The ‘Suezide’ of British Foreign Policy: Reassessing Imperial Identity after the 1956 Suez Crisis

The growing foreign policy ambitions of the United Kingdom, reflected, among other things, in the expansion of its military presence in the Middle East, have brought renewed attention to the role of imperial tradition in shaping the worldview of British elites. In this context, it is particularly interesting to examine how they interpreted the events of the 1956 Suez Crisis, which compelled Britain to undertake a fundamental reassessment of its foreign policy identity. The author advances the hypothesis that the Suez Crisis marked not the end of British imperialism but rather a turning point in its evolution, triggering a transition from the overt exercise of territorial control through military force to a system of less overt forms of financial and economic influence. To substantiate this hypothesis, the article examines the objective economic, financial, and military-strategic factors that accounted for Britain’s heightened interest in the Suez Canal zone after World War II. At the same time, it demonstrates how these objective circumstances interacted with the subjective perceptions of the Brit-ish ruling class regarding the United Kingdom’s place and role in the context of intensifying bipolar confrontation, particularly its conviction that the country could maintain its former imperial grandeur. It was the combination of these factors that determined the British government’s vehement response to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. However, the subsequent failure of the tripartite Anglo-French-Israeli aggression against Egypt forced the British elites to confront, painfully, not only the erosion of Britain’s great-power status but also the extent of the country’s economic, financial, and military dependence on the United States. The author concludes that the Suez debacle of October 1956, which triggered a radical reassessment of Britain’s role in world politics and stimulated the development of new foreign policy concepts, resulted less from the United Kingdom’s objective economic and financial weakness than from a form of ‘cognitive misjudgment’, i.e. a fatal discrepancy between the state’s material capacity to sustain its imperial commitments and the political class’s psychological unwillingness to acknowledge the new realities.