THE SUEZ: The Crisis Turns

The threat of force all but disappeared from the Suez crisis last week, and a Western strategy of massive but peaceful pressure took its place.

The U.S., Great Britain and France, who had seemed to be moving in divergent directions, came together in a united plan. They confronted Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser with the chance to back down from his West-flouting seizure of the Suez Canal or the risk of exposing his impoverished nation to an economic squeeze. The new approach to the crisis was the West’s “users’ plan,” sketched out by U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and presented publicly by Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden in Parliament (see below).

Under the plan, an association of nations using the Suez would hire its own pilots, regulate traffic and collect the tolls. Egypt would be asked to cooperate, and would be paid for its contributed facilities. If Egypt refused to cooperate, the users would set in motion the grand plan of economic strategy, underwritten by the U.S. and described as the Suez Sea Lift (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

Nasser denounced the plan almost before it was fully explained. But that was expected. For it put him on the defensive for perhaps the first time since he seized the canal seven weeks before. It also made clear the real issue at stake. That issue was not the provision of international guarantees for what could not be fully guaranteed: the free passage of the canal. Debate on that point, and there had been a lot of it. had always had a curiously unreal quality.

Nasser’s seizure, though it had humiliated the West, had left the West with nothing tangible to complain of. The threat remained only a threat until ships had been stopped or traffic otherwise interfered with. In fact, Nasser has always possessed the physical capability of closing the canal ever since the British evacuated the Canal Zone (he has only to swing shut the railroad bridge), and would still have the capability even after agreeing to any arrangement for international operation short of reoccupation of the Canal Zone in its entirety.

The real point was a point of law and order: it must be shown that other nations cannot deprive the Western powers of their right or threaten their vital interests with reckless impunity. If Nasser got away with his grab unpenalized, other Arabs in other lands might take it as a precedent for grabs of their own—at British and U.S. oil and pipelines. And if Nasser’s truculence became a pattern elsewhere, it could destroy all hopes of fruitful cooperation between the world’s free industrial nations and the underdeveloped countries.

The new strategy expressed far more accurately the West’s hopes of converting the old relationship of empire and colony into a new partnership of mutual respect and mutual profit. For its effect it relied on a simple demonstration of the real value of Western friendship—by the simple process of showing vividly what it costs to be without it.