On November 6, 1956, British and French troops were scything through Port Said, the Egyptian city guarding the entrance to one of the world’s most-important waterways. A day earlier, their paratroopers had dropped in to seize the Suez Canal, with Israeli forces advancing across the Sinai Peninsula to help clear the way. By midnight, the Anglo-French assault had stopped; not because their soldiers wilted, but because the governments commanding them had been forced to capitulate under pressure from Washington.
President Dwight Eisenhower had threatened to brutalize Britain’s battered economy, and rallied the United Nations to demand a ceasefire and withdrawal. America’s economic and political influence achieved in hours what Egyptian armed resistance could not, and brought the Western military campaign to a humiliating halt. Seventy years on, America is locked in its own conflict over another critical shipping route, the Strait of Hormuz.
Washington is now on the receiving end of the uncomfortable lessons it once taught its European allies—except, this time, the economic and political damage is self-inflicted. The Suez Canal is a sliver of water barely a fifth of a mile wide that runs through Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean and Red Seas and separating Africa from Asia. It is now, as it was then, the shortest maritime route between Europe and Asia, and, in 1956, more than half the oil required by Western Europe passed through it.
When Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Anglo-French company operating it that July, Britain’s Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his French counterpart Guy Mollet decided they simply couldn’t stomach the possibility of losing stewardship over the canal and wider Middle East. London and Paris hatched a dastardly plan with Israel. It was decided that Israeli forces would invade the Sinai Peninsula, providing the pretext for an Anglo-French "intervention" to separate the combatants and occupy the canal.
If Nasser happened to be toppled in the process, then all the better. The ground offensive began with an impressive display of firepower on November 5; British and French aircraft bombarded Egyptian defenses as paratroopers dropped in near Port Said. Amphibious forces began pushing south from the city the following day.
But the Egyptians saw it coming, and Nasser’s forces had deliberately scuttled ships in the canal, blocking the transit of desperately needed oil. This piled more weight on Britain’s creaking postwar finances, and Eden’s government desperately needed emergency assistance from the International Monetary Fund to stabilize its currency. Without American support, the pound faced a potentially disastrous collapse.
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