1956: Suez Canal

July 27, 1956

The second half of 1956 marked a turning point in the Cold War and the balance of power in the Middle East. On July 26, 1956, Gamel Abd al-Nasser defied the West and nationalized the Suez Canal.

In 1952, Nasser helped lead a group of army officers, known as the Free Officers, in a revolutionary coup in Egypt. Their revolution was part of the general post war restructuring of the Middle East that had begun during World War I and continued through World War II. Nasser hoped to carry this revolution beyond the borders of Egypt, and into the entire Arab world. For the Suez Crisis to be understood, one must first grasp the message Nasser was sending to the world with his actions.

Nasser hoped that he would be the one to reunite the Arab people; therefore, he developed a foreign policy that would place him in the position to do that. The essence of Nasser's policy was a return to dignity.i The primary objective of his policy was independence from external control -- military, political, and economic.ii Thus, he hoped to restore the dignity of the Arab people by removing the corruptive influence of all types of foreign entanglements. He hoped to create an Arab bloc, which could protect, police, and finance itself. Central to his policy was the principle of positive neutralism or non-alignment.iii In Nasser's mind, any Arab country that aligned itself with a major power gave up their sovereignty, and subjected itself to the will of the stronger.

Following WW II both Britain and France attempted to maintain their influence in the Middle East. These two colonial powers would be severely tested by the rise of nationalism in the region. Many have defined the Crisis in terms of the end of an era (colonialism), and the beginning of another (Pan-Arabism); however, the Crisis did not occur in such a neat little vacuum. Britain had developed a number of ways to maintain its influence without abject political control. The very concept of the Commonwealth was one example. Another example was the Baghdad Pact, which Britain hoped to use to keep its foot in the Middle Eastern door. Nasser's reaction to the Pact should have alerted the two colonial powers to the type of opposition their actions would receive.

Anthony Eden was a central figure throughout the Crisis. He was the last prime minister to consider Britain an equal power to the US and USSR.iv He openly criticized Dulles and accused him of abandoning his closest allies, but it was Eden who lost control of Suez.v Blinded by ghosts from the past -- appeasement, colonial glory, and his own success -- he lost touch of the great game and played an extremely sloppy hand.

US foreign policy, as it often was in the Cold War, was in a state of transition. The Eisenhower Doctrine would follow on the heels of this Crisis and the Rollback policy had conveniently been rolled under the White House carpeting. Much has been made about Dulles the moral crusader, he has been portrayed as one who based his foreign policies on his personal beliefs about good and evil.vi This paints a rather anorexic portrait of Dulles' actual policies. I believe that portrayal was due to the combined effect of relying too heavily on European versions of the story, and an inability to separate Dulles' rhetoric from the meat of his policies.

If Dulles was truly the moral crusader he was made out to be, clearly Nasser's non-alignment policy would be unacceptable. The facts tend to show this was not the case. Although Dulles was not a fan of non-alignment, he recognized Egypt's freedom of choice. A closer look at the Czech arms deal and the Dam offer reveal that Nasser's "aggressive non-alignment" in the latter would not be tolerated.vii

Further, US estimates of Nasser and the overall situation in the Middle East were closer to reality than any of the allies. From the outset of the Crisis, the US sought to isolate Nasser and was concerned about: "making Nasser a much more important figure than he is."viii Although Dulles and Eisenhower sought to solve the present Crisis, they kept their eye toward the future and their expanding role in the region.

*taken from http://history.acusd.edu/gen/text/suez.html by Chris Leininger

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