Will America Make the Same Mistakes as Britain in the Middle East?

The Suez Crisis demonstrated how "peace through strength" can go terribly wrong.

The Middle East is a problem. Our enemies there are on the march, and our friends are nervous. We need to do something about our credibility. The government has just the plan to fix it: Let Israel deal a crushing blow to the most powerful enemy state so that our country can swoop in as the peacemaker. Then we can finally build the security alliance that we've been trying for. Peace through strength will win the day.

I am writing, of course, about British leaders' mentality in 1956. In late October and early November of that year, Britain carried out a plan with the help of France and Israel to deal with Egypt's rising nationalist government. And it failed miserably. That war, known as the Suez Crisis, is widely considered the beginning of the end of the British Empire. Egypt became the most powerful Arab country for the next 20 years as British troops packed their bags.

The Suez Crisis is a cautionary tale for America. Washington's problems in the region look a lot like the ones Britain faced in 1956. Just like British leaders back then, Democrats and Republicans now seem convinced that proxy warfare is the one weird trick to solve those problems. Even the choice of proxy—using the Israeli army to bludgeon the region into shape—is the same.

Britain was the most powerful country in the Middle East after World War II, but its strength was waning. The region's pro-British monarchies priced their oil in pound sterling, allowing the Bank of England to print as much money as it wanted, similar to today's petrodollar system. However, those monarchies were being squeezed from two sides. On one hand, the rising Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was selling its oil in U.S. dollars. On the other hand, Arab nationalist revolutionaries wanted to overthrow the monarchies entirely, and they successfully took over Egypt in 1952.

Britain tried to reverse the tide by roping its ally Jordan into a coalition known as the Baghdad Pact, which included Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran at the time. But the idea of joining the Baghdad Pact was hated in Jordan, which responded to British pressure by kicking out British military advisers.

Leaders in London believed that the dominos were falling to a conspiracy led by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom British politicians compared to Adolf Hitler. The final straw came on July 26, 1956, when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which was owned by a British-French consortium. Though Nasser compensated the shareholders, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden argued that Nasser cannot "have his thumb on our windpipe."

Britain's local allies felt the same way. The night the canal was nationalized, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said was dining with Eden in London. "Hit [Nasser] hard and hit him now," Said said. "If he is left alone, he will finish all of us." Of course, al-Said was not offering Iraqi troops to do the job. It's hard not to hear an echo of his words when Saudi leaders compare Iran to Nazi Germany and egg on Washington to fight a war that Saudi Arabia itself has no intention of fighting.

Another Middle Eastern country, Israel, would come to the rescue. France, which was fuming at Egypt for supporting the Algerian independence movement, brought leaders from Britain and Israel, which had been dealing with years of border raids from Egypt, together in a secret meeting. All three countries agreed to play a game of political charades. Israel would invade Egypt, destroying the forces defending the Suez Canal. Britain and France would pretend to be shocked, then land peacekeepers in Egypt to "guarantee freedom of passage" through the canal.

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had an even more ambitious plan for a "new order" in the Middle East, parts of which modern-day Israeli nationalists are still dreaming about. After succeeding at this operation, Ben-Gurion proposed, Israel could overthrow the Egyptian and Jordanian governments, expel Palestinians east of the Jordan River, seize the West Bank and Gaza, conquer southern Lebanon, and install a new regime in Beirut.

The deception fell apart two weeks before the invasion began when U.S. spy planes spotted a suspicious number of French fighter jets parked in Israel. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was enraged at his allies for deceiving and blindsiding him. Once British and French forces landed, the U.S. threatened to sell off British bonds, destroying the pound sterling. Nasser had his forces block the canal by scuttling ships in it. London's Middle Eastern adventure ended up causing the two bad outcomes that it was supposed to have prevented.

That particular experience is worth thinking about in light of a potential war over Taiwan, which produces 68 percent of the world's computer chips. U.S. officials from both major parties have discussed blowing up Taiwanese chip factories during a future war with China to avoid letting the global economy fall into China's hands.

Meanwhile, even though Israel conquered Gaza along with large parts of Egyptian territory, Ben-Gurion was surprised to see Palestinians stay put in Gaza instead of fleeing, despite heavy Israeli repression. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, who witnessed Israeli forces kill his uncle in 1956 and who co-founded Hamas in the 1980s, later said that the invasion "planted hatred in our hearts."

A week after the Suez Crisis began, the United Nations sent in its first-ever peacekeeping force with backing from both the United States and the Soviet Union. The British, French, and Israeli armies had no choice but to withdraw. Although some British veterans claim that they "won the war, but lost the peace" and could have kept going if not for U.S. pressure, Eisenhower likely gave Britain a face-saving way out of an unwinnable situation. The deck was stacked against British power and trying to fight a long-term occupation of Egypt while facing an economic meltdown probably would not have turned out well.

In 1958, the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown and al-Said was executed. In 1963, rebellions broke out in the British protectorates of Aden (modern-day Yemen) and Oman. Britain lost on the battlefield in Aden and won in Oman, but either way, the empire was economically and militarily exhausted. In 1967, the British government made its infamous "East of Suez" decision, pulling out of all military bases between Egypt and Hong Kong.

Given how frustrating Middle Eastern wars have been for Washington, it's no surprise that American commentators sometimes bring up the Suez Crisis. In a 2003 column warning against the Iraq War, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof used the Suez Crisis as an example of how "the hawks have a consistent track record of shrieking obsessively and seeing one minor country after another as global threats—in an eye-bulging, alarmist way that in retrospect looks hysterical." If Nasser wasn't really a Hitler-level threat in 1956, then neither was Saddam Hussein in 2003 and neither is the ayatollah today.

More recently, Compact columnist Malcom Kyeyune called the U.S. intervention in Yemen "America's Suez Crisis" because it challenged Washington's international legitimacy. "The near-complete lack of enthusiasm or buy-in" from even close European allies, he argued, is "occurring over the same waters in which both British and French pretensions of being imperial powers were shattered."

But maybe there's another, more timely lesson for us in the Suez Crisis. Clever tricks and bluster can't resolve the serious, long-term issues draining the nation's power. Military power is useless if it ends up destroying the things it is designed to save. Sometimes it's better to bow out of overseas adventures gracefully than to be dragged out kicking and screaming. The declining British Empire, at least, had America's tough love to save Britain from itself. The U.S. is on its own.