Come Back Sir Anthony, all is Forgiven
After 68 years, the White House has performed an extraordinary reverse ferret. But there's a dark twist.
Forget this year’s the surrender of the Chagos Islands. Forget the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. The point at which the sun really did set on the British Empire can of course be pinpointed to the humiliation of November 1956.
You probably know the story. In July 1956 the Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised one of the most important shipping lanes in the world.
The Americans had withdrawn their promise of funding the ambitious Aswan dam project - this itself after Egypt flirted with the communist world, first with an arms deal with Czechoslovakia and then diplomatic recognition of China. Within two months of that recognition, the Americans yanked their dam funding offer.
As is always the case in world affairs, tit follows tat follows tit. Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal one week after the Americans withdrew funding for the dam.
The canal, which had until nationalisation been operated by an Anglo-French company, was (and still is of course) of vital importance to global trade. Transporting barrels of oil from the Persian Gulf to a northern European port like London or Rotterdam is a journey of over 11,000 nautical miles via the Cape of Good Hope, but is slashed to just over 6,000 nautical miles via Suez. At 1950s tanker speeds that could cut journey times from 35–40 days down to 15-20 days.
The British and the French saw Nasser’s seizure of the canal as a threat to their carefully cultivated trade routes. They had been peaceably running the canal ensuring the free flow of trade, and now an erratic nationalist leader who had recently conducted an arms deal with communists had taken control.
Naturally, the Great Powers planned to intervene.
On 31 October 1956, Britain and France began a Halloween bombing raid of Egyptian positions. Two days earlier Israel had invaded Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, and the Ango-French alliance swept in to ‘secure the canal’. On 5th November,1 British and French paratroopers landed along the canal, and by the 7th fighting was over.
A week before the invasion, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and a small team secretly travelled to Sèvres, a commune in suburban Paris. There they met with British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd along with the French Foreign and Defence ministers.
The three countries signed what became known as the Protocol of Sèvres, Israel agreed to invade the Sinai Peninsula, providing a pretext for Britain and France to intervene militarily, under the guise of separating Egyptian and Israeli forces and securing the canal.
The plan worked smoothly and successfully militarily, but then entered America.
The Eisenhower administration was appalled by the Anglo-French action. Washington applied intense diplomatic and economic pressure, threatening to block a heavily indebted Britain’s access to IMF funds. The White House even went as far as to threaten to dump American holdings of British sterling bonds on the open market - a move that would crash the pound’s value and trigger a full-blown currency crisis.
The thumbscrews worked. Britain and France, humiliated, withdrew.
And that was that, for all to see. Global power had shifted. The age of unilateral European military action was over, and Washington held the purse strings.
Sir Anthony Eden resigned as British Prime Minister. The Suez Crisis marked not only the end of his career, it closed the door on Britain’s role as a global superpower.
Fast forward to March 2025, and United States Vice President JD Vance is deep in conversation on Signal. Also in the group chat were three Cabinet secretaries, top White House staff, the directors of two intelligence agencies, and Jeffrey Goldberg, journalist and editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
Thanks to the erroneous addition of Goldberg the world caught a glimpse of how the US government planned a strike on Yemen rebel group the Houthis, in order to secure the Red Sea shipping lane that leads to the Suez Canal.
“I just hate bailing Europe out again”, says the Vice President, apparently unaware that seventy years earlier America did all it could to prevent Europe from bailing itself out and securing that very same canal.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was even more visceral. “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading, it’s PATHETIC”, he wrote.
Did neither of these men appreciate the irony of the US administration complaining about European countries’ inability to independently secure the Suez Canal? Did neither think to themselves, is there a reason why countries like Britain and France do not act without the say so of the White House?
Did neither of these men appreciate the irony of a US administration complaining about European countries’ inability to independently secure the Suez Canal? Did neither pause to ask themselves why nations like Britain and France no longer act without the blessing - or at least the tolerance - of the White House? Did these men forget that it was Washington, not Cairo, that taught the price of acting independently?
And yet, perhaps latterly, the Vice President has arrived at his answer to these questions. No doubt after seeing some of the online reaction to the signal group chat, in an interview this week with Sohrab Ahmari for UnHerd, JD Vance reverse ferreted on America’s domination of European powers.
“I don’t think that Europe being more independent is bad for the United States — it’s good for the United States. Just going back through history, I think — frankly — the British and the French were certainly right in their disagreements with Eisenhower about the Suez Canal.”
It’s one thing for a Brit to say the US was wrong to so totally eclipse the British Empire - from seizing global military bases, to emptying London’s gold reserves for wartime arms, indebting the UK to the throat, and then threatening financial ruination when Britain dared to act alone. But for an American Vice President to deliver the same sentiment, seventy years later, is nothing short of extraordinary.
I sat down with Sohrab Ahmari earlier this week and put this point to him. I have reproduced his response in full:
“We live in such a turbulent world that the fact that the sitting vice president of the United States said that Eisenhower was wrong in response to the suez crisis, and Britain and France were in the right, isn’t even the top item in the story… in a normal world that would be a huge story.
Because for a lot of Americans especially Americans of a kind of foreign policy hawkish bent, the suez crisis is really a moment of pride. It’s a moment in which American global primacy is seen to in a decisive way overshadow or eclipse the former global hegemon, namely Great Britain.
Much more so than WW2, that was the moment that the United States could really order around to other allied countries - France and Britain.
So for him to say hey maybe we denigrated our allies and put them in a position where they have to be as he said they feel like vassals, and not independent allies, maybe that wasn’t such a good thing.
You know I think this is the kind of thing that makes the Vice President such an intriguing character, he’s an intellectual, he’s willing to re-engage history and reconsider certain things that are really taken for granted among the Washington foreign policy establishment.”
He’s right. Vance has spelled out in a far more intellectually consistent way what the aims of the MAGA movement are. A retreat perhaps to a pre-Suez world. Come back Sir Anthony, all is forgiven.
For seventy years the American empire has bent the world to its will with carrots and sticks. Not least by ordering around the militaries of nations once seen as top-table superpowers.
For the White House to repent at the time would have had Sir Anthony Eden jumping for joy. It could have changed the character of postwar Britain, which has always struggled to find its role in the world as a post imperial power. For centuries a global power proudly outside the continental system, now suddenly the Lion had been declawed in this strange post war world. And declawed in victory.
Not knowing quite which way to turn, Britain has sat uneasy ever since. The debates that have rocked British politics over the course of the last decade have their roots in Suez.
It is extraordinary to see an America that holds all the cards begin to step away from its unique position as the global hegemon. Britain was squeezed out of that role, America appears to be giving much of it up voluntarily. If I were an American I would be asking, why?
The United States’ unique role in the world is held together through both fear and favour. Not just its immense military and economic power, but crucially also buy-in from allies, something the Soviet Union never managed. The USSR was extractive and brittle. When it faltered, its satellite states couldn’t decouple fast enough. America, by contrast, was magnetic.
Through defence guarantees, aid programmes, low interest loans, and beneficial trading arrangements - she has cemented her position as top nation, enticing more countries into her orbit.
That was, until Trump.
First he killed what was then known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). An ingenious Pacific trade area looping in developed and fast developing countries - with the crucial exception of China. Had America gone ahead with the plans, these countries potentially in China’s orbit would instead be drawn in to the USA’s powerful family of friends.
There was some suggestion at the time that Trump mistakenly thought China was to be a member, or perhaps the US withdrawal was because he didn’t like the word “Trans”. In any case the rump TPP reformed as the more clumsily named Comprehensive and Progressive Trans Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) - just without the world’s largest economy as a member.
But not content with killing the TPP in 2017, in 2025 we saw the ‘liberation day’ tariff regime. Hitting out not just at China, but at all countries in the world. If I were a secret Chinese agent operating within the US government, intent on pushing most of the world into the Sinosphere, my strategy on tariffs would look pretty much identical to that of the current administration.
Is it any wonder that this week Xi Jinping has been on visits to Vietnam and Malaysia? China is not making the mistake of the Soviet Union. Xi is buying friendships, while Trump is taxing them away.
Whilst it’s fun to imagine how delighted Anthony Eden would be with JD Vance’s pronouncement this week, history doesn’t run in reverse. America has spent seventy years building an empire of influence that Britain could only dream of preserving. Now, astonishingly, she is stepping back from it.
Perhaps the person we really need to be paying closer attention to is not the long since deceased former British Prime Minister, but an all too active Chinese President.
Remember remember the 5th of November; paratroops, canals and plot. I see no reason why paratroop cohesion should ever be forgot.