But in London he had tweaked the lion's tail.Eden, so long under the shadow of Churchill's bulldog reputation, felt he had no option but to resist. He wanted the Canal Zone restored to the Company, which meant to Britain and France, by force if need be, and, better, with Nasser deposed into the bargain. France agreed. Israel colluded in what became a massive international deception, that Britain would appear to "intervene" to stop a "war" between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai peninsula. America wanted none of this. It had no quarrel with Nasser and, as the crisis unfolded, was infuriated by the Anglo-French deception, which it saw as a typical old colonialist trick. Washington pleaded international law, time for negotiation and recourse to the United Nations. To America, Britain was behaving as a waning imperial power with something to prove. It should wake up to the second half of the twentieth century.
The Suez debacle has long been regarded as the locus classicus of post imperial delusion. The invasion was a military fiasco, signalled too long, delayed in execution, opposed by international opinion and then aborted when the opinion became intense and America refused to support sterling. Britain had to withdraw.
The Canal, whose accessibility was the objective of the operation, was to be blocked for twenty years. Eden was humiliated and sickened and resigned. No good came of Suez, except no end of a lesson. Yet it was an error in which the British people overwhelmingly supported their Prime Minister, indeed one on which they virtually insisted. Suez showed that public opinion is not always the best judge of a nation's interest.
Enthusiasts for Hegel's theory of historical repetition may find Suez today almost too painful to recall. Britain at the time was led by a popular and handsome leader who had just won a decisive general election. Eden came to power in 1955, late in life, after a career dominated by foreign affairs. Yet he was curiously deficient in strategic vision. He was a diplomat schooled in the age of dictators, and understandably eager to prove himself on the world stage. Yet he was temperamentally the wrong man to lead a nation in war. Tetchy and sensitive, he was given to sudden bursts of anger. Aides who had worked for the no less temperamental Churchill compared "a great historical figure with a great hysterical one".
Eden's early months in Downing Street had been refreshing. He was a good chairman and had, at his side, two clever and ambitious colleagues, Rab Butler and Harold Macmillan. But the rest of the Cabinet was mostly Trollopian, a mixture of lordly grandees and Churchill's wartime buddies. Eden's closest associate was Lord Salisbury. These were men content with the post-war Welfare "settlement" at home, but still haunted by Munich overseas. They believed in the virtues of military power and the danger of appeasement. With that in mind they joined America in building NATO and confronting the Soviet Union, but beyond that confrontation their responses were still those of imperial power projection.
It was perhaps inevitable that at some point the demands of the emerging Cold War would clash with Britain's always hesitant withdrawal from Empire, and that this clash would occur within the "conversation" that was the special relationship with America. Both Eden's predecessor and his successor in Downing Street, Churchill and Macmillan, had American mothers. To them the American bond seemed natural and important. Eden was of a different cast. He was a European who resented America's rise to Great Power status. He thought America enigmatic and unreliable, a reluctant participant in both World Wars. He raged at Churchill's deference to Washington: "Why can't we have a foreign policy of our own?". But even Eden assumed the American alliance to be table d'hote. It was inconceivable that Washington might revert to pre-war a la carte.
On taking office, Eden was encouraged by Churchill to resume the habit of personal correspondence with the White House which he had conducted with Roosevelt. The new President was Dwight Eisenhower, whom Eden had known and liked during the Second World War. The auguries were good. To people of that generation the letter was a favoured and civilized communication. It was preferable to the telephone or cables, which were for emergencies. Such a "back channel", as it would now be called, would cement the transatlantic relationship and build trust and loyalty against a rainy day. In this, Eden was to be deceived.
