Trump, Iran, and the Shadow of Suez
Israel moves fast, launching a bold military operation against a weaker Middle Eastern neighbor. It frames the campaign as a preëmptive effort to neutralize a regional threat. Israel’s Western allies join in, bombing the country in what looks like an attempt to oust its government. But things soon go awry. The embattled regime holds on, and closes off a critical shipping lane, disrupting global trade. Politically embarrassed, and economically exposed, Israel’s main Western partner in the campaign becomes overextended; they lack both wider international support and a coherent plan. Early military gains give way to a larger strategic mess.
This could describe the past month of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. But it’s also what happened nearly seven decades ago, when Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt, provoking the Egyptian government to close the Suez Canal for what ended up being a period of five months. The confrontation was set off in July of 1956, when Egypt’s ruler, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, a charismatic populist, nationalized the Anglo-French company that had operated the canal since its creation in 1869, during the colonial era. Britain and France were furious—the canal carried oil and other goods that were vital to European economies—and determined to take back control. Israel, meanwhile, saw Nasser’s rising influence across the Arab world as a danger, and wanted an excuse to cut him down, and to target Palestinian fedayeen militants who were operating in Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, which were both controlled by Egypt at the time. While the U.S. and United Nations spent months trying to negotiate a settlement over the canal’s management, the top leaders of the British, French, and Israeli governments were secretly plotting a military intervention.
That operation began on October 29, 1956, when Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula and rapidly overwhelmed Egyptian forces. Britain and France then entered the war, under the guise that they were neutral parties seeking to stabilize the tensions. But few believed it, especially after the British and French demanded that the warring nations both withdraw at least ten miles away from the canal, a move that would hand Israel a vast expanse of territory. Egypt refused, and Anglo-French deployments followed with air and naval strikes against Egyptian positions; they also sent paratroopers to Port Said, at the northern end of the canal. By November 2nd, Nasser had deliberately sunk into the canal old ships full of debris, so as to block all traffic—the precise outcome that Britain and France had claimed they were trying to prevent.
The closure hit Britain especially hard, as it relied on long-standing oil arrangements in the Persian Gulf, with contracts denominated in sterling. That economic pressure was compounded by geopolitical isolation, with both the U.S. and the Soviet Union independently condemning the military campaign. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, just days away from a Presidential election, also worried that the chaos in Egypt undermined the West’s moral position against Soviet aggression and gave the Kremlin political cover to brutally crack down on an uprising in Hungary, which was happening at the same time. Britain and France ultimately withdrew from Egypt in humiliation, and the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was forced to resign. Egypt maintained control over the canal, and Nasser emerged with a huge symbolic victory over the two European colonial powers that had lorded over the Middle East for decades.
It’s hard to know where exactly the Iran war is headed. Some reports suggest that President Donald Trump has grown “bored” of the conflict and may want an off-ramp. More signs point to the Trump Administration preparing to deploy ground troops, pulling the U.S. deeper into a war that has already killed hundreds of Iranian civilians and sprawled into a wider regional conflict, with Iran launching retaliatory strikes against its Arab neighbors and—through its closure of the Strait of Hormuz—sending energy prices soaring and disrupting global supply chains. As Trump fumbles with the Pandora’s Box he’s broken open, there’s no shortage of historical analogies to choose from. Could Iran end up like Libya, where a NATO air campaign in 2011 helped topple a decades-old dictatorship, but paved the way for the disintegration of the Libyan state into a thicket of rival factions and warring militias? Or perhaps the U.S.’s wars with Iraq are the better guide. The Gulf War left Saddam Hussein in power, but weakened and dangerous, a source of regional instability for another decade—a pattern that some fear might be playing out in Iran, if the regime emerges from the war battered but no less entrenched. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 did topple Hussein, but not without becoming a parable for American hubris and strategic folly.
Of all the parallels to invoke, though, Suez might be the most apt, at least in this moment. Just as, in 1956, when France and Britain kept Washington in the dark about their real plans, America’s European and Arab allies say they were caught off guard by Trump’s decision to attack Iran, and have been skeptical of the intervention, instead pushing for a diplomatic solution. The clearest echo, of course, is Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which mirrors Nasser’s decision to thwart passage through the Suez Canal. In both cases, it was a foreseeable response that the attacking parties somehow failed to anticipate: “Instead of keeping the Suez Canal open, the [Anglo-French] action closed it, as the dumbest intelligence analyst, either British or American, could have predicted,” Miles Copeland, a famous C.I.A. agent working in the Middle East in the nineteen-fifties, wrote. Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, recently wrote something similar, on social media, after Iran closed the strait: “This was totally predictable, but Trump has lost control of this war.”
The grimmer parallel is what all this may reveal about American power. By 1956, Britain and France were already empires in decline: Britain had let go of its major colonial possessions in the Indian subcontinent, while France had suffered major losses in Indochina and was in the throes of an era-defining battle to hold Algeria, where Nasser’s anti-colonialist message was proving persuasive. Their failure to retake the canal underscored their diminished status on a world stage. In the wake of the Second World War, Britain had still been considered a third superpower, alongside the Soviet Union and the United States, Alex von Tunzelmann, a British historian and the author of “Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace,” explained. “After Suez,” she continued, “that just drops,” and we hear “more about a binary, bipolar world. What became obvious is that Britain couldn’t act expressly against the will of the U.S.”
Now the U.S.’s own ability to exercise its will as a paramount hegemon is in question, according to Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank that advocates policy restraint. Trump’s mistaken belief that the campaign against Iran could be done swiftly and neatly, Kelanic said, “shows that the United States doesn’t have the strategic advantages and power that it thought it had, and that it maybe previously did possess.” Despite U.S.-Israeli military dominance, Trump is struggling to beat back Iranian reprisals and prevent the conflict from spiralling wider. Satellite imagery suggests that various U.S. bases in the Middle East have had to be evacuated in the face of Iranian strikes, and Tehran now appears to believe that it can effectively veto shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, even though it shares the channel with its Gulf neighbors. (In fact, Iran is now earning nearly twice as much from daily oil sales than it did before the war began, according to The Economist.) This raises troubling questions about the efficacy and role of U.S. forces in the region. As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it: “What is the point of the entire U.S. military role in the Middle East? If it has any point, it should be to prevent something like the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet U.S. military action has only brought about the very problem it’s supposed to prevent.”
For Israel, which had to vacate its Sinai conquest in 1956, there are parallels, too. Tactical achievements don’t make up for a lack of strategic gains, and, for all the demonstrated prowess of Israel’s military and intelligence services in Iran, the regime endures, and seems even more firmly in the grip of ideological hard-liners. Nimrod Novik, a distinguished fellow at the Israel Policy Forum and a former adviser to the late Prime Minister Shimon Peres (who, in his younger days, played a key role in planning the 1956 offensive), sees Trump possibly leaving behind a muddle in Iran, where future rounds of conflict are still likely. “In 1956, the British and French proved politically unreliable, certainly once the U.S. banged its fist on the table,” Novik told me. “Israel’s brilliant military achievements produced no lasting stable security environment.” After all, a bit more than a decade later, hostilities would explode anew in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, during which Nasser shut the canal again. “I wonder whether we are in for an equally—even more significant—disappointing ending in Iran, where joining forces with a transformative ambition ends up but another round with more to come,” Novik said.
Should Trump decide that he wants to continue the war, one key difference between then and now is that there is no outside power willing or able to stop him, the way Eisenhower did with Britain and France. Eisenhower had little patience with Britain’s late-imperial delusions, and exerted tremendous economic pressure to rein them in, blocking assistance from the International Monetary Fund and threatening to dump U.S. holdings of British bonds, which triggered a collapse in the British pound. The Soviets, meanwhile, warned Britain and France that it would consider striking them with long-range weapons if their campaign continued. The U.N., too, played a central role in ending the Suez crisis and in managing the aftermath; today, the institution is becoming a geopolitical sideshow, and the U.S. President seems more keen to carry out his agenda in defiance of the U.N. than out of duty to it.
Russia and China, for their part, have gained simply by staying out of the conflict: the former is making more money from oil sales, while the latter keeps accruing more soft power as America’s credibility erodes. “The Iran war won’t keep the United States from remaining the most powerful country in the world,” Wertheim said. “But it could prove to be a turning point by laying bare the poor quality of American governance and the overstretched condition of America’s military, which is now tasked with providing deterrence and defense in four regions with a one-war force.”
Countries that came to rely on American security guarantees—guarantees that expanded as the U.S. consolidated its singular-superpower status in the West in the aftermath of the Suez crisis—are reckoning with new realities. “This war is a violation of international law—there is little doubt about that,” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a speech to German diplomats last week. “It is also a politically fatal error.” Vivian Balakrishnan, the foreign minister of Singapore, described the geopolitical shift underway, in a recent interview: “The underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor,” he said. “But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone.” ♦