LONDON: The Suez invasion, 50 years ago on Tuesday, marked the start of close cooperation between London and Washington still visible in the Middle East and made clear for the first time that Britain and France were no longer world powers.
It showed that interests between America and its European allies were not always the same as had been assumed until then, said Robert McGeehan from the Royal Institute of International Affairs think-tank in London. This was a great turning point for NATO, because it was the most serious crisis ever since the alliance was created in 1949. And never again were Britain or France really able to take the kind of independent military action that they would have wanted to.
The invasion, launched on late Oct. 31, 1956, took place in the context of the Cold War. On July 26 that year, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, owner and operator of the main route for Middle Eastern oil bound for Europe and a vital Franco-British asset. The Suez Canal, on the western side of Egypt s Sinai Peninsula, links the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean beyond. Britain and France, who considered Nasser as a kind of Arab Hitler , said McGeehan, held a secret meeting with Israel at which it was agreed that Israel would invade the Sinai and that after a short while, Britain and France would intervene and re-take the Suez canal. Operation Musketeer was initially a success for the two European powers, which quickly established control over the canal in November. But once it got under way and Washington found out, US president Dwight Eisenhower was incensed that his NATO allies had hatched such an audacious plan behind his back. Washington threatened to sell the US s sterling reserves and spark a sharp fall in the pound, and together with the Soviet Union – in an unlikely Cold War alliance, particularly as the crisis happened the same year as Hungary s anti-communist uprising – pressured London and Paris into a humiliating withdrawal. The disastrous episode from the point of view of France and Britain prompted very different reactions on either side of the English Channel, McGeehan said. Britain vowed never to find itself in such a situation ever again and decided that having a good relationship with the new superpower must come first, even if this meant losing autonomy of action, he said. This special relationship has lasted down the 50 years that followed, and has perhaps never been stronger than it is nowadays between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush, as evidenced in Iraq and Afghanistan. The French decided more or less the reverse, McGeehan believes. [They] are a very proud nation, and they do not particularly enjoy the feeling of being pushed around by les Anglo-Saxons .
Charles de Gaulle, the war hero who became French president in 1959, protested against the dominant role of the United States in NATO and against cozy Anglo-US relations, and in 1966 removed French troops from the organization’s military command. They were not to return for 33 years. Many people believe that even though there was a French nuclear program before 1956, that the force de frappe really was the child of Suez, McGeehan argued.
