Could Trump’s Iran Fiasco Be America’s Suez Crisis?
by Medea
Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies | May
12, 2026
https://original.antiwar.com/mbenjamin/2026/05/11/could-trumps-iran-fiasco-be-americas-suez-crisis/
Empires rise and fall. They do not last forever.
Imperial declines follow a gradual shifting of the economic tides but are also
punctuated and defined by critical tipping points. There are many differences
between the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the US war on Iran today, but
similarities in the larger context suggest that the United States is facing the
same kind of “end of empire” moment that the British Empire faced in that
historic crisis.
In 1956, the British Empire was still resisting
independence movements in many of its colonies. The horrors of British Mau Mau concentration camps in Kenya and Britain’s
brutal guerrilla war in Malaya continued throughout the 1950s, and, like the
United States today, Britain still had military bases all over the world.
Britain’s imperial domination of Egypt began with its
purchase of Egypt’s 44% share in the French-built Suez Canal in 1875. Seven
years later, the British invaded Egypt, took over the management of the Canal and
controlled access to it for 70 years.
After the Egyptian Revolution overthrew the British-controlled monarchy in
1952, the British agreed to withdraw and close their bases in Egypt by 1956,
and to return control of the Suez Canal to Egypt by 1968.
But Egypt was increasingly threatened by Britain,
France and Israel. Through the 1955 Baghdad Pact, the British recruited Turkey, Iraq, Iran and
Pakistan to form the Central Treaty Organization, an anti-Soviet, anti-Egyptian
alliance modeled on NATO in Europe. At the same time, Israel was attacking
Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip, and France was threatening Egypt for
supporting Algeria’s war of independence.
Egypt’s President Nasser responded by forging new
alliances with Saudi Arabia, Syria and other countries in the region, and,
after failing to secure weapons from the US or USSR, Egypt bought large
shipments of Soviet weapons from Czechoslovakia.
Upset with Egypt’s new alliances, the United States,
Great Britain and the World Bank withdrew their financing from Egypt’s Aswan
Dam project on the Nile. In response, Nasser stunned the world by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company and pledging to
compensate its British and French shareholders.
British leaders saw the loss of the Suez Canal as
unacceptable. Chancellor Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, “If Nasser ‘gets away with it’, we
are done for. The whole Arab world will despise us… and our friends will fall.
It may well be the end of British influence and strength forever. So, in the
last resort, we must use force and defy opinion, here and overseas”.
British Prime Minister Anthony Eden hatched a secret
plan with France and Israel to invade Egypt, seize the Canal and try to
overthrow Nasser. The US rejected military action against Egypt, and President
Eisenhower told a press conference, on September 5, 1956, “We are committed to
a peaceful settlement of this dispute, nothing else.” But the British assumed
that the US would ultimately support them once combat began.
Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula,
and then Britain and France landed forces in Port Said at the north end of the
Suez Canal, under the pretense of protecting the Canal from both Israel and
Egypt.
But before Britain and France could fully seize
control of the Canal, the US government intervened to stop them. The US began
selling off its British currency reserves and blocked an emergency IMF loan to
Britain, triggering a financial crisis. At the same time, the USSR threatened
to send forces to defend Egypt and even hinted at the possible use of nuclear
weapons against Britain, France and Israel.
The UN Security Council used a procedural vote – which
Britain and France could not veto – to convene an Emergency Special Session of
the General Assembly under the “Uniting for Peace” process. Resolution 997 called for a ceasefire, a
withdrawal to armistice lines and the reopening of the Canal, and was approved
by a vote of 64 to 5.
Four days later, Prime Minister Eden declared a
ceasefire. British and French forces withdrew six weeks later, and the Canal
was cleared and reopened within five months. Egypt subsequently managed the
Canal effectively, and did not block British or French ships from using it.
The Suez Crisis was the pivotal moment when the
British government finally learned that it could no longer use military force
to impose its will on less powerful countries. Like Americans today on Iran,
the British public was way ahead of its government: opinion polls found that
44% opposed the use of force against Egypt, while only 37% approved. As Prime
Minister Eden dithered over the UN’s ceasefire order, 30,000 people gathered at
an anti-war rally in Trafalgar Square.
Eden was forced to resign, and was replaced by Harold Macmillan, who withdrew British forces from bases in Asia,
expedited independence for British colonies around the world, and repositioned
Britain as a junior partner to the United States. That new role included arming
British submarines with U.S. nuclear missiles, which is now a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
But Macmillan’s successor, the Labour Party leader Harold Wilson, would later
keep Britain out of Vietnam.
Britain charted a successful transition to a
post-imperial future through its relationships with the United States and the
British Commonwealth – an association of independent states that preserved
British influence in its former colonies. On the domestic front, there was
broad political support for a mixed capitalist-socialist economy that included free education and
healthcare, publicly owned housing and utilities, nationalized industries, and
strong trade unions.
Macmillan was reelected in 1959 with the slogan,
“You’ve never had it so good.” When a cartoonist mockingly dubbed him
“Supermac,” the nickname stuck.
Britain’s Tories were dyed-in-the-wool imperialists, much like Trump and his motley crew today. But they
did not let their imperial world view blind them to the lessons of the Suez
Crisis. They could see that the world was changing, and that Britain had to
find a new role in a world it could no longer dominate by force.
Most Americans today have learned similar lessons from
failed, disastrous US wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But like the
British people who opposed Eden’s invasion of Egypt, Americans have been
repeatedly dragged into war by the secret scheming of leaders blinded by
anachronistic, racist, imperial assumptions.
Trump is now encountering the same kind of
international pressure that forced Britain and France to abandon the Suez
invasion. Another Emergency Special Session of the UN General Assembly and a
new “Uniting for Peace” resolution might also be helpful.
But ultimately, the resolution of this crisis, and the
future of the United States in today’s emerging multipolar world, will depend
on whether US politicians are capable of making the kind of historic
policy shift that Macmillan and his colleagues made in 1956 and the years that
followed.
Macmillan was not an opposition politician, but a
senior member of Britain’s Conservative government, up to his neck in the Suez
fiasco. The secret plot with the Israelis was his idea. President Eisenhower
personally warned him at the White House that the US would not support a
British invasion of Egypt. But unlike the British Ambassador who sat in on the
same meeting, Macmillan assumed that, when the chips were down, Eisenhower
would stand by his old World War II allies.
Maybe it was the shock of getting it all so wrong that
persuaded Macmillan and his colleagues to take a fresh look at the world and
radically rethink British foreign and colonial policy.
The crisis with Iran is at least as catastrophic for
US imperialism as the Suez Crisis was for the British Empire. The question is
whether anyone in Washington today is capable of grasping the gravity of the
crisis and making the required policy shift.
To follow Britain’s Suez example would mean closing US
military bases around the world; renouncing the illegal threat and use of
military force as the main tool of US foreign policy; and relying instead on
multilateral diplomacy and UN action to resolve international disputes.
But where is the Macmillan in the Trump administration
or the Republican Party? Or the Harold Wilson in the Democratic Party, whose
leaders have never even tried to formulate a progressive foreign policy since
the end of the Cold War? Obama’s belated outreach to Cuba and Iran in his
second term were their only flirtation with a new way forward.
The silver lining in the current crisis is that it may
mark the final collapse of the neoconservative imperial project that has
dominated US foreign policy since the 1990s and now cornered Trump into a
“damned if you do, damned if you don’t” choice between an unwinnable war with Iran and a
historic diplomatic defeat.
Americans must insist that this crisis spark the
radical rethink of US politics, economics and international relations that
neocons in both parties have prevented for decades. Trump’s dead
end in the Persian Gulf must also be the final end of this ugly, criminal
neoconservative era, and the beginning of a transition to a more peaceful
future for Americans and all our neighbors.
