reputation had been made when he resigned in 1938 when he was just 40 years old from the government of Neville Chamberlain in protest against the appeasement of Mussolini and he then made his reputation establishing himself in the public eye as the young handsome idealistic upholder of collective security and international agreements and he seemed to personify the struggle against dictatorship in Europe now some argue that Eden's resignation was misjudged that Mussolini was a minor figure and he was worth trying to bring him on side so the better to resist Hitler but Eden rejected that view he argued that if the democracies were firm with Mussolini this would impress Hitler and deter him or at least ensure that the German generals refused to take the risks of war and my own personal view is that Eden was right in that judgment but what he was fundamentally concerned with in the 1930s and in the 1950s is the fundamental problem of how you secure the conditions of international order now eaton went back to the Foreign Office in 1940 shortly after Churchill became prime minister and then again in 1951 in Churchill's peacetime government and as foreign secretary on these two occasions he had a record of almost unbroken success and was described by the Australian labor prime minister at the time as the greatest foreign secretary of the century and it had generally felt he had a great instinct for foreign policy matters and now in the 1950s he saw the same syndrome as in the 1930s with international agreements being broken an international order being threatened he compared NASA with Mussolini though not with Hitler but the opposition leader Hugh Gates kill went further he said in Parliament it is all very familiar it is exactly the same that we encountered from Mussolini and Hitler in those years before the war it was just 20 years one must remember since Hitler had re militarized the Rhineland and such comparisons were frequent The Daily Herald a Labour paper had a headline no more Hitler's and the Secretary General of the United Nations controlled the British Foreign Secretary 1950 in 1955 that NASA was comparable to Hitler now gate skill will leader of the Opposition gave three objections to NASA's actions which were exactly the same as those of the government the first was the company was not just an ordinary company but since it controlled an international waterway a matter of international concern and it could not be in the hands of a single power secondly the manner of the nationalization done suddenly without negotiation without discussion and by force and thirdly in gait skills you part of a policy of Egyptian imperialism he said we cannot forget that Colonel Nasser has repeatedly boasted of his intention to create an Arab Empire from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf and he said the French Prime Minister had quoted a speech of NASA's and rightly said it could remind us only one thing of the speeches of Hitler before the war but at the same time Gaitskell said that what NASA had done so far offered no justification for the use of force unless authorized by the United Nations and that's where he differed from the government he said it should be taken to the United Nations and one should abide by United Nations decisions now the cabinet took a different view it met on the day after the nationalization and it faced the following question I quote from the minute the fundamental question before the cabinet was whether they were prepared in the last resort to pursue their objective by the threat or even the use of force and whether they were ready in default of assistance from the United States or France to take military action alone and the cabinet answer the question in the following way the cabinet agreed that our essential interest in this area must if necessary be safeguarded by military action and that the necessary preparations to this end must be made failure to hold the Suez Canal would lead inevitably to the loss one by one of all our interests of assets in the Middle East and even if we had to act alone we could not stop short of using force to protect our position if all other means of protecting it proved unavailing but the restoration of international control was not the only aim of the government the cabinet set up an Egypt committee this met on the 30th of July shortly after nationalization and according to the minutes decided as follows while our ultimate purpose was to place the canal under international control our immediate objective was to bring about the downfall of the present Egyptian government this might perhaps be achieved by less elaborate operations than those required to secure physical possession of the canal itself on the other hand it was argued that our case before world opinion was based on the need to secure international control over the canal now for most of us it would seem shocking that the British government sought to remove the Egyptian government regime change if you like now it would not have seemed shocking I think to British and American governments at that time in 1953 the British and Americans had helped remove the radical government in Iran that had nationalized the oil company in 1951 and re-established the Shah in power in 1954 the Americans had helped remove the government in Guatemala and in 1963 under Kennedy it was to help remove the government in South Vietnam in Grenada in 1983 in Panama in 1989 leaving aside Iraq now none of these governments it's fair to say had been democratically elected tho nor were the government's displaced them so the British when the Americans opposed them at Suez thought this was an example of American hypocrisy but later on you'll see some examples of British hypocrisy as well now in my view and my view here's a minority one most people disagree but in my view the excerpts I quoted from the British government the cabinet minutes that the British government was not in fact committed to using force against Egypt it's true they made military preparations during the summer but in my view these were contingency plans to be put into practice only if other methods of achieving a satisfactory settlement had failed and if that happened it would have to go back to the cabinet which would decide on the use of force in my rule the bidding had had too much trouble over the Suez based to wish to go back with a renewed physical presence in Egypt and I believe the hope was that the United Front by Britain America and France would compel a settlement acceptable to Britain and that as in Iran a settlement on terms unfavourable to Egypt would lead to the removal of nasa's government and its replacement by a more pro-western government and there was always I think at that time also a general presumption that NASA would undertake some further action such as blocking the canal which might well provide a justification for force but he was far too shrewd to do that and he acted very moderately during this period now whatever the cabinet minutes say the British were unwilling to act alone goes from the start they were anxious to secure American support and indeed American support was essential because suppose Britain with with France intervened and Suez and that led to Soviet action then the two countries would need the protection of the Americans so Americans support or at least acquiescence was a sin and Anthony Eden told an American diplomat we do hope you will take care of the bear that they are being Russia and at first sight chances of the United Front appeared good because the President of the United States was Eisenhower was a strong Anglophile that worked in close harmony with Churchill during the war had known Anthony Eden and also Hal Macmillan the Chancellor and he was particularly good I think at understand British sensibilities and popular in Britain his particular skill which was essential on d-day was in handling coalition politics between different countries and for him the unity the Allied armies was more important than any national interest including even American national interests and he would immediately send back on the next boat home any officer however senior who dispatched Britain one such officer complained to Eisenhower for he was being sent back to America for calling a British officer a son-of-a-bitch and Eisenhower replied but you called him a British son-of-a-bitch and that is unforgivable now Britain was to complain during the Suez Crisis that America had not understood the British point of view but I think it's also the case that Britain didn't understand the American point of view and there was a tendency in the early post-war years perhaps it's still there for the British to think of the American government as a kind of gigantic charitable institution whose purpose was to provide the money to sustain British interests in the world without asking too many questions about what what Britain did with that influence and President Eisenhower himself complained to a colleague in 1953 he said at times I get weary of the European habit of taking out money resenting any slight hint as to what they should do and then assuming in addition full right to criticize us as bitterly as they may desire now the Americans felt I think that they were being patronized by the British and they were worried understandably that might present them with a fait accompli in series they would invade and then assume the Americans were offer support and indeed after the Suez invasion the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told the president they're thinking might be that they will confront us with the de facto situation in which they might acknowledge that they have been rash but would say the US could not sit by and let them go under economically now Eisenhower made clear from the very beginning he thought there was no justification for the use of force he shared the British view that NASA was a menace to Western interests and that a policy had to be worked out to deal with him but he did not believe the nationalization of the Canal Company was the right issue on which to act and he drew a strong distinction which I think the British prep didn't grasp between military action and covert operations again you may say that's a sign of American hypocrisy but so will come to signs of British apostasy later on now Eisenhower made is you absolutely clear not so much in public statements though there were public statements been in letters to Eden and these have now been published well those are the very kircheis he was writing to a friend and Ally but there was no room for misunderstanding that he was particularly insistent on a peaceful solution because he was facing a presidential election on November the 6th in which he was campaigning as the candidate who had maintained the peace during the difficult days of the Cold War the last thing he needed was a war in the Middle East which might undermine that claim and in his memoirs Eisenhower said my conviction was that the Western world had got into a lot of difficulties by selecting the wrong issues about which to be tough to choose a situation in which NASA had legal and sovereign rights and in which world opinion was on his side was not in my opinion a good one on which to make a stand still the British hoped even if the American didn't support what they were doing there might be acquiescence that the Americans would turn a blind eye acts of posing in public but in practice doing nothing to stop the operation and part of the reason for this was that Eisenhower didn't say what he would do if the British did use force partly because he believed they wouldn't do it without American support and he did not want to appear to threaten an ally and the British we encouraged in their view that they might win American support for a threat of force by the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and that was paradoxical since while British leaders liked Eisenhower he need almost everyone in the phrase of the 1950s almost everyone liked Ike as they put it British leaders didn't like Dulles very much and they particularly hurt by his rather legalistic and self-righteous approach to foreign policy even prided himself on his flair and intuition in foreign policy and he didn't like listening to sermons and moralizing from the American Secretary of State and Harold Macmillan rather unkindly said of Dulles that his speech was slow but it easily kept pace with his thought now Eisenhower like Dulles but few others did and even certainly didn't and called him in his memoirs a preacher in the world of politics it's also fair to say that Dallas and many other Americans didn't like Eden with his languid aristocratic manner and his habit of calling colleagues my dear which rather grated on American opinion now Dallas is long-winded speeches left many wondering what precisely he meant but that was in part deliberate because Dulles was deliberately using delaying tactics he thought the danger of war would disappear once negotiations started and that he should keep a pot boiling so that tempers cooled down a bit but to get the British and French fully committed to negotiations he had to give the impression that if these failed the Americans might consider supporting force in other words he wanted to string the British and French along but despite all this and despite the fact that he was disliked by British leaders Dulles oddly enough was more sympathetic to the British position than Eisenhower was so he couldn't disguise that sympathy in Britain and so there were crucial misunderstandings on both sides of the Atlantic and in particular four crucial mistakes were made in handling that American relationship the first mistake was the British have you that Dulles who was more sympathetic than Eisenhower was in charge of a medic and foreign policy the Dulles tend to be more outspoken and that was wishful thinking the British assume that Dulles was in the position of a British Foreign Secretary who at that time would be a powerful politician with the constituency of his own as Eden and had under Churchill and Ernest Bevin in the ackley Labour government but the American Secretary of State's position is not like that he is a delegate of and responsible to the President and in some ways he's more like the permanent sector of the Foreign Office than a British Foreign Secretary can't act independently of the president and Dulles was very aware of that because of what had happened in 1947 when the American Secretary of State had tried to do just that James Byrnes who'd rather underestimated Truman and was attempting to carry out a foreign policy of his own but was in effect dismissed by President Truman for insubordination and that was even though Byrnes had a political base of his own having been a senator and later in 1982 President Reagan was to dismiss Alexander Haig as his Secretary of State because he found him personally incompatible now Dallas by contrast with Byrnes had no electoral constituency or political base he'd been defeated in an attempt to secure a Senate seat in 1950 it was entirely dependent on the president his only claim to his post was his technical ability and that confidence which the president placed in him so whatever Dallas's private views might have been he was not going to challenge the president eisenhower was the man who made the decisions his was the he was the man who counted his word with what counted but Bridget didn't fully understand that now the second mistake was made by Dallas he looked at British opinion and he sold a Labour Party together with a few Conservatives and many members of the public were against the use of force so he assumed force would not be used he was comparing parliamentary opposition in Britain to senatorial opposition in America and he no doubt remember the havoc that Senator McCarthy had caused in American foreign policy through his wild charges concerning communists in the State Department and he noted the great power wielded by Lyndon Johnson the Democratic leader in the Senate but the British system is different a British prime minister and like the president controlled the legislature they could be no equivalent to McCarthy or Lyndon Johnson in the House of Commons and opposition hostility to government policy is standard it's expected now Cameron has said he won't act in Syria without some opposition support but it doesn't have to take such a line a determined prime minister need not bother with the Opposition in Parliament and insofar as Parliament counted in 1956 it was in the form of the right wing of the Conservative Party it was pressing Eden to adopt more forcible measures and clamouring for the use of force so conscious what Dallas thought parliamentary pressure was spurring Eden on not holding him back the third mistake was made by the British they saw Eisenhower as a fairly passive figure who would go along with British policy and there was a character of him at that time in Britain but also amongst some Americans but he was a lazy president who spent more time on the golf course than in his office and on one of Eisenhower's letters Eden said the only thing that's true to Ike is his signature and that's illegible and Churchill told his doctor the president is no more than a ventriloquist doll and in addition with an election during November the British hoped he would not go against Israel with allies here because of the importance of the Jewish vote in new which was there a swing state but in fact Eisenhower was in full control of American foreign policy and Dulles was his agent and most important of all contra to public perceptions perceptions which Eisenhower encouraged so as to be seen as a constitutional monarch about the battle and retain his popularity Eisenhower was a strong president with strong views on foreign policy far from being a golf playing amateur he had from his wartime experiences and his post-war leadership in NATO vast indeed unrivaled experience of foreign policy he knew at hand a firsthand many of the world's political leaders and the problems involved and contrary to the sunny image which he projected he had a furious temper and as we shall see he became very angry when his views were ignored and the British were to pay a very high price for under estimating Eisenhower in addition Eisenhower did not need the Jewish vote because at that time Republicans support clay primarily in upstate New York and not in the cities where the Jewish vote was strong and in any case at that time most Jews voted Democrat and the lot in tenant support Eisenhower even if he were to show himself more sympathetic to Israel and in fact he was now the fourth mistake was made by both sides the British Chancellor Harold Macmillan met Eisenhower in September in Washington for half an hour they'd been colleagues during the war in North Africa and Mellon was the only senior politician to meet Eisenhower during the crisis now remarkably during that half hour Suez was not raised and this silence was misinterpreted on both sides Eisenhower made the mistake of not repeating the warnings he'd given to Antony Edom because he thought McMillan was an equivalent to the American sector of the Treasury or a continental Finance Minister someone dealing primarily with technical issues concerning money in fact Macmillan was the second man in the government deeply involved in to is the first suggests that Britain work with the Israelis to defeat NASA pressing Eden to take fortable action and threatening to resign from the government it Eden didn't and during the serious crisis he was in regular communication with Churchill whose prestige of course was too enormous and both who agreed that NASA must be confronted Macmillan was prepared to lead a revolt from the right against Eden which were threatened Eden's Premiership in fact therefore Macmillan was the key to Britain's Suez policy Eisenhower did not realize this an error on his part but millon made the more serious error he believed that Eisenhower's silence indicated consent he told the cabinet and I quote I quill lied doggo and that was wishful thinking he made a further mistake he failed to pass on to his prime minister a warning given by his permanent section of the Treasury that Sterling would not be able to stand the strain of a military campaign without American help on the 7th of September Macmillan was told of a vital necessity and I quote from the point of view of the currency and our economy of ensuring that we do not go it alone and we have maximum American support at that time the pound was not floating as it is now but on a fixed exchange rate regime and Britain would want to avoid what it would regard as a humiliation of a devaluation of the pound and Macmillan simply commented on it Treasury memo yes this is just the trouble the Americans are being very difficult but he did not tell his prime minister of it now the Americans and in particular Dulles as I've said they tried to play for time tempers would cool the British would gradually understand that whatever they thought about the nationalization it did not have the apocalyptic consequences they believed would occur life would go on much as it did before so Dulles sponsored two conferences which were held in London in which the various users of the canal could prepare proposals for the Egyptians but as might have been predicted they had little effect now the big acquiesced in all this hoping if they appeared reasonable they would win American support for a stronger line but in fact Eisenhower and Dulles had unintentionally made the British position more difficult because once it was known may opposed the use of force this tuple of pressure off the Egyptians to reach an agreement they thought all they had to do was sit tight and wait and the Americans would restrain Britain and France still it seemed at first sight in the American approach was succeeding and tempers were cooling the British Foreign Secretary met with his Egyptian counterpart at the United Nations in New York and they agreed upon six principles for a settlement the most important of which were free and open chances through the canal insulation of the operation of the canal from the politics of any one country and the dispute between the company and Egypt should be settled by arbitration the trouble was there was no agreement about how these agreements these principles would be implemented how breaches of them were to be verified and how they would have be enforced against a recalcitrant Egypt and there was widespread distrust of Egyptian good faith and the British wanted terms would damage Nasser hoping perhaps he might be replaced and that of course suggests the British did not believe that NASA could accept the sort of terms we were seeking still it seems if agreement might be within reach with winter coming be difficult to mountain amphibious landing to invade Egypt and on the 12th of October I am the house both in his press conference as follows I've got the best announcement that I could possibly make to America tonight the progress made in the settlement of the suez dispute this afternoon at the UN is most gratifying Egypt Britain and France have met from their foreign ministers and agreed on a set of principles on which negotiate and it looks like here is a very great crisis that is behind us now once again the British protested this was cutting the ground from under their feet because without American pressure though little incentive for the Americans to for the Egyptian to reach agreement the American response was one shouldn't take too seriously what was said in the middle of an election campaign now we will never know whether agreement could have been reached on the base of the six principles Britain certainly had a strong negotiating position at the time with the active sympathy and support in many other countries including America but this negotiating position was of course dissipated by the military action for the sixth principle would have given Britain better terms that were actually achieved after the failure of military action now just at this point things began to go wrong and a peaceful settlement soon appeared how to reach while Eisenhower was speaking the annual Conservative Party conference was in session and at that conference the leadership had proposed an innocuous motion which had little more than endorsed the government's efforts to achieve what it called a just solution the resolution said nothing about force and nothing about international control which I think confirms my judgment the government at this stage was still seeking a peaceful settlement the two Conservative MPs proposed an amendment to the effect that the just solution must ensure and I quote international control of the canal and one of the MPs said in the debate due to search for control failed at the UN our hands are free to use any and every measure that may be necessary to achieve our ends including if necessary the use of force even if necessary against American wishes and this view was so strongly supported among constituency delegates the leadership simply accepted it not daring to risk a vote which it might lose it was clear the temper of the Conservative Party was opposed to any settlement which could be interpreted or sent out now even returned from the conservative conference to checkers his country home and on a Sunday he was visited by two French emissaries first was the Deputy Foreign Minister and the second was the deputy chief of staff of the French Air Force and they told Aidan that the Israelis were preparing to attack Egypt the Israelis believed that the Egyptians intended to fight a war against them and they saw no reason why they should wait while Egypt assimilated arms from a Soviet bloc to prepare their attack the Israelis were not wrong in their judgement when the British invaded Egypt in October they found the following operation order two Egyptian commanders dated 15th of February 1956 every commander should be prepared and prepare his troops for unavoidable war with Israel in order to achieve our supreme objective namely annihilation of Israel and its complete destruction in as little time as possible and by fighting against her as brutally and cruelly as possible now the French said they were going to help the Israelis but both the Israelis and the French needed British support to provide air cover for the Israeli troops since the Israeli Air Force was at that time too weak to combat Egypt's Russian built aircraft it Britain agreed so the French emissaries said Britain and France would have an excellent opportunity to reverse NASA's nationalization and perhaps even to overthrow his government now in response to this Eden visited Paris with his foreign secretary to consult French leaders and on his return spoke to his senior colleagues the Foreign Secretary was Selwyn Lloyd and he I think was almost skeptical of the use of force he wanted to continue with negotiation but he was rather in or bands in Eden and he come to the Foreign Office by a rather curious route um he was a very junior figure and in 1951 he'd been made a junior minister at the Foreign Office much too surprised by Churchill he was expecting to have a position as a law officer because he'd been a Shadow Lord so in the late 1940s and he had the that would be his position but Eden asked for him as a junior minister and when Churchill said he was going to appoint the Foreign Office so when Lloyd said but sir I think there must be some mistake I do not speak any foreign language excepting war I have never visited any foreign country I do not like foreigners I have never spoken in a foreign affairs debate in the house I have never listened to one and Churchill replied young man these all seem to me to be positive advantages but given his position he was very much in awe of Eden and was easily convinced by Eden now after senior ministers were consulted it was agreed that Selwyn Lloyd would go with an official in incognito to France to meet the French and the Israelis secretly at a village in seb around 20 miles from Paris at which the plans would be outlined and that was on the 22nd of October and the Foreign Secretary was told the Israelis proposed for attack in the Sinai desert in a week's time on the 29th of October her French suggested that they on the British should then issue an ultimatum requiring both Israeli and Egyptian forces to retreat ten miles from the canal the pretext being the safeguarding of the canal now the Israelis would accept this ultimatum simply unlikely they would actually be within 10 miles of the canal natchok weren't in fact while the Egyptian could hardly accept a proposal require them to withdraw from their own territory which is under attack Britain and France for then invade would Britain a green Selwyn Lloyd said he has to consult his cabinet but a contrary Israeli account he insisted on the following that the Israeli attack not be a small-scale encounter but a real war he said otherwise there would be no justification for the British ultimatum and Britain would appear in the eyes of the world as an aggressor the British said they had friends like the Scandinavian countries who would not view with favor Britain starting a war and you may think this is an example of British hypocrisy to match anything the Americans had done now the Israelis said they would not attack Egypt unless they had a cast-iron guarantee from Britain that they would bomb Egyptian airfield because otherwise they said their ground troops would be attacked in the Sinai desert by Egypt so two days later there was a second clandestine meeting at Sarah attended this time not by any ministers but by two Foreign Office officials from a initial two documents putting in writing the discussion two days earlier when they got back to London Eden was furious he said nothing should be put on paper the British copy should be destroyed and the Foreign Office officials were told to go back to Paris to destroy the other copies as well now on returning to the French Foreign Office they were locked in a room for some time and indeed unable to obtain their lunch and then told there was no question of the French destroying their copy because the Israelis had taken their copy back to Israel and they wouldn't destroy it because they didn't trust the British to actually bomb MAGIX and airfields without the written agreement and the French couldn't agree to the Israelis having the only copy so the British officials returned empty-handed and the so called Treaty of Sarah which intend to be secret more accurately a protocol it was first published by Israeli chief of staff Moshe Dayan in his memoirs in 1966 and then by the French Foreign Minister in his memoirs in 1976 the document now to be found in the British National Archives is in fact the Israeli version the British one has been destroyed but whether treaty or protocol it was secret and intended to remain secret forever now the cabinet contrary to what was sometimes said were told in very general terms that the Israelis proposed for attack and what the British and French response would be they were not told about the deep details of the several meetings nor the protocol that had been signed outside the cabinet very few were told only the cabinet secretary the permanent head of a foreign office and of course the foreign officials who have been observed but the permanent head of a foreign office decided not to tell his junior officials nor even the ambassador's to Israel Egypt France or America who were therefore left in the dark when called upon to explain British policy a number of junior officials contemplated resignation and one or two actually did so and at least one ambassador the British ambassador Soviet Union contemplated resignation but in the end stayed at their post some officials went to see the former Labour Prime Minister Attlee to ask what they should do at a crisis of conscience he briskly told them to return to their posts from not waste his time the law office has dissociated themselves in the action which they believed lacked any sanctions national law they've not been told as a server protocol and the cabinet had broken with convention by not seeking their advice that of course is in contrast with the situation in the Iraq war when the advice of The Lofts has was fought on the insistence and military leaders wanted an assurance soldiers were not being asked to do anything unlawful the agreement was also kept from Parliament and of course from the public now in defence of the government you might argue that in conflict situations it is often the case that matters have to be withheld as was done in both world wars indeed Winston Churchill said that the truth was so important in wartime that it had to be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies and in this case the justification of secrecy was that with Britain would suffer fewer casualties if the Israelis had already helped destroy the Egyptian army before the invasion and that if the collusion became known British civilians living in other Arab countries would be in danger and I leave it you decide whether this justification is sufficient it's fair to say the House of Commons did not hold collusion against the foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd since in 1971 he was made Speaker of the House of Commons for the agreement of all now at first all seemed to go well after weeks of stalemate the Suez Crisis burst dramatically into the news again for Israel has invaded Egypt Britain and France have declared the canal in danger and British and French troops are on the move background to these startling events is the running sword of the Israeli to front which has been a theater of sporadic warfare ever since the Israeli state came into being for many years even the village schools in the frontier settlements have known that at any moment death may be looking over their shoulder Israeli patrols have been permanently on the watch for any move from the Egyptian side for Israel's Arab neighbors have never been reconciled to her existence every few weeks the farmers daily round has been interrupted by sudden crashes for which neither side has been without blame meanwhile in Egypt the steadily growing power of the regime which overthrew Faruk has been evident to the world the Western nations sinking of the Suez Canal watched uneasily Egypt turned eastward for her supplies of arms and russia's Foreign Minister Shapiro found NASA a ready customer but with every man and woman trained Israel strengths too was growing and the danger of a major flare-up increased the frontier raids continued sooner or later the explosion must calm at last without warning Israel strikes general mustard a n1i commander-in-chief orders the tax into action Israeli forces sweep across the frontier into the Egyptian desert while premier ben-gurion declares general mobilization within hours the leading Israeli columns are driving towards the canal Britain and France reacted once with an ultimatum stop the fighting or we march in Israel accepts if Egypt will and Egypt flatly refuses the world waits tensely to see whether the British flag will fly once more ever Suez the Israelis attacked as arranged on the 29th of October Britain Britain and France sent their ultimatum on the 30th rejected by Egypt Britain then bombed Egyptian airfields now radio Cairo spoke of horrifying civilian casualties but the British in fact bombed only airfields and military targets British could easily have terrorized Cairo port side and Alexandria to enforce a rapid surrender but did not do so now after the bombing was to come the invasion but the military remembering Arnhem said the invasion could not be achieved by paratroops alone but must be supported on the sea now for the fleet to arrive on the Suez Canal from Malta the nearest port available that would take five days and the fleet couldn't start before 30th of October because it had to wait for rejection of the British ultimatum so paratroops wouldn't land at port side until the 5th of November and the seaborne invasion would begin on the 6th of November but of course all this gave time for those opposed to force to act the Labour Party at home opposed it and there were protest rallies in Trafalgar Square but that wasn't important to American opposition Eisenhower said he hadn't been consulted though I think from intelligence report he'd have had a good idea of what was going on and the Americans said the proper response was to invoke the tripart declaration for the British and French said that means helping Egypt she's been attacked by Israel we're certainly not going to do that and the bridge in French therefore vetoed a resolution to that effect in the United Nations the first time that Britain had ever used a veto and the Americans then took the issue to the General Assembly they were absolutely furious the Suez Canal storm center of controversy for weeks now becomes a cause of war in a lightning sequence of diplomatic and military moves since its seizure a nationalization by President Nasser of Egypt the vital waterway has precipitated a new crisis in the already tense Middle East cracked French units are embarked at Marseille bound for a joint staging area with Great Britain on Cyprus less than an hour's flight from Egyptian ports where they are prepared for seizure of the canal by force simultaneously Britain reinforces its garrison on the island for the same eventualities a naval concentration in the eastern Mediterranean strengthens the military buildup even as Israel in a lightning attack thrusts deep into Egypt to the facility of the canal France and Britain issue a 12-hour ultimatum that all fighting must cease within hours of its expiration Britain's warplanes are winging their way to Egypt and it's bombers attacked five key cities including Cairo following a Security Council veto by Britain and France of a United States motion for a ceasefire President Eisenhower after consultation with Secretary of State Dulles makes a firm declaration of United States policy United States was not consulted in any way about any phase of these actions nor were we informed of them in advance in the circumstances I have described there will be no United States involvement in these present hostilities I therefore have no plan to call the Congress in special session of course we shall continue to keep in contact with congressional leaders of both parties it is our hope and intent this matter will be brought before the United Nations General Assembly there with no veto operating the opinion of the world can be brought to bear in our quest for a just end to this tormenting problem in the past the United Nations has proved able could find a way to end bloodshed we believe it can and that will do so again the whole question is brought before an emergency session of the General Assembly where it faces the bar of world opinion Eisenhower was absolutely furious he was facing a presidential election on November the 6th and he took the issue from the Security Council to the General Assembly where no veto was possible and there was a vote of sixty four to five calling for an immediate ceasefire the five were Britain France Israel Australia and New Zealand and the Canadians who were share who shared the American view proposed that a United Nations emergency force be established to police the egyptian-israeli border nothing was said about the need for international control of the canal and that issue now lapsed and D no more was heard of it again and despite the six principles Egypt strengthened by her support of the UN refused to negotiate any further on that particular issue now the British wondered what to do I think when they saw that United Nations resolution but the Americans let them with little choice because the Americans said they would prevent Britain exercising her withdraw rights for funds from the International Monetary Fund which were needed to sustain the pound and they said they would refuse to supply Britain with the oil she needed until she obeyed the United Nations resolution it's fair to say the Suez Canal was blocked as soon as the military action began by NASA so we weren't getting any oil and we therefore needed the Americans to supply the oil but the Treasury secretary said to his British counterpart Harold Macmillan you will not get a dime from the US government until you've gotten out of Suez and Macmillan at that stage said to his colleagues he threw out his arms and said oil sanctions that finishes it he said we can stop now edan wanted to continue so that Britain had control of the whole canal we were about a third of the way into the canal he want to continue so that we had as he would have thought stronger bargaining power but the cabinet would not support him and Macmillan now threatened to resign unless it was a ceasefire in addition the Israelis had accepted a ceasefire so the pretext of British intervention had now gone the bidding of whom that the Israelis would take much longer to get to the canal about two weeks and they did in fact they were there in seven days so the Israelis were too quick and the British Invasion was too slow so at that point a ceasefire was accepted and American pressure forced a British withdrawal the British had hoped that their forces could form part of the United Nations contingent but the Egyptians said understandably they would not accept a UN force if our enemies Britain and France were part of it and they would not accept it until Britain and France had left Egypt and the UN said the force could only be there subject to Egyptian consent so by just before Christmas the last British forces left Suez and this was the first time I think in the modern era where Britain had to end the war at a time not of her own choosing the aim of the operation had been to remove NASA but in fact it was Anthony Eden who went he resigned on health grounds in January 1957 though it's not clear for how long he could continued even if his health had been good he was succeeded ironically by Harold Macmillan though millons judgment had been even more in question than Eden's he pressed for forth he pressed for collusion with the Israelis he'd misinterpreted the views of Eisenhower to Eden he failed to pass on a treasury warning of the strains on sterling had failed to take proper precautions to preserve the currency but he was the beneficiary so shows the eternal truth has no real justice in politics there was an ironic PostScript on the 3rd of November in the middle of the operation the American deputy director of intelligence told the CIA representative in London tell your friends to comply with the goddamn ceasefire or go ahead with the goddamn invasion either way we'll back them up if they do it fast what we can't stand is their goddamn hesitation the CIA officer in London told the Joint Intelligence Committee in London saying I'm not speaking without instructions and that was an indication that Eden and Macmillan might have been right after all if it had been quick the Americans might have turned a blind eye and indeed Dulles said to Eisenhower on 12th of November the British having gone in should not have stopped until their toppled NASA as it was they had now got the worst of both possible worlds they had received all the onus of making the move and at the same time but not accomplished their major purpose and then on 17th of November just 11 days after ceasefire the British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd visited Dallas in hospital he had been hospitalized during the crisis and Dallas asked why did you stop why didn't you go through with it and get NASA down and Lloyd said why didn't you give us a wink and Dallas said I think perfectly reasonably why I couldn't do that but even if the Americans had turned the blind eye the question remains what could Britain and France do once they were in Egypt with another occupation against the wishes of the people some conservatives believe there was an alternative probe it'sh leadership available in Egypt I think that was wishful thinking probably a British occupation would have met with terrorism and guerrilla warfare led by Nasser whose position would have been strengthened what could have been accomplished if the Suez operation had actually been successful that sets the main argument against it what could it have achieved now I come to my conclusions the effects curiously were rather contrary to many of those predicted and not as immediately striking as many had predicted and Eden shortly before his resignation told the cabinet Suez has not so much changed our fortunes as revealed realities it was assumed that series would have long-term divisive effects in British politics but it didn't things heal pretty quickly indeed opinion polls showed four oddly enough Suez became more popular with the public as it was seemed to have failed there was no majority for the use of force before the operation began but one stayed it was clear a majority said that Eden had been right on the first and second November Gallup reported 37% for Eden 44% against long 10th 11th of November 53% for Eden 32% against and popular support for Eden remained high until his resignation perhaps the public admired him simply for having a go for bashing the foreigner who dared to challenge British interests Suez had an effect on opinion formers sometimes dismissed as the chattering classes it turned them against the Conservatives but that will probably have happened anyway opinion reformers are generally to be found on the left labour tried to make an issue of Suez during 1959 election the pure peer interested and the Conservatives won the election with an increased majority it was assumed that series would lead to long-term damage to British American relations that didn't happen either the relations were patched out rapidly by Harold Macmillan and Macmillan said again rather patronizingly who the British could be the Greeks to a Medicus Rome in other words we had the ideas the Americans had the power the Americans were also keen to patch things up Eisenhower said those British they're still my right arm but some may say these things were patched up too too quickly but Suez ended a long era in anglo-american relations which had begun in 1895 from that point on British governments had rarely departed from the attitude of courting the friendship of America and Bismarck had famously said the key to the 20th century would be that the Americans spoke English now many in Britain hoped that they with America could maintain the peace of the world an attitude encouraged by alliances in two world wars and the British hoped she could work with an equal as an equal with America because of her Empire which made her a world power that was all now seen as wishful thinking the Empire had gone and the British relationship was that of a subordinate path Britain was becoming without realizing it a purely European power the German Chancellor dr. Adenauer saw the realities at the time very clearly he said Britain was like an old man who had lost all his property and did not realize it and after seeing Eden on a 6th of November the day of the ceasefire he wrote to the French Prime Minister very presently he said France and England will never be powers comparable to the US and the Saadat Union nor Germany either there remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world that is to unite to make Europe England is not right for it but the affair of Suez will help to prepare her spirits for it we have no time to waste and you told the French Europe will be your revenge and the French and a Gaul in particular who came to power in France in 1958 subordinated their relationship with America to the construction of a European power which could exert leverage over America European interests the French thought were distinct there should be a European policy distinct from you and a goal with greatly influenced by Suez it made him even more distrustful of Britain which he believed would always follow America rather than Europe and that I think is one of the reasons why he vetoed Britain's early applications to join the European communities he thought Britain would be an American corrosion horse and so in my view the effect on the Antarctic cordial was greater than the effect on British and American relations and the French insisted Britain before entering Europe must jettison sterling her reserve currency so there could be a strong European reserve currency independent of America now that is now the euro though you may say it's not a successful reserve currency and France also developed her own totally independent nuclear deterrent completely independent of America there was no similar reaction in Britain no anti-americanism of the right no gaullism the anti-americanism remained a near monopoly at the left Macmillan did eventually apply to join Europe in 1961 but his conception of Europe was quite different to the goals he believed in interdependence with America and Britain as a bridge between the continent and America which is probably still the British view where de Gaulle said that Europe should have its own independent policy now in Britain Suez ended the illusion which 1940 had engendered that the fate of the country lay entirely in her own hands the Churchillian illusion if you like people remembered 1940 but perhaps they forgot the war had only been one with the aid of the Soviet Union and America Britain became overconfident and when this was realized at the time of Suez there was a loss of national self-confidence which persisted until a successful campaign to recapture the Falklands in 1982 the subject of my fourth talking this series when Eden died in 1977 his a bit early in the time said he was the last Prime Minister to believe Britain was a great power and the first to confront a crisis which proved she was not now Eden's failure at Suez was a failure of the right a failure if you like of gunboat diplomacy but that in my view does not comprehend its full significance because Suez raises key questions which have not yet been resolved of how international order is to be maintained in a post-imperial world and that was the question that had preoccupied Antony Eden's and for 1930s in the 19th century international order had been secured through the idea of the concept of Europe in formal summits of European powers that kept Europe at peace from 1815 to 1914 then it was replaced by the League of Nations and then the United Nations setting up principles of international order and law and at first sight Suez seemed to show the forth of the United Nations as a representative of world opinion but the United Nations could only work against the democracies he couldn't work against the Soviet Union in Hungary and it couldn't work against Egypt it was assumed that Suez would strengthen the United Nations it did not the United Nations could not get any redress for Britain and France in face of the Soviet veto and Britain France felt that the UN was hypocritical it intervened stopped them but not the Soviet Union and an Oran Bevin a leader of the left whom I quoted earlier he said there was only one motto worse than my country right or wrong and that is the UN right or wrong and the UN failed to keep peace in the Middle East in 1967 NASA ordered the United Nations emergency fought out of Egypt so he could once again threaten Israel and the resolution setting up the United Nations forces accepted you could stay only as long as Egypt consented to it the result the six-day war was won by Israel and there was a further war in 1973 and the consequences are still there in Gaza the West Bank of the Jordan and the Syrian Golan Heights all conquered by Israel in 1967 had Britain still been in possession of the Suez Canal base or had to has been successful it is possible these wars would not have occurred now Eden as I said was concerned with the weakening of international order which was threatened by NASA just in the 1930s he'd been concerned with the weakening of international order through the action of the dictators and Eden was the first to realize that the great threat to international order was not so much from the communist powers who were weak and cautious and highly risk-averse but from radical third-world dictators who were much less risk-averse and NASA has had his successes in the Middle East in Saddam Hussein Colonel Gaddafi and Bashar Assad and we face now not dissimilar problems that faced by edon in 1956 and on a number of occasions since 1956 we've intervened in the Middle East most recently in Iraq and in Libya and those interventions like Suez were highly controversial and show the cost of intervention but on the other hand you may argue the failure to intervene in Syria like the failure to intervene against Hitler Mussolini in the 1930s show the risks and costs of non intervention so perhaps there are no simple answers and perhaps Eden was more precedent than appeared at the time and certainly the problem which he had to confront how to secure an international order compatible with radical third-world nationalism still exists today and challenges us all to try to find a solution and from that point of view Suez was not just a throwback to the past but a pointer to the future thank you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 102,399

Rating: 4.5971222 out of 5

Keywords: gresham, gresham lecture, gresham talk, gresham visiting professor, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham college talk, Professor, visiting professor, history, modern history, british history, european history, political history, politics, modern politics, party politics, parliamentary politics, parliament, labour, conservatives, political crisis, post war, eden, Anthony eden, Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower, harold macmillan, Macmillan, Nasser, President, Egypt, suez

Id: YBNvAGkVGpw

Length: 78min 32sec (4712 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/htown242]

An extremely interesting and very informative analysis of Britain's role in the Suez crisis.