of Mexico or to help stem the flight from the
pound. Without dollar support Britain could not
afford to pay for the oil from the Western hemi-
sphere. But relations improved the moment the
Anglo-French troops handed over to the UN
peacekeeping force; the British and French finally
left two days before Christmas. The French prime
minister was then welcomed in Washington;
ironically, it was Macmillan, originally a strong
proponent of the Suez adventure, who succeeded
Eden in January 1957 and was received by
Eisenhower and Dulles the following March in
Bermuda. The alliance was restored. On 24 April
of that year the Egyptian Canal Authority opened
the Canal to traffic again. Nasser had not fallen.
The Zone and the Canal were the property of
Egypt. The Americans, pronouncing the Eisen-
hower Doctrine in January 1957, attempted to fill
the void left by the defeat of Britain and France
in the Middle East.
The conflicts of Suez were just a part of the
continuing Middle Eastern crisis which the West
failed to solve then or later. When it came to
armed conflict, in 1947, neither Britain nor the
US had been prepared to jeopardise its relations
with the oil-rich Middle East to ensure an inde-
pendent Israel in Palestine. The Israelis had to
achieve this by their own fortitude. The Tripartite
Declaration of 1950 might then have served as a
basis for a great-power imposition of peace, but
the Cold War, the rise of Nasser and his challenge
eventually to Israel, France and Britain sowed
divisions in the West and shifted Britain, France
and the US away from the role of impartial peace-
keepers. The Soviet Union took advantage of this
to fuel Egyptian–Israeli tensions by its large arms
deliveries to Nasser. The Anglo-French attack on
Egypt in collusion with Israel appeared to serve
the interests of all three nations threatened by
Nasser’s ambitions.
Eden only entered late, in mid-October 1956,
into the plan. He knew that the US did not
believe during the summer and early autumn that
diplomacy had been exhausted. It seemed, ac-
cording to Washington’s perceptions, that Egypt
was showing readiness to compromise in order to
reach a settlement over the Canal. The French
from the start were far more ready to act inde-
pendently; it was they who persuaded Eden to
join in the Sèvres scenario and to work behind
America’s back. Eden and Mollet mistakenly
believed that Eisenhower, faced with presidential
elections on 6 November 1956, would not be
able to act against Israel, Britain and France if
they attacked Egypt before then. Finally, the con-
dition the Israelis made that they would launch
an attack on the Egyptians, which was to provide
the pretext of French and British intervention,
only if the British and French neutralised the
Egyptian air force by bombing their airbases
within thirty-six hours of the Israeli attack was
bound to reveal the collusion. In a vain attempt
to preserve the fiction of the impartial policemen,
the main combat forces were obviously not sup-
posed to sail from their base in Malta until after
the start of hostilities between Israel and Egypt.
(They actually left a little earlier.) It was thought
that they would need at least eight days, though
they actually made it in six, reaching Port Said on
6 November. That had left a week for the inter-
national community at the UN to intervene. Had
France and Britain been less concerned to main-
tain the fiction of not colluding with Israel they
could have landed earlier and faced the US and
the UN with a fait accompli and occupied the
Canal Zone; they could even have dispensed with
Israeli cooperation altogether. But even a suc-
cessful occupation of the Canal Zone would not
have been the end of the affair. In the last resort
it was not really a question of timing. It was not
the Americans who doomed Suez to disaster. The
most powerful Western nations could no longer
simply impose their will on the whole region
without unacceptable costs to themselves.