Is the West facing a ‘Suez Moment’, as suggested by The Economist magazine.
In an article published under the revealingly pompous pseudonym, Charlemagne, the magazine of the Anglo-American establishment asked, “What happens if Ukraine loses?” It is here the pseudonymous journalist raised the prospect of an end of empire crisis, or, in their preferred terms, the end of Western hegemony). It is here that failure in Ukraine, attributed to Ukraine, but in fact the defeat of NATO, is compared to the failure of the British Empire to maintain its dominance of the Middle East during the 1956 Suez Crisis.
During the 1956 Suez Crisis, Britain, France, and Israel secretly colluded to invade Egypt, and to depose its leader, Nasser. Nasser was a threat to British power, prestige and economic revival after World War Two. So, like so many demonised leaders since, he became the target of a regime change operation: the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden uttered the now familiar phrase, “he had to go”. The aim of the operation was to preserve the British Empire’s status as the third super-power of the world, despite the wheels falling off its empire for over a decade, including catastrophically in India in 1947. The military intervention followed Britain’s five frustrating years of difficult diplomacy, and attempted coercion of Egypt’s leaders, over a major military base, control of the shipping lanes of the Suez Canal, and the economic redevelopment of the de facto British colony.
The military intervention failed spectacularly. The United States refused to back the enterprise, since it risked its grander strategy of world supremacy and the fight against the Soviet Union and the “bloody Chinese”, in Eisenhower’s words. It provoked a run on the fragile British currency, and fatally undermined the leadership of the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. Within days the soldiers were withdrawn, despite bombarding Egyptian cities and civilians. It was a humiliating withdrawal.
The incident was one of many failures in Britain’s empire, and it made Britain “public enemy number one” on the world’s diplomatic stage in the late 1950s and 1960s. It contributed to the movement for decolonisation and strengthened the non-aligned movement after the initial Bandung conference in 1955. It revealed as an illusion Britain’s belief that it matched the USA and the Soviet Union as a super-power. It was the moment when Britain’s status as world power collapsed, and the soiled clothes of the naked emperor fell to the ground.
The Suez Crisis has ever since become, for both American and British elites, a potent historical comparison to tell myths about end of empire moments. For Americans and most popular YouTube history channels, the Suez Crisis was the last hurrah of the European colonial empires, and the moment when the West finally united behind the American democratic crusade against communism. For British elites, however, the Suez crisis had a more complex meaning, with shades of shame and a lingering nostalgia that, with more political will and iron in the spine, the greatness of Britain could be preserved.
The Economist article’s invocation of the Suez moment draws on this legacy of the British elites’ myths of the Suez Crisis. It is not an empirical historical comparison, but rather a mythic metaphor of what empires do near the end, especially when their leaders lack the political will to do whatever it takes, and the public lack the gumption to pay for it for as long as it takes. It is a myth being summoned in fear of the imminent defeat of NATO in Ukraine. It attempts to put steel in the spine of the British elite, by reminding them of the shameful humiliation of Eden, Churchill’s ‘Crown Prince” successor in 1956. It also attempts to ensure the flow of aid from the US Congress and American elites to NATO’s war in Ukraine.
This intention is clearly revealed by reading the full context of the Economist’s invocation of the shame of Suez.
“To ask “what if Ukraine loses?” was once a tactic favoured by those looking to berate its Western allies into sending more money and weapons. Increasingly the question feels less like a thought experiment and more like the first stage of contingency planning. After a gruelling few months on the battlefield, gone are last year’s hopes of a Ukrainian counter-offensive that would push Russia back to its borders and humble Vladimir Putin. These days it is fear that dominates…
A defeat of Ukraine would be a humbling episode for the West, a modern Suez moment. Having provided moral, military and financial succour to its ally for two years now, America and Europe have—perhaps inadvertently—put their own credibility on the line. That they have sometimes dithered in delivering this support would make things worse, not better: further confirmation, among sceptics of liberal polities, that democracies lack what it takes to stand up for their interests.”
(The Economist, ‘Charlemagne’, 2024)
This use of historical mythology appears to be part of a coordinated campaign in Western media to keep the war fires burning, especially in the US Congress. Boris Johnson has chimed in with a more populist version of the argument in the Daily Mail
Let us be clear, that if Ukraine falls, it will be not only a disaster for that innocent country.
It will be a total humiliation for the West — the first time in the 75 years of Nato’s existence that this hitherto successful alliance has been utterly routed — and on European soil.
A defeat for Ukraine would usher in a new era of fear in the whole Euro-Atlantic area, as Putin continues his drive to rebuild the Soviet empire: from the Baltics to Georgia to Moldova to Central Asia to the Arctic.
It will be a terrifying moment for the people of Taiwan and the clearest possible signal to China that the West has lost the willpower to protect democracy.
It will be a turning point in history, the moment when the West finally loses its post-war hegemony, the moment when borders everywhere are suddenly up for grabs and aggression is seen to pay — and all because of a failure to stand up for Ukraine.
Boris Johnson, Daily Mail 13 April 2024
These historical comparisons are more revanchist than realist. They try to rally their business and administrative elite readers to the American imperial flag. The Economist even quotes George Robertson, a former boss of NATO, to reveal the real agenda: “If Ukraine loses, our enemies will decide the world order.”
Despite the campaigning intentions to shock the imperial elites into action, however, many commentators across the world smelled blood, fear and weakness. Quite a few commentators have read this editorial as a sign that the Anglo-American and European elites are panicking, and that the end of empire is nigh.
But few writers have examined the validity of the comparison, or indeed the true historical lessons for “end of empire” moments, such as the Suez Crisis. How meaningful is the comparison between failure in Ukraine and the Suez Crisis? Is defeat in Ukraine the West’s Suez moment? Does it foretell the end of Western hegemony, or does it merely signal the dispelling of the grand illusions of the unipolar moment?
Let us turn then to the most distinguished, authoritative historian of the British Empire, and indeed world empires between 1400 and today, John Darwin.
In After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000 Darwin summarises the real geopolitical significance of the Suez Crisis as:
“Suez signalled the end of British ambition to manage the politics of the whole Arab world. It created a vacuum of great-power influence. It was the moment to forge a new Middle East order.” (p. 458)
As we know, that order was not forged according to Nasser’s pan-Arabic ideals, but rather became the American quagmire that is playing out tragically today in conflicts in Gaza, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. In that respect, the Economist should make a closer comparison between the Suez Crisis and the failures of American imperial diplomacy in Gaza.
However, the true historical lessons of the Suez Crisis are drawn out most fully in Darwin’s book on the British world system, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830-1970. There he notes the many versions of the lessons of history that contemporaries and historians have drawn from the Suez crisis. One strand of interpretation focuses on the collapse of the illusion of British imperial power.
“Suez has been seen very widely as the real turning point in Britain’s post-war attempt to remain a great power… the end of illusion: a brutal exposure of geopolitical realities in a ‘superpower’ world. Suez marked the pricking of the Churchillian bubble: the belief that Britain could intervene decisively in world affairs, when and if it chose.” (p. 605)
Darwin’s history of the British empire project showed, however, that the illusions persisted. Boris Johnson’s comic journalism shows they persist to this day. Moreover, the years of the British Empire project after 1956 showed that Britain’s leaders still failed to match desire and reality, often, as with the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, with cruel consequences. It may be that Eliot was speaking of ‘end of empire’ moments in The Waste Land?
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Darwin also observes the loss of prestige to British empire both at home and abroad following the Suez crisis. Here there may be some valid comparisons with NATO’s failure in Ukraine. He cites the novelist J.G. Ballard who observed from his post in Shanghai that after Suez:
“Chinese shopkeepers, French dentists and Sikh school-bus drivers made disparaging remarks about British power.” (J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life)
Today, after Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen and more, the mockery of British and American power is even louder and more common.
In the longer-term, historical perspective, however, Darwin summarised four key historical lessons of the Suez crisis for the British Empire.
First, it showed how constrained British power had become.
“Henceforth Britain’s place in great power diplomacy would depend even more on a rhetorical ‘leadership’, on a confident voice influencing global opinion, and on the reinvention of empire as a beneficent legacy, a school of stable democracy.” (p. 606)
Second, the Suez crisis exposed the fragility of the British currency and financial system. In the 1950s Britain still operated a sterling zone, based on its dominions, and still chafed against the Bretton-Woods Agreement. It hoped to reassert the pound as a dominant world currency. This sentimental dream of a global Britain collapsed after the run on the sterling during the Suez crisis, and the decades of financial uncertainty that followed.
Third, “Suez exposed the divisions that would make themselves felt if London resorted to unilateral action internationally.” (p. 607) Now reliant on soft power, rhetoric and the claim to stand on the side of justice and democracy, the British empire had to walk on the diplomatic eggshells that its imperial illusions had broken. Even Commonwealth members as loyal as Australia grew reserved. Britain lost its last fig leaf of moral authority at Suez and had to relearn its diplomatic manners. “Old fashioned imperialism (of the Suez variety)”, Darwin wrote “would be self-defeating at best.” (p. 608)
Fourth, Suez showed the limits of Britain’s military power. It could not execute its plans. It could not intervene militarily for more than a few days without the consent of the USA. Changes in the military balance of power and the political distribution of authority showed that Britain could not do whatever it wished in war.
Suez seemed to show the age of colonial ‘expeditions’ had passed. It was one thing to engage in counter-insurgency… or to defend a frontier against foreign incursions… But invading a recalcitrant state to defend British interests was now beyond British strength.” (p. 608)
Darwin’s careful scholarship of the real processes that underlie “end of empire” moments, or at least transitions, reveals some surprising parallels with the West’s, NATO’s and America’s looming defeat in Ukraine. American and Western power is constrained. The USA and the EU are now just two of five great powers in the world and need to learn a new stance of equipoise with the other nations that share this earth. The US dollar is fragile, and the “sanctions from hell” backfired like hellfire on trust in Western financial institutions, and especially the economy of Europe. The West lost the diplomatic war in Ukraine, and then suffered a rout over Gaza. Its moral authority collapsed when it claimed most ferociously the righteousness of its ‘soft power’. Finally, Western military power has been exposed again as ill-matched to the strategic challenges of today.
Oddly, like a broken clock that is correct twice a day, The Economist’s editorial team - almost certainly inadvertently - has fallen on some valid historical comparisons between the Suez moment and the West’s defeat in Ukraine. But hopes that the Western elites that ordered this modern-day Charge of the Light Brigade in Crimea will learn some better judgement from Darwin’s history are misplaced.
Although the Suez moment has been mythologised in British and Western foreign policy orthodoxy, the truth is little was learned from the fiasco. Darwin wrote:
“The most curious aspect of the British reaction to Suez, once the immediate drama had passed, was the mood of public indifference. There was no grand debate about Britain’s place in the world, no official inquiry into what had gone wrong. … But what seems even more curious is that, after such a defeat, British leaders still showed an extraordinary faith that, with its sails duly trimmed, Britain must remain a world power.”
Today, as the tragic failure of the West in Ukraine becomes more apparent, a few sensible voices are raising the hope that, at least after this catastrophic failure, we might learn something, look at went wrong, look for some person or cause to blame. John Mearsheimer is among these critics of the Ukraine War who hope for some lessons from history.
But the last sad lesson of the Suez moment is that usually when great powers fail catastrophically, the ship of fools still sails on.
Coming up on The Burning Archive
The Suez moment was a key crisis in the “post-1945 world”. In my Wednesday essay, I will be returning to my brief history of the multipolar world. I will share some stories, like the Suez Crisis, which show that, even in the period between 1945 and 1989, the era of the Cold War and “bipolarity”, the world was always multipolar.
Do also check out three of my recent YouTube videos.
In this video, I read the poem, Report from a Besieged City (1982) by Zbigniew Herbert. Written in Poland in 1982, in the last years of the Cold War and Soviet occupation, it has an eerie resonance with events today as people endure conflicts in many parts of the world.
In this video I discuss the ideas of the “father of geopolitics”, Halford Mackinder and how his Heartland Theory laid the groundwork for so many Anglo-American imperial wars since 1904.
Finally, I have noticed this video on Emmanuel Todd’s Defeat of the West has been gathering interest lately. It summarises the 10 surprises of the Ukraine War, which led the distinguished French scholar to argue the West has been defeated in Ukraine. It is very relevant to the issues discussed in today’s essay.
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