Despite becoming the mouthpiece for the Trump administration’s unprecedented hostility towards their European allies, vice-president JD Vance has made himself popular in one corner of Europe by whispering the magic words that make every British conservative of certain persuasion simply melt: “You were right over Suez.”
Even though Vance’s recent admission that “the British and the French were certainly right in their disagreements with Eisenhower about the Suez Canal” was just a throwaway line in a longer interview which focused on the need for Europe to be more independent of the US, it struck a nerve with a portion of the British right who have been waiting to hear this for years. The Spectator magazine responded with an article celebrating Vance for being a US politician who finally “understands” that America made a fatal error in not supporting Britain’s claim to the Suez Canal in 1956. And this is because Suez isn’t just one of a number of historically distant conflicts from the dying days of the British Empire. It has become a metonym for the failure of British statecraft; a shorthand for the country’s 20th-century transition from global hegemon to American vassal state. Vance saying that it was always a mistake is the geopolitical equivalent of middle-aged man being told by that old girlfriend he always loved that she made the biggest mistake of her life by leaving him.
The history of the Suez crisis will be familiar to many readers but is worth briefly retelling. In 1956, General Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt announced the nationalisation of the British-controlled Suez Canal and froze all the accounts of the Suez Canal Company. The Suez Canal, known as the highway to India, was key to British trade routes to and from the East, serving as the fulcrum from which Britain projected its power across the globe. The new Conservative prime minister, Anthony Eden, was furious at the actions of this native upstart and branded Nasser as a “Muslim Mussolini” whose brand of pan-Arabian solidarity could lead to the nightmare of rulers in other British Arab territories – Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia – actually acting in their own interests. Therefore, Eden tried to covertly use French and Israeli forces to manufacture a military confrontation with Egypt that would remove Nasser from power. However, the plan blew up in his face when the new global hegemon, the US, turned its back on its old ally and refused to back Eden’s attempt to recapture the canal. Eden was humiliated and his premiership ended shortly afterwards. His successor, Harold Macmillan, famous for saying he recognised the “wind of change” now blowing across the world, decided it was time to accept the terminal condition of the British Empire.
Therefore, Suez has come to be seen as the turning point in the downfall of “Global Britain”. But the attempt by Vance and his British cheerleaders to rewrite this history makes the same error as those who see it as the death knell for Britain – it over-exceptionalises Suez as a singular event rather than placing it within the context of the wave decolonisation that redrew the global map in the postwar era. If it hadn’t been Nasser and Suez, it would have been somewhere else. Maybe the failed conflict in Malaysia or the brutal but futile attempts to supress the Mau Mau in Kenya would now be canonised as the moment that “Britain fell”. It’s useful to remember that, just three years prior to the Suez conflict, Eisenhower did back Britain in a covert plot to reassert its power in the Middle East: the US collaborated in the coup that removed Mohammad Mosaddegh from power in Iran after he had claimed sovereignty over the refineries of the Anglo-Iranian oil company. Had they also supported Britain against Egypt, would they have had to do so again a few years later when Ghana nationalised its cocoa trade? And a few years after that when Sri Lanka nationalised British oil companies? How long could they have held back a tide of history which no longer accepted colonial extraction as an economic model?
Yet, at the heart of Suez revisionism is an illusion not about the past but about the present. It is summed up excellently in the same Spectator article, which ends by saying, “Suez should not be seen as a mistake, but a glimpse of the world power Britain could be again, if we hadn’t lost our nerve.” This holds that, as the world once again divides into spheres of competing great powers, it is essential that Britain is one of them. Yet for most ordinary Britons, Suez wasn’t some great tragedy. In fact, just one year after Suez, Macmillan told the country they “have never had it so good” as Britain’s withdrawal from its futile attempts to hold on to its empire coincided with the period when living standards for working people rose across the board. Council houses were built, the NHS was in its ascendancy and unions protected job conditions. As the remnants of these institutions now lie in tatters in a modern Britain of runaway wealth inequality and never-ending austerity, I would argue that most people would be more concerned with rebuilding our social infostructure than with whether or not Britain is a “world power” again.
The 19th century when our little old island ruled over such vast swathes of the world map, including territorial juggernauts like India and China, was a historical anomaly – not the norm. The sooner some sections of the conservative commentariat accept this, the sooner we can get on with building a country that serves the interests of the majority of citizens in this new multipolar world.
[See also: Did the Tories create modern Britain?]
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