WI: US supports UK, France and Israel during Suez Crisis

@Indicus Pakistan's leaders were pro-US (Liaquat Ali Khan was invited to both Washington and Moscow upon independence, and he went to Moscow) from the beginning and unless the US takes an explicitly pro-India stance in the 1950s or if the Rawalpindi Conspiracy, which was a plan for a left-wing coup, somehow overthrows Liaquat Ali Khan (kind of unlikely) and aligns Pakistan with the USSR there is no way Pakistan doesn't become a US ally, and I doubt Pakistan's government would really care much about the Suez Crisis, no matter what the people feel.

With Pakistan, there were anti-western protests, and one of the reasons Pakistan is so close to China is because of anti-western feeling, albeit rooted more in the 1964 war than Suez.

But sure, let’s say Pakistan would have been an American ally regardless. The fact of the matter was that the third world was emerging from the colonial empires. If the US supported the colonial empires’ attempts to overthrow a country for simply nationalizing a company, well, you can imagine how the third world would think about that.
 
What were the domestic opinion of the US, UK, and France at the time? I am pretty sure that in the UK there protests against the crisis since people didn't want to get into another war.
 
I love that the anti-colonial argument (which is an important one) is expressed here on behalf of “the third world”.

That’s very unhelpful. The likely response of individual nations will differ, indeed sometimes internally between a public response and a governmental response. Some nations will ‘matter’ to the US, UK, France and/or USSR. Some won’t.

But if the argument and assessment of consequences is to be meaningful (and not a contest of competing prejudices which it has, at times, become) let’s deal in specifics not meaningless and/or unhelpful generalities...
 
In 1956 the USSR is NOT going to intervene.[...]

The USSR would make lots of noise, it might try and up the pressure in Berlin, but the USSR is not going to risk the destruction of the Soviet Union to bail out Nasser. It makes no sense geopolitically or militarily, and the Soviet racial attitudes about the Arabs don't help either.

If they don't do anything against NATO invasion of an allies of the USSR, they would very fast have no allies. They would have to at least send soldier and weapons to Egypt.
 

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I love that the anti-colonial argument (which is an important one) is expressed here on behalf of “the third world”.

That’s very unhelpful. The likely response of individual nations will differ, indeed sometimes internally between a public response and a governmental response. Some nations will ‘matter’ to the US, UK, France and/or USSR. Some won’t.

But if the argument and assessment of consequences is to be meaningful (and not a contest of competing prejudices which it has, at times, become) let’s deal in specifics not meaningless and/or unhelpful generalities...

It also doesn’t explain the lack of opposition votes in the Canal Users Committee meetings in the early stages of the build up to the crisis.

If they don't do anything against NATO invasion of an allies of the USSR, they would very fast have no allies. They would have to at least send soldier and weapons to Egypt.

Before Suez Egypt was in no way an ally of the USSR.
 
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@Diforto: In 1956 Egypt is not even close to being an "ally" of the USSR. Furthermore there is no military alliance/defense treaty. Sure the USSr could potentially send a few advisers to the Egyptians, but by the time any significant materiel aid could arrive things are over. While a few Soviet pilots flew over Korea, and Korea was a communist ally if the USSR, the number was small and nobody wanted to broadcast this. Even during the periods when Egypt-Israel tensions were high there was minimal direct intervention buy the USSR, and Israel's ability to make life difficult for the Russians was way less than the USA & NATO.

Even if the USSR could magically make a couple of hundred tanks and a couple of squadrons of MiGs arrive in Egypt, you need to train the crews to operate the tanks and the pilots to fly the planes, and of course the folks to maintain all this relatively sophisticated equipment. The ONLY way there is an immediate impact is if this equipment gets there (which means only aircraft as ground equipment would take too long to get there) and essentially all of this is operated by Soviet personnel. This is war with France & the UK (and Israel), which means war with NATO which means war with the USA. The USSR is not, ever, going to do this to bail out Nasser.
 
We're getting well off topic, but its an interesting discussion anyway.

Can’t we all agree, at least, that colonial empires are bad?

Compared to what? Compared to a fair, liberal democracy yes certainly a colonial empire is bad, but compared to a genocidal kleptocracy that many former colonies turned into a colonial empire might be the lesser of 2 evils. There is no definitive colonial empire, they were all different and even had different arrangements within them.

I can’t believe this is even an object of debate.

Why can't you believe it? Colonialism and Empire are large, complex topics with no one size fits all answer that puts the debate to bed.

Of course Egypt was a colony. It was run by Britain and provided goods for a metropole. Therefore, a colony, and anything Britain decided to call it is irrelevant.

Here are some actual dictionary definitions of colony;
  • a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country and occupied by settlers from that country.
  • a group of people of one nationality or race living in a foreign place.
  • a group of people who leave their native country to form in a new land a settlement subject to, or connected with, the parent nation.
  • a body of people living in a new territory but retaining ties with the parent state
Egypt doesn't fit those criteria.

And “oppressors”? That is exactly what the third world thought of the colonial empires, and the entire idea of colonial empires.

Again, its not as simple as that. Many in the third world, particularly leaders, were aware that Imperial powers had their uses and that their other options were limited so that the Imperial power might be the lesser of 2 evils.

The fact of the matter is, Britain and France has no choice but to ally with the US.

This is incorrect, they could ally with each other and forge other alliances as well as making greater efforts to take care of their own defence.

Contrast that with the third world, which certainly could turn around and ally with the USSR if it wanted to, and I think more of the third world would have done so if the US had supported the colonial powers during the Suez Crisis.

As for the “most of the third world wasn’t independent yet” argument, it was plain as day that this was changing.

If Suez had been successful the pace of decolonisation would have been slowed considerably and the third world would have faced a different set of choices after 1956. As it turned out the failure at Suez increased the pace of decolonisation.
 
Here are some actual dictionary definitions of colony;
  • a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country and occupied by settlers from that country.
  • a group of people of one nationality or race living in a foreign place.
  • a group of people who leave their native country to form in a new land a settlement subject to, or connected with, the parent nation.
  • a body of people living in a new territory but retaining ties with the parent state
Egypt doesn't fit those criteria.

The Raj doesn’t fit those criteria. That’s specifically describing settler colonialism.
 
The Raj doesn’t fit those criteria. That’s specifically describing settler colonialism.

That's right, the Raj is different again to Egypt and the raft of other arrangements by which the British built up their Empire. These arrangements are different to how the French went about their Empire, I believe Algeria was constitutionally considered part of metropolitan France and its independence caused a constitutional crisis.
 
Compared to what? Compared to a fair, liberal democracy yes certainly a colonial empire is bad, but compared to a genocidal kleptocracy that many former colonies turned into a colonial empire might be the lesser of 2 evils. There is no definitive colonial empire, they were all different and even had different arrangements within them.

Even that’s disputable. The 1943 Bengal famine, for instance, killed more people (2.1 million) than the 1970 Bangladesh genocide (300,000) even when you account for the fact that Bangladesh is only part of Bengal. So, in terms of raw casualty count even adjusted for population difference the British Raj was more evil than the Yahya Khan dictatorship. Of course, there are more factors to be accounted for, but even that is a highly arguable point. We shouldn’t sugarcoat the bleak horror of colonialism.

Here are some actual dictionary definitions of colony;
  • a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country and occupied by settlers from that country.
  • a group of people of one nationality or race living in a foreign place.
  • a group of people who leave their native country to form in a new land a settlement subject to, or connected with, the parent nation.
  • a body of people living in a new territory but retaining ties with the parent state
Egypt doesn't fit those criteria.

That disqualifies almost all late nineteenth-century colonies. With that definition, the only colonies in Africa are Kenya (to a lesser extent), Algeria, Libya, South Africa, and Rhodesia.

Again, its not as simple as that. Many in the third world, particularly leaders, were aware that Imperial powers had their uses and that their other options were limited so that the Imperial power might be the lesser of 2 evils.

There were others who viewed the US as a colony that successfully broke the shackles of the British to become one of the two the strongest countries in the world, and wanted to replicate that. If the US supported the colonial powers during Suez, you can imagine how hard such an image would shatter. Sure, there would be those who would still see them as the lesser evil, but the US can only lose from attempting to prop up colonial empires.

This is incorrect, they could ally with each other and forge other alliances as well as making greater efforts to take care of their own defence.

None of that is opposed to American interests.

If Suez had been successful the pace of decolonisation would have been slowed considerably and the third world would have faced a different set of choices after 1956. As it turned out the failure at Suez increased the pace of decolonisation.

No, it would not have been a considerable slowdown. Britain already lost its largest colony and was involved in numerous wars, France had massive quagmires, the Netherlands already lost almost all of their colonies, and Portugal was soon to be involved in quagmires. Really, the writing on the wall was visible to everyone.
 
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