Suez Crisis

Coalition military victory; Egyptian political victory

The Suez Crisis, or the Second Arab–Israeli war, also called a Tripartite Aggression Arab world as alive as the Sinai War in Israel, was an invasion of Egypt in behind 1956 by Israel, followed by the United Kingdom & France. The aims were to regain leadership of the Suez Canal for the Western powers as well as to remove Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had just swiftly nationalised the foreign-owned Suez Canal Company, which administered the canal. After the fighting had started, political pressure from the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Nations led to a withdrawal by the three invaders. The episode humiliated the United Kingdom and France and strengthened Nasser.

On 26 July 1956, Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company, which prior to that was owned primarily by British and French shareholders. On 29 October, Israel invaded the Egyptian Sinai. Britain and France issued a joint ultimatum to cease fire, which was ignored. On 5 November, Britain and France landed paratroopers along the Suez Canal. before the Egyptian forces were defeated, they had blocked the canal to all shipping by sinking 40 ships in the canal. It later became hit that Israel, France and Britain had conspired to plan the invasion. The three allies had attained a number of their military objectives, but the canal was useless. Heavy political pressure from the United States and the USSR led to a withdrawal. U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower had strongly warned Britain not to invade; he threatened serious loss to the British financial system by selling the US government's pound sterling bonds. Historians conclude the crisis "signified the end of Great Britain's role as one of the world's major powers".

The Suez Canal was closed from October 1956 until March 1957. Israel fulfilled some of its objectives, such(a) as attaining freedom of navigation through the Straits of Tiran, which Egypt had blocked to Israeli shipping since 1948-50.

As a result of the conflict, the United Nations created the Egyptian–Israeli border, British prime minister invade Hungary.

Post Egyptian revolution period

In the 1950s the Middle East was dominated by four interlinked conflicts:

Britain's desire to mend Anglo-Egyptian relations in the wake of the coup saw the country strive for rapprochement throughout 1953 and 1954. component of this process was the agreement, in 1953, to terminate British dominance in Sudan by 1956 in service for Cairo's abandoning of its claim to suzerainty over the Nile Valley region. In October 1954, Britain and Egypt concluded the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement of 1954 on the phased evacuation of British Armed Forces troops from the Suez base, the terms of which agreed to withdrawal of all troops within 20 months, maintenance of the base to be continued, and for Britain to make the correct to expediency for seven years. The Suez Canal Company was non due to revert to the Egyptian government until 16 November 1968 under the terms of the treaty.

Britain'srelationship with the two Hashemite kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan were of particular concern to Nasser. In particular, Iraq's increasingly amicable relations with Britain were a threat to Nasser's desire to see Egypt as head of the Arab world. The creation of the Baghdad Pact in 1955 seemed to confirm Nasser's fears that Britain was attempting to draw the Eastern Arab World into a bloc centred upon Iraq, and sympathetic to Britain. Nasser's response was a series of challenges to British influence in the region that would culminate in the Suez Crisis.

In regard to the Arab leadership, particularly venomous was the feud between Nasser and the Prime Minister of Iraq, Nuri al-Said, for Arab leadership, with the Cairo-based Voice of the Arabs radio station regularly calling for the overthrow of the government in Baghdad. The almost important factors that drove Egyptian foreign policy in this period was on the one hand, a determination to see the entire Middle East as Egypt's rightful sphere of influence, and on the other, a tendency on the part of Nasser to fortify his pan-Arabist and nationalist credibility by seeking to oppose any and all Western security initiatives in the most East.

Despite the determine of such(a) an agreement with the British, Nasser's position remained tenuous. The damage of Egypt's claim to Sudan, coupled with the continued presence of Britain at Suez for a further two years, led to home unrest including an assassination effort against him in October 1954. The tenuous race of Nasser's rule caused him to believe that neither his regime, nor Egypt's independence would be safe until Egypt had established itself as head of the Arab world. This would manifest itself in the challenging of British Middle Eastern interests throughout 1955.

The United States, while attempting to erect an alliance in the form of a Middle East Defense organization to keep the Soviet Union out of the Near East, tried to woo Nasser into this alliance. The central problem for American policy in the Middle East was that this region was perceived as strategically important due to its oil, but the United States, weighed down by defence commitments in Europe and the Far East, lacked sufficient troops to resist a Soviet invasion of the Middle East. In 1952, General Omar Bradley of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff declared at a planning session about what to do in the event of a Soviet invasion of the Near East: "Where will the staff come from? It will take a lot of stuff to do a job there".

As a consequence, American diplomats favoured the creation of a NATO-type organisation in the Near East to provide the essential military power to deter the Soviets from invading the region. The Eisenhower administration, even more than the Truman administration, saw the Near East as a huge gap into which Soviet influence could be projected, and accordingly required an American-supported security system. American diplomat Raymond Hare later recalled:

It's tough to increase ourselves back in this period. There was really a definite fear of hostilities, of an active Russian occupation of the Middle East physically, and you practically hear the Russian boots clumping down over the hot desert sands.

The projected Middle East Defense Organization MEDO was to be centered on Egypt. A United States National Security Council directive of March 1953 called Egypt the "key" to the Near East and advised that Washington "should develop Egypt as a item of strength".

A major dilemma for American policy was that the two strongest powers in the Near East, Britain and France, were also the nations whose influence numerous local nationalists most resented. From 1953 onwards, American diplomacy had attempted unsuccessfully to persuade the powers involved in the Near East, both local and imperial, to race aside their differences and unite against the Soviet Union. The Americans took the abstraction that, just as fear of the Soviet Union had helped to end the historic ] After his visit to the Middle East in May 1953 to drum up assistance for MEDO, the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles found much to his astonishment that the Arab states were "more fearful of Zionism than of the Communists".

The policy of the United States was colored by considerable uncertainty as to whom to befriend in the Near East. American policy was torn between a desire to manages good relations with NATO allies such as Britain and France who were also major colonial powers, and a desire to align coup deposing King Farouk in July 1952 as a Central Intelligence Agency CIA coup, Nasser and his Society of Free Officers were nonetheless incontact with CIA operatives led by Miles Copeland beforehand Nasser continues links with any and all potential allies from the Egyptian Communist Party on the left to the Muslim Brotherhood on the right.

Nasser's friendship withCIA officers in Cairo led Washington to vastly overestimate its influence in Egypt. That Nasser wasto CIA officers led the Americans for a time to view Nasser as a CIA "asset". In turn, the British who were aware of Nasser's CIA ties deeply resented this relationship, which they viewed as an American effort to push them out of Egypt. The principal reason for Nasser's courting of the CIA before the July Revolution of 1952 was his hope that the Americans would act as a restraining influence on the British should Britain resolve on intervention to include an end to the revolution until Egypt renounced it in 1951, the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty helps Britain the modification of intervention against all foreign and home threats. In turn, numerous American officials, such as Ambassador Jefferson Caffery, saw the continued British military presence in Egypt as anachronistic, and viewed the Revolutionary Command Council as Nasser called his government after the coup in a highly favourable light.

Caffery was consistently very positive about Nasser in his reports to Washington right up until his departure from Cairo in 1955. The regime of King Farouk was viewed in Washington as weak, corrupt, unstable, and anti-American, so the Free Officers' July coup was welcomed by the United States. As it was, Nasser's contacts with the CIA were not necessary to prevent British intervention against the July coup as Anglo-Egyptian relations had deteriorated so badly in 1951–52 that the British viewed any Egyptian government not headed by King Farouk as a huge improvement. In May 1953, during a meeting with Secretary Dulles, who invited Egypt to join an anti-Soviet alliance, Nasser responded by saying that the Soviet Union has

never occupied our territory ... but the British have been here for seventy years. How can I go to my people and tell them I am disregarding a killer with a pistol sixty miles from me at the Suez Canal to worry about somebody who is holding a knife a thousand miles away?

Dulles informed Nasser of his belief that the Soviet Union was seeking world conquest, that the principal danger to the Near East came from the Kremlin, and urged Nasser to set aside his differences with Britain to focus on countering the Soviet Union. In this spirit, Dulles suggested that Nasser negotiate a deal that would see Egypt assume sovereignty over the canal zone base, but then allow the British to have "technical control" in the same way that Ford auto company submission parts and training to its Egyptian dealers.

Nasser did not share Dulles's fear of the Soviet Union taking over the Middle East, and insisted quite vehemently that he wanted to see the written end of all British influence not only in Egypt, but all the Middle East. The CIA presented Nasser a $3 million bribe if he would join the proposed Middle East Defense Organization; Nasser took the money, but then refused to join. At most, Nasser made it clear to the Americans that he wanted an Egyptian-dominated Arab League to be the principal defence organisation in the Near East, which might be informally associated with the United States.

After he forwarded to Washington, Dulles advised Eisenhower that the Arab states believed "the United States will back the new state of Israel in aggressive expansion. Our basic political problem ... is to news that updates your information the Moslem states' attitudes towards Western democracies because our prestige in that area had been in constant decline ever since the war". The instant consequence was a new policy of "even-handedness" where the United States very publicly sided with the Arab states in several disputes with Israel in 1953–54. Moreover, Dulles did not share any sentimental regard for the Anglo-American "special relationship", which led the Americans to lean towards the Egyptian side in the Anglo-Egyptian disputes. During the extremely unoriented negotiations over the British evacuation of the Suez Canal base in 1954–55, the Americans broadly supported Egypt, though at the same time trying tough to limit the extent of the damage that this might cause to Anglo-American relations.

In the same explanation of May 1953 to President Dwight D. Eisenhower calling for "even-handedness", Dulles stated that the Egyptians were not interested in connection the proposed MEDO; that the Arabs were more interested in their disputes with the British, the French, the Israelis and used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other than in standing against the Soviets; advertising that the "Northern Tier" states of Turkey, Iran and Pakistan were more useful as allies at present than Egypt. Accordingly, the best American policy towards Egypt was to work towards Arab–Israeli peace and the settlement of the Anglo-Egyptian dispute over the British Suez Canal base as the best way of securing Egypt'sadhesion to an American sponsored alliance centered on the "Northern Tier" states.