Suez Crisis
The 1956 debacle in which Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt, then were forced to retreat, exposing the end of European empire.
On July 26, 1956, Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the waterway that carried much of Europe's oil and had been run since it opened in 1869 by a British-and-French-owned company. He did it partly in fury after Washington and London withdrew their promised funding for his Aswan High Dam. For Britain and France the canal was strategy, prestige, and empire in a single ditch, and they resolved to take it back. The war they launched lasted a week and ended the era in which either country could still call itself a great power.
The secret collusion
Unable to justify a naked grab, the two governments hatched a scheme with Israel that was as clever as it was disgraceful. Under a secret agreement signed at Sevres, near Paris, in October 1956, Israel would invade Egypt across the Sinai; Britain and France would then step in as pretended peacekeepers, demand both sides pull back from the canal, and occupy it when Nasser refused. It ran to script. Israeli forces struck on October 29, the Anglo-French ultimatum followed, and on November 5 British and French paratroopers dropped on Port Said. Militarily it worked. Politically it was a catastrophe, because the collusion was transparent and the timing could not have been worse.
Washington pulls the plug
Dwight Eisenhower was furious, and not on Nasser's behalf. His allies had gone to war behind his back, in the final days of his reelection campaign, while Soviet tanks were crushing Hungary and handing Moscow a propaganda gift. The United States refused to shield the British pound, which was hemorrhaging as investors fled, and let it be known that emergency support would come only after a ceasefire. That was decisive. A run on sterling could do what Egyptian troops could not, and London folded. The Soviet Union added menace by threatening rocket attacks on the aggressors, but it was American financial pressure, applied to its own closest ally, that stopped the war. Britain accepted a United Nations ceasefire on November 6 with the canal still in Egyptian hands.
The lesson of Suez
The humiliation was complete. Britain and France withdrew by December, Israel by March 1957, and Nasser emerged the undisputed hero of Arab nationalism, having lost the battles and won the war. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, broken by the affair, resigned within weeks. The deeper verdict was strategic: the old imperial powers had been shown, in public, that they could no longer act on the world stage without Washington's permission. France drew the conclusion that it needed its own nuclear deterrent and a Europe less dependent on America; Britain drew the opposite one, resolving never again to break with the United States.
That is why Suez became shorthand. To this day a government tempted by an overreaching intervention is warned it may face its own Suez, a moment when imperial ambition collides with the hard arithmetic of a superpower patron who is no longer willing to pay the bill.