The Suez Crisis
The week Britain and France discovered they were no longer empires
Open
Israel took the Sinai peninsula in about a hundred hours. British and French paratroopers destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground and held the northern Suez Canal within days.
This is a war Egypt lost on every battlefield it fought.
Egypt also kept the canal, kept its government, and its president became the most celebrated man in the Arab world.
Three governments met in secret at a villa outside Paris three weeks before the shooting started, and none of them planned for that outcome.
Scene 1Alexandria, the twenty sixth of July
On the nineteenth of July, nineteen fifty six, the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles withdrew Washington's offer to finance Egypt's Aswan High Dam.
Seven days later Gamal Abdel Nasser spoke to a crowd in Alexandria for two hours. In the middle of it, he said one name: Ferdinand de Lesseps.
It was a signal. As he spoke, Egyptian officers were already seizing the offices of the company that had run the Suez Canal since eighteen sixty nine.
Nasser told the crowd the canal, dug through Egyptian soil by Egyptian labor, now belonged to Egypt. Its tolls would build the dam the Americans had refused to fund.
That same day, Egypt published the decree itself.
· Presidential Decree Law No. 285 of 1956 · July 26, 1956
“The Universal Company of the Suez Maritime Canal is hereby nationalized. All its assets, rights, and obligations are transferred to the State.”
Egypt had bought its own company at market value and promised to keep the canal open, which it did. There was no law against what Nasser had just done.
Scene 2London
Anthony Eden reached for the analogy that had shaped his whole career. He had resigned from government eighteen years earlier over the appeasement of the dictators.
To Eden, Nasser was Mussolini on the Nile, and the canal was Munich again.
Britain and France drew two thirds of Western Europe's oil through that canal. But nationalizing a company at market value broke no law, and they could not simply invade a country that had committed no crime.
So they built a pretext instead.
Scene 3Sevres
At a villa outside Paris, between the twenty second and twenty fourth of October, nineteen fifty six, British, French, and Israeli officials signed a secret protocol.
Israel would invade the Sinai. Britain and France would then demand that both sides withdraw from the canal. When Egypt refused to retreat inside its own territory, the two European powers would occupy the canal zone, calling themselves peacekeepers.
Eden later ordered the British copy of the protocol destroyed.
It was a war planned in secret by three governments against a fourth that had broken no law.
Scene 4The invasion
On the twenty ninth of October, Israeli forces struck into the Sinai. Israel calls it Operation Kadesh.
On the thirty first, British and French aircraft began bombing Egyptian airfields.
On the fifth of November, British and French paratroopers dropped on Port Said and Port Fuad, followed by a seaborne and helicopter assault, one of the first large helicopter landings in military history.
Militarily, it worked. Israel took the Sinai in roughly a hundred hours. Anglo-French forces held the northern canal within days.
Scene 5Washington
The two governments not consulted at Sevres ended the war.
Dwight Eisenhower learned of the invasion from intelligence reports, not from his allies. It was the final week of his re-election campaign, and Soviet tanks were crushing the Hungarian uprising at the same time.
He refused to protect the pound. Speculators drained the Bank of England's reserves, and the United States blocked Britain's emergency access to the International Monetary Fund until it accepted a ceasefire.
In Moscow, Nikolai Bulganin sent notes threatening rocket attacks. The United Nations General Assembly bypassed the British and French vetoes and voted for a ceasefire, creating the first armed peacekeeping force in its history.
On the same day the bombing began, Eisenhower told the American public where he stood.
· Radio and television address to the American people on the Suez and Hungary · October 31, 1956
“We cannot subscribe to one law for the weak, another law for the strong; one law for those opposing us, another for those allied with us. There can be only one law, or there shall be no peace.”
He said it about Hungary and Egypt in the same breath, and then used financial pressure, not weapons, against the ally he would not name.
Scene 6The ceasefire
Britain accepted the ceasefire on the sixth of November, hours after the invasion had already succeeded on the ground.
British troops withdrew in December, having gained nothing.
Nasser, who had lost the battle for the Sinai, kept the canal, kept his government, and became the undisputed hero of the Arab world.
Five accounts
What Suez was, and who really won it, is contested from five directions. Each gets its own case, in its own terms, before anything is said against it.
vanquishedBritish and French Imperial
British and French Imperial
For Eden, the canal was not a business asset. It was an imperial artery, carrying two thirds of the oil that heated Western European homes and ran its factories.
Nasser's seizure of the company was, to a generation that remembered appeasing dictators, Munich all over again. There was no legal ground for war, so Britain and France invented one at Sevres.
The operation itself succeeded. French and British paratroopers took Port Said, and by the sixth of November the northern canal was in Anglo-French hands.
It was American financial pressure, not an Egyptian army, that ended the war. Eden defended the intervention to Parliament in his own words.
“We are not at war with Egypt. We are in an armed conflict.”
Britain never again conducted a great power foreign policy without American permission. France concluded the opposite lesson, that it could trust nobody but itself.
Read the full account
Narrative
For Anthony Eden, the canal was not a business asset but an imperial artery. Through it flowed two-thirds of the oil that heated Western European homes and ran its factories. A man Britain regarded as an Egyptian demagogue had just seized the company that operated it, and Eden, who had resigned from Neville Chamberlain's government in 1938 over the appeasement of the dictators, saw the pattern he had spent his career warning against. Nasser was Mussolini on the Nile. To let him keep the canal was Munich again.
The legal problem was that Nasser had done nothing illegal. Egypt had nationalized a company registered in Egypt, promising to compensate the shareholders and keep the canal open, which it did. There was no ground for war. So Britain and France manufactured one. At Sevres on October 22-24, 1956, Selwyn Lloyd's deputy Patrick Dean signed a secret protocol with France and Israel: Israel would attack, the two powers would demand that both combatants pull back from the canal, and when Egypt refused to retreat inside its own territory, they would seize the canal zone as neutral guardians. It was a plot dressed as a rescue.
The operation itself succeeded. French and British paratroopers took Port Said, the Egyptian air force was destroyed on the ground, and by November 6 the northern canal was in Anglo-French hands. Then the empire's own weakness ended the war from within. Speculators dumped sterling, the Bank of England lost more than 200 million dollars in reserves in a single month, and the United States made clear it would block any rescue from the International Monetary Fund until Eden accepted a ceasefire. Harold Macmillan, who had been the invasion's loudest advocate in Cabinet, read the run on the pound and reversed himself. The opposition later mocked him as "first in, first out."
Britain accepted the ceasefire on November 6, hours after the military objective had been won on the ground. The troops withdrew in December with nothing to show for it. Eden, ill and discredited, resigned in January 1957. The lesson London absorbed was that Britain could no longer conduct a great-power foreign policy without American permission. France absorbed a different lesson: that alliance with Washington was worthless in a crisis, and that survival required an independent nuclear force, a united Europe, and a free hand in Algeria. The two empires walked out of Suez in opposite directions, but both walked out smaller.
Arguments
- The canal was a strategic lifeline carrying two-thirds of Western Europe's oil, not an ordinary commercial dispute
- Nasser's seizure evoked the appeasement of the 1930s that Eden's generation was determined never to repeat
- The Sevres collusion was a deliberate pretext because nationalization itself gave no legal grounds for war
- American financial coercion, not battlefield defeat, forced the humiliating withdrawal
Sources
- Suez: Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East
- Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis
- The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis
victorEgyptian and Arab Nationalist
Egyptian and Arab Nationalist
The canal was Egyptian ground, carved through the isthmus by Egyptian labor. For nearly a century its profits had flowed to shareholders in Paris and London.
When Dulles withdrew the Aswan Dam financing, Nasser read it as a colonial insult. He chose to fund the dam himself, from the canal's own tolls.
Three foreign armies, two of them the old colonial masters and the third a new settler state, attacked Egypt in concert. Egyptian forces were beaten in the Sinai and outgunned at Port Said.
But the invaders were forced out by the world's condemnation. The canal stayed nationalized, and Nasser became the paramount voice of Arab nationalism. He had told the crowd what Egypt now owned.
“The Suez Canal Company has become Egyptian, and Egyptians will run it.”
A defeat on the battlefield became, in Cairo's telling, a triumph of sovereignty.
Read the full account
Narrative
The canal was Egyptian ground. The Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez had been carved through the isthmus between 1859 and 1869 by Egyptian laborers under a corvee system; Egyptian historians hold that more than 100,000 workers died in the digging. For nearly a century afterward the profits flowed to shareholders in Paris and London while Egypt, whose khedive had been forced to sell his shares to Britain in 1875, collected a fraction. The canal had also been the excuse for the British occupation of 1882, which had lasted, in one form or another, for 74 years.
When Dulles withdrew the Aswan Dam financing on July 19, 1956, Nasser read it as a colonial slap: fund the dam and Egypt would owe the West; deny it and Egypt would be humiliated. He chose a third path. The tolls of the canal, running about 35 million Egyptian pounds a year to foreign owners, would build the dam instead. In his July 26 speech in Alexandria he named the canal's builder, Ferdinand de Lesseps, as the coded order for Egyptian engineers to take over the offices. The crowd understood before he finished the sentence. Across the Arab world the reaction was electric. Here was an Arab leader who had faced down the empires and taken back what was theirs.
The invasion that followed only confirmed the argument. Three foreign armies, two of them the old colonial masters and the third the new settler state, attacked Egypt in concert. Egyptian forces were beaten in the Sinai and outgunned at Port Said, where resistance and civilian deaths made martyrs. But the political result was total victory. The invaders were forced out by the world's condemnation; the canal stayed nationalized; and Nasser emerged as the paramount figure of Arab nationalism, the man who had turned a military defeat into a triumph of sovereignty.
Suez became the high-water mark of pan-Arabism. Nasser's prestige carried Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic in 1958, inspired nationalist and republican movements from Iraq to Yemen, and made Cairo the capital of a politics that promised to unite the Arabs against imperialism and its local clients. In this reading, 1956 is not a story about the decline of Europe. It is a story about the agency of the colonized: the proof that a poor, formerly occupied nation could seize its own resources, endure the fury that followed, and win.
Arguments
- The canal was built on Egyptian soil by Egyptian labor and its revenues rightfully belonged to Egypt
- Nationalization was a lawful, compensated act of sovereignty, provoked by the withdrawal of Aswan Dam financing
- The tripartite invasion exposed the collusion of the old colonial powers with the new settler state
- Military defeat in the Sinai became a political triumph that made Nasser the leader of Arab nationalism at its peak
Sources
- Cutting the Lion's Tail: Suez Through Egyptian Eyes
- Nasser at War: Arab Images of the Enemy
- Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences
victorIsraeli Strategic
Israeli Strategic
For Israel, Suez was never about the canal. It was about Egyptian raids launched from Gaza, a blockade of the Straits of Tiran, and a new arms deal that had just armed Egypt with Soviet bloc tanks and aircraft.
France, fighting its own war against rebels it blamed on Nasser, offered Israel weapons and air cover in exchange for the spark Britain and France needed. At Sevres, Ben-Gurion signed, reluctant about the role but clear about the aims.
On the twenty ninth of October, Israeli paratroopers dropped at the Mitla Pass. Within about a hundred hours the Israel Defense Forces had overrun the Sinai.
Israel was forced to give back the Sinai by March nineteen fifty seven. But it reopened the Straits of Tiran, won a UN buffer force, and built the French alliance that would seed its own nuclear program. Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Chief of Staff, put it plainly.
“We were fighting our own war, for our own reasons, at a time that suited us.”
What Israel returned in fifty seven under pressure, it would take again eleven years later in six days.
Read the full account
Narrative
For Israel, Suez was not about the canal. It was about the Sinai, the Straits of Tiran, and Gaza. Since 1955 Egypt had sponsored fedayeen raids from the Gaza Strip that killed Israeli civilians; it had closed the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, blockading the port of Eilat; and in September 1955 it had signed the Czech arms deal, importing Soviet-bloc tanks and aircraft that threatened to shift the regional military balance decisively. Ben-Gurion, Dayan, and Shimon Peres concluded that a war was coming and that Israel should choose its timing.
France provided the opening. Fighting its own war against Nasser-backed rebels in Algeria, Paris had already become Israel's principal arms supplier. When Britain and France needed a pretext to seize the canal, Israel offered the spark in exchange for weapons, air cover, and a French commitment that would soon extend to a nuclear reactor at Dimona. At Sevres, Ben-Gurion signed the protocol with reluctance about being cast as the aggressor, but with clear strategic aims. On October 29, Israeli paratroopers dropped at the Mitla Pass; within about 100 hours the Israel Defense Forces had overrun the Sinai, at a cost of 231 dead and 899 wounded.
Under American and Soviet pressure, Israel was forced to give back every inch of the Sinai by March 1957. Critics called it a war fought to hand a victory to the Europeans. But Israeli strategists counted concrete gains. The Straits of Tiran were reopened and a UN Emergency Force was stationed as a buffer in Sinai and Gaza. The fedayeen raids largely stopped, buying a decade of relative quiet on the southern front. And the French alliance forged in the collusion seeded the arms pipeline and the atomic program that would define Israeli security for a generation. When Nasser expelled UNEF and reclosed the Straits in May 1967, Israel treated it as a casus belli, and the Sinai it had returned in 1957 it took again in six days.
Arguments
- The war addressed Egyptian fedayeen raids, the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, and the destabilizing Czech arms deal
- The Sinai campaign was a decisive military success, overrunning the peninsula in roughly 100 hours
- The French alliance built at Sevres secured arms supply and the foundations of Israel's nuclear program
- Withdrawal was forced by the superpowers, but Israel gained a reopened strait, a UN buffer, and a decade of quiet
Sources
- The Protocol of Sevres, 1956: Anatomy of a War Plot
- Israel in Search of a War: The Sinai Campaign, 1955-1956
- The 1956 War: Collusion and Rivalry in the Middle East
bystanderAmerican Cold War Management
American Cold War Management
Eisenhower's own allies had blindsided him, during his re-election campaign, in the same week Soviet tanks were crushing Hungary. This account's fury is aimed less at Nasser than at London and Paris.
Letting the old colonial powers reconquer an Arab state by force would have driven the whole region toward Moscow, at the exact moment America was trying to look like the alternative to European empire.
So Washington moved against its own allies. It sponsored the ceasefire the Anglo-French veto had blocked at the Security Council, and the Treasury made clear it would not support the pound.
An adviser recorded Eisenhower asking the plainest version of the question, in the middle of the crisis.
“How could we possibly support Britain and France if in doing so we lose the whole Arab world?”
Into the vacuum the two humiliated empires left, the United States stepped, a role formalized weeks later in the Eisenhower Doctrine.
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Narrative
Eisenhower learned of the invasion from intelligence reports, not from his allies. It was the final week of his re-election campaign, and Soviet tanks were rolling into Budapest to crush the Hungarian uprising. His two closest allies had chosen that moment to attack Egypt in secret collusion with Israel, handing Moscow a propaganda gift: while the Soviets killed Hungarians, the Western democracies bombed Egyptians. Eisenhower was furious less at the goal than at the deception and the timing.
The American calculation was Cold War arithmetic. Nasser was a nationalist, not a communist, but the surest way to drive the Arab world toward the Soviet Union was to let the old colonial powers reconquer an Arab state by force. The United States had spent a decade positioning itself as the anti-colonial alternative to European empire; Suez threatened to destroy that credibility overnight. So Eisenhower moved against his own allies. At the United Nations, the United States sponsored the ceasefire resolutions that the Anglo-French veto had blocked in the Security Council, moving the question to the General Assembly. Behind the scenes, the Treasury made clear it would not support the pound, and Britain's access to emergency IMF funds was frozen until it agreed to withdraw.
It was economic coercion applied to allies, and it worked within days. Eisenhower framed it in the language of principle, that there could not be one law for friends and another for adversaries, delivered in the same breath as his condemnation of the Soviets in Hungary. Whether principle or interest drove the decision, the outcome reshaped the region's power structure. Britain and France were finished as independent actors in the Middle East. Into the vacuum stepped the United States, which announced the Eisenhower Doctrine in January 1957, pledging military and economic aid to Middle Eastern states resisting communism. The empire that emerged from Suez was American.
Arguments
- The allies acted in secret, blindsiding Washington during the election and the Hungarian crisis
- Letting colonial powers reconquer an Arab state would have driven the region toward the Soviet Union
- American financial pressure, not military force, was the decisive instrument that ended the war
- The crisis let the United States supplant Britain and France as the Western power in the Middle East
Sources
- The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945-1956
- Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-1957, Volume XVI: Suez Crisis
- Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956
academicLater Scholarship and the End of Empire
Later Scholarship and the End of Empire
To the historians who reconstructed Suez after the archives opened, nineteen fifty six is the hinge where a European world turned into a superpower one.
The collusion Eden denied for the rest of his life, that Britain, France, and Israel had secretly conspired at Sevres, was pieced together decades later from Israeli and French records.
Historians still argue whether Eisenhower's coercion was wise restraint or a needless humiliation that pushed France toward its own nuclear force. What nobody disputes is the sequence that followed.
Ghana became independent within a year. By nineteen sixty, Harold Macmillan himself was describing what Suez had exposed.
“The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”
Within a decade, the map of empire he was describing was gone.
Read the full account
Narrative
To the historians who reconstructed Suez after the archives opened, 1956 is the hinge on which the twentieth century turned from a European world to a superpower one. Keith Kyle titled his definitive account Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East. Wm. Roger Louis and Roger Owen assembled the standard scholarly volume around the same claim. The consensus is not that Suez alone dismantled the empires, but that it exposed, in a single humiliating fortnight, a decline that had been underway since 1945 and that both London and Paris had refused to admit.
The evidence that Eden had denied for the rest of his life, that Britain, France, and Israel had secretly conspired at Sevres, was pieced together from Israeli and French records and confirmed in Avi Shlaim's 1997 anatomy of the war plot. The collusion mattered to scholarship because it demonstrated that the intervention was never the police action its architects claimed. It was a war of imperial restoration disguised as peacekeeping, and its exposure destroyed the moral authority the empires had claimed to carry.
Historians divide on the counterfactuals. One reading holds that Eisenhower's financial coercion needlessly humiliated allies and taught France a lesson in self-reliance that led straight to the force de frappe and a generation of Atlantic friction. A second credits Eisenhower with preventing a catastrophe that would have driven the Arab world into Soviet arms. Economic historians have shown that the sterling crisis was as much about long-term British weakness as about American pressure. And a growing literature has moved the center of the story away from London and Washington toward Cairo, insisting that the enduring meaning of 1956 belongs to the decolonizing world that watched Nasser survive.
What is not disputed is the sequence that followed. Ghana became independent in 1957; Harold Macmillan spoke of a "wind of change" blowing through Africa in 1960; within a decade the map of empire was gone. The canal that had been the imperial artery had become, in the phrase historians repeat, the place where the empires discovered they were no longer empires. The superpowers that ended the war at the United Nations set the pattern for the world that came after: a bipolar order in which the old imperial capitals were now clients, spectators, or supplicants.
Arguments
- Suez did not cause imperial decline but exposed a weakness underway since 1945
- Declassified records confirmed the Sevres collusion that Eden denied, discrediting the peacekeeping pretext
- Scholars debate whether Eisenhower's coercion was wise restraint or a needless humiliation of allies
- Recent scholarship recenters the story on Egyptian agency and the decolonizing world
Sources
- Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences
- Suez: Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East
- The Protocol of Sevres, 1956: Anatomy of a War Plot
The turn
None of these five accounts is invented, and each has a gap it would rather not discuss.
The British and French account leaves out that Eden denied the plot he had personally signed off on, for the rest of his life, and that Egyptian civilians died at Port Said.
From the record
The legality of Egypt's nationalization and its offer of compensationThe secret collusion at Sevres, denied by Eden for the rest of his lifeEgyptian civilian casualties at Port SaidThe anti-colonial meaning of the event for the wider worldThe Egyptian and Arab nationalist account leaves out the scale of its own defeat in the Sinai, and how quickly Nasser's own pan-Arab unity fractured after him.
From the record
The scale of Egypt's battlefield defeat in the SinaiNasser's own authoritarian consolidation and suppression of domestic rivalsThe fragility of pan-Arab unity that fractured within a decadeThe Israeli account leaves out that it was the trigger in somebody else's colonial plot, and the Palestinian civilian toll during the occupation of Gaza.
From the record
Israel's role as the trigger in a colonial plot to topple an Arab governmentThe Palestinian civilian toll, including killings at Khan Yunis and Rafah during the occupation of GazaThe temporary nature of the gains, undone by 1967The American account leaves out that the same pressure was never once applied to reverse the Soviets crushing Hungary, and that replacing European influence with its own was also, plainly, in its own interest.
From the record
That the same pressure was never applied to reverse the Soviet crushing of HungaryThe self-interest in replacing European influence with American influenceThe withdrawal of Aswan financing that had triggered the crisis in the first placeLater Scholarship and the End of Empire
The scholars leave out the immediate human experience of the invasion itself, for the people who were actually in Port Said when the paratroopers landed.
From the record
The immediate human experience of the invasion for Egyptians at Port SaidThe contingency and fear felt by decision-makers in real timeThe military details of the campaigns themselves
Nobody in these five accounts disputes who won which battle. What they cannot agree on is who won the war.
Close
Eden resigned in January nineteen fifty seven, replaced by Harold Macmillan, the man who had pushed hardest for the invasion and then led the retreat from it.
The canal itself, the reason for all of it, sat blocked by scuttled ships for five months. Nobody's ships moved through it either.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 1956
- Killed
- ~3Kroughly 1,000 Egyptian civilians, 900-plus Egyptian…
- Displaced
- Suez Canal blocked by scuttled ships…
- Place
- Egypt
Key figures
- Gamal Abdel NasserPresident of Egypt; nationalized the Suez Canal Company on July 26, 19561918 to 1970
- Anthony EdenBritish Prime Minister; ordered the invasion, resigned January 19571897 to 1977
- Guy MolletFrench Prime Minister; principal architect of the Anglo-French intervention1905 to 1975
- David Ben-GurionPrime Minister of Israel; signed the Protocol of Sevres, ordered Operation Kadesh1886 to 1973
- Dwight D. EisenhowerUS President; forced the ceasefire through financial pressure on Britain1890 to 1969
- John Foster DullesUS Secretary of State; withdrew Aswan Dam financing on July 19, 19561888 to 1959
- Moshe DayanIDF Chief of Staff; commanded the Sinai campaign1915 to 1981
- Nikolai BulganinSoviet Premier; sent notes threatening rocket attacks on Britain, France, and Israel1895 to 1975
- Dag HammarskjoldUN Secretary-General; organized the deployment of the UN Emergency Force1905 to 1961
- Lester B. PearsonCanadian External Affairs Minister; proposed UNEF, won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize1897 to 1972
- Harold MacmillanBritish Chancellor of the Exchequer; urged invasion, then withdrawal, succeeded Eden as PM1894 to 1986
Primary sources
· Presidential Decree Law No. 285 of 1956 nationalizing the Suez Canal Company · July 26, 1956
“The Universal Company of the Suez Maritime Canal is hereby nationalized. All its assets, rights, and obligations are transferred to the State.”
· Reported by Anthony Nutting in No End of a Lesson, recounting Eden's instruction regarding Nasser · 1956
“I want him destroyed, can't you understand? I want him murdered.”
· Radio and television address to the American people on the Suez and Hungary · October 31, 1956
“We cannot subscribe to one law for the weak, another law for the strong; one law for those opposing us, another for those allied with us. There can be only one law, or there shall be no peace.”
· Note to Prime Minister Anthony Eden · November 5, 1956
“In what position would Britain have found herself if she herself had been attacked by more powerful states possessing all types of modern destructive weapons?”
Threads
- The Six-Day WarThe UN Emergency Force stationed in Sinai after 1956 became the tripwire for 1967. When Nasser expelled it and reclosed the Straits of Tiran in May, Israel treated it as a casus belli and retook the Sinai it had surrendered under pressure in 1957
- The Creation of Israel and the NakbaOn May 14, 1948, one people declared independence. On May 15, 750,000 of another people became refugees. Same land.
- The Arab SpringA fruit vendor set himself on fire in a town of 40,000. Within 60 days, three presidents had fallen.