Suez: Consequences

According to historian Paul Johnson, the Suez crisis was a turning point in the 20th century, less because it confirmed the decline of Britain and France as great powers, but more because it affirmed the role of a mutated United Nations. As often happened, an American administration with a short-term agenda encouraged the rise of some force that would cause serious blowback trouble for the U.S. for years to come.

The real loser in the long term was the United States. Eisenhower appeared to act decisively, and he got his way fast enough. Britain came to heel. He preserved his reputation as a man of peace. But in the process he helped prepare a mighty scourge for America's own back, in the shape of the tendentious concept of "world opinion" first articulated at Bandung and now, by Eisenhower's own act, transferred to the U.N.

Until the early 1950s, the Americans had controlled the U.N. Their first mistake was to involve it in Korea, especially through the forum of the General Assembly, a pseudo-representative body which spoke only for governments, a growing proportion of which were undemocratic. Korea broke Trygve Lie, the Norwegian Secretary-General, who was loyal to the principles of the old Western alliance. He resigned when the Russians boycotted him and got the Left to stir up his own Secretariat against him. At this point the Western democracies should have dropped the U.N. and concentrated instead on expanding NATO into a world-wide security system of free nations.

Instead, after much bad temper, the powers appointed a senior Swedish diplomat called Dag Hammarskjöld. A worse choice could not be imagined. He came from a highly successful family of public servants in a nation uneasily aware that it had grown immensely prosperous by staying out of two world wars. He was guilt personified and he was determined that the West should expiate it. Severe, well-read, humourless, unmarried (though not homosexual: "In Hammarskjöld's life," wrote his official biographer, "sex played little or no part"), he exuded a secular religiosity. ... It was Hammarskjöld's manifest intention to cut the umbilical cord which linked the UN to the old wartime Western alliance, and to align the organization with what he regarded as the new emergent force of righteousness in the world: the "uncommitted" nations. ... When Eisenhower turned on Eden at Suez, broke him, and handed the whole problem to the UN, he gave Hammarskjöld exactly the opportunity he had been waiting for.

The Secretary-General set to work to oust the Anglo-French force and the Israelis and replace them with a multi-nation UN "peace-keeping" contingent. He saw a role for himself as a world statesman, driven by the engine of non-alignment. Hence, though affecting impartiality, he threw his weight entirely behind the Afro-Asian camp. That meant treating Israel not as a small and vulnerable nation but as an outpost of imperialism. There was on record a 1951 UN resolution, passed before his time, calling on Egypt to allow Israeli vessels through the Canal. At no point did Hammarskjöld make any attempt to get the resolution implemented. Nor would he allow that Arab denial of freedom of navigation to Israeli shipping in the Gulf of Aqaba was a threat to peace -- though in fact it was this denial, tightened by the three-power Arab military pact of 25 October 1956, which was the immediate cause of the Israeli attack.

He repeatedly declined to condemn Nasser's seizure of the canal, and other arbitrary acts. So far as he was concerned, the Israeli attack and the Anglo-French intervention were wholly unprovoked acts of aggression. He said he was "shocked and outraged" by such behaviour. On 31 October he took the unprecedented step of publicly rebuking the British and French governments. The Soviet invasion of Hungary, which took place under cover of the Suez crisis, he treated as a tiresome distraction. His friendliness to the Egyptians throughout, and his cold hostility to Britain, France and Israel made it plain where his emotional sympathies lay. He set his heart on the public humiliation of the three powers and he got it. In deploying the UN emergency force, to move into the vacuum created by the three-power withdrawal, he insisted that its presence was by grace and favour of Egypt: as he put it, "the very basis and starting point has been the recognition by the General Assembly of the full and unlimited sovereign rights of Egypt." It had therefore to be withdrawn at Egypt's simple request, a right exercised by Egypt in 1967 as soon as it believed itself strong enough to destroy Israel. Hammarskjöld thus bequeathed another Middle Eastern war to his successors. More important, however, was his demonstration of the way in which the UN could be used to marshal and express hatred of the West. In 1956 it was the turn of Britain and France. Soon it would be America's own.