Dulles. There was an additional issue of the future
of the Sudan, hitherto under dual Anglo-
Egyptian authority. In February 1953 agreement
was reached that the Sudanese should decide their
own future. To Nasser’s surprise they opted not
for union with Egypt but for independence. The
following year Nasser was more successful. In
October 1954 a new Anglo-Egyptian treaty was
concluded which provided for the complete evac-
uation of all British troops from the Suez bases
within twenty months. The bases were to be
mothballed. This compromise formula would
allow Britain to reactivate the bases should war
break out in the region. The treaty was to run for
seven years until 1961. The British chiefs of staff
calculated they would not need a Suez base after
1961 anyway. Nonetheless, with the Suez Canal
still foreign-owned and foreign-run, it was less
than immediate complete freedom for Egypt. The
Muslim Brotherhood denounced Nasser’s agree-
ment with Britain as treachery, while in London
Eden was accused by right-wing Conservatives of
‘scuttling from the Canal Zone’. Eden had made
considerable concessions on Britain’s behalf and
had taken a risk with his popularity at home,
which made him later all the more sensitive to the
charge of appeasing the Egyptian dictatorship.
Britain, together with France and the US, claimed
the right to exercise a major role in ensuring that
stability should be preserved throughout the
Middle East. During the years immediately fol-
lowing the signature of the armistice between
Egypt, Israel and the other Arab states in 1949 an
uneasy peace prevailed. But the Arabs refused to
accept that Palestine had disappeared, its territory
partitioned between the new sovereign State of
Israel and an enlarged Jordan. The armistice could
not be turned into a permanent peace. To stop the
outbreak of another war the US, Britain and
France, by their Tripartite Declaration on 25 May
1950, sought to regulate the arms supplied to
Israel and its Arab neighbours; and they appointed
themselves policemen in the Arab–Israeli conflict,
stating that:
should they find that any of these States was
preparing to violate frontiers or armistice lines,
[the three powers] would, consistently with
their obligations as members of the United
Nations, immediately take action, both within
and outside the United Nations, to prevent
such violation.
The Arab states and Israel were not a party to this
treaty nor was the Soviet Union invited to join it.
By leaving out the Russians, the unregulated
supply of arms from the Eastern bloc led to the
very arms race the West had tried to prevent.
The Declaration, with its assumption of great
power overlordship, was more impressive on
paper than in actuality. Britain, France and the
US were uneasy partners. The US believed, not
unjustly, that Britain had still not abandoned its
old colonial attitudes, which would alienate the
Arab nations. The British, for their part, resented
the growth of American influence and the way in
which the US was diminishing Britain’s commer-
cial stake. Although France was to cooperate with
Britain in the mid-1950s at the time of the Suez
Crisis, cooperation was based on considerations
of Realpolitik. Had not the British ruthlessly
destroyed France’s empire in the Lebanon and
Syria at the end of the Second World War? The
purpose of France’s continued involvement in the
Middle East was at least to retain, and if possible
to expand, its shrunken influence in North Africa
after the military debacle in Indo-China. The
most critical struggle of all was being waged in
Algeria, which the French declared to be an indi-
visible part of France. Nasser’s propaganda sup-
ported the Algerian rebels, and the tension was
raised still further because the French were over-
estimating the quantity of weapons Nasser was
able to send to the Algerian nationalists.
The US too faced a dilemma. Britain and
France were its most important Western allies but
America also wished to be regarded as the friend
of independent Arab nations; it saw itself as being
free from the colonialist taint and condemned the
old British and French attitudes. How to side
with Arab nationalism as well as with Britain and
France? There was no reconciling such a contra-
diction six years later during the Suez Crisis of
- In strengthening US economic power in
the region through the oil giants, its disinterested
1
1956: CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST – SUEZ 443
