Great Britain and the Lessons of the Suez Crisis: A Prologue to the Era of Hybrid Warfare?

Assessments of the consequences and historical significance of the Suez Crisis remain contested in the academic literature. While some scholars interpret the crisis as a turning point in the decline of the United Kingdom’s influence in the Middle East, others regard it as merely one episode in the transformation of the British Empire, a process driven by a complex interplay of economic, political, and military factors. In this regard, it is useful to situate this crisis within a broader historical context encompassing the transfer of colonial order and the adaptation of European empires’ internal security models to new forms of projecting global influence amid decolonization. This article advances the hypothesis that the Suez Crisis acted as a catalyst for Britain’s systemic transition towards a strategy of exerting multifaceted pressure on adversaries — a strategy that, many decades later and under different technological and geopolitical conditions, would be referred to as ‘hybrid warfare’. The research examines the economic, political, and military-strategic considerations that impelled British elites to undertake a military operation against Egypt, as well as the course and consequences of that operation. The article argues that the failure of the tripartite Anglo-French-Israeli intervention exposed the limitations of the traditional colonial model, which relied on the direct projection of military force as a universal instrument of coercion. This model was gradually superseded by a new strategy, developed by British elites through trial and error. This strategy entailed abandoning direct military confrontation in favor of comprehensive, multilayered pressure; blurring the boundaries between war and peace; employing non-state actors and proxies; and actively contesting the information and ideological space. These features would subsequently become associated with the toolkit of hybrid warfare. It would, of course, be methodologically inaccurate to claim that, in the second half of the 1950s, Great Britain deliberately waged hybrid warfare against Egypt in the contemporary sense of the term. Nevertheless, the use of this concept allows for a better understanding of the logic behind the subsequent evolution of British strategic culture.