GREAT BRITAIN: The Resiler

FOREIGN NEWS

In London last week, cocktail-party pundits predicted: “Nasser or Eden out of power by October.” At a Socialist rally in Caterham, the Labor Party’s foreign-affairs spokesman, Alfred Robens, cried that if peaceful negotiations with Nasser failed, Anthony Eden “has no alternative but to resign.” One lover of historical irony, harking back to Ethiopian War days of Eden the boy-wonder diplomat, announced that Eden was about to end his career as he began it, talking about sanctions that he can’t deliver.

It was understandable why the conclusion-jumpers were so active. In the first angry days after Nasser’s seizure of the Suez, Sir Anthony had talked tough. Last week, after a month and a half of inconclusive international consultations, culminating in the abortive Menzies mission to Cairo. Eden had softened. Now some of his fellow Tories demanded that he make good on his threats. On the other hand, the Labor Party, which represents roughly half the British population, was sharply opposed to the use of force against Egypt, pressed him to submit the case to the U.N.

Entrenched. But though his position seemed precarious. Sir Anthony Eden was in fact better entrenched in No. 10 Downing Street than most of his critics and mourners recognized. His Tory critics were of no mind to risk bringing him down at the cost of new elections, and there was no other Tory at hand to replace him. Furthermore, Sir Anthony’s un-Edenish tone and temper during the first days of the crisis, and his subsequent softening, could be understood and accepted by many Britons. In the first place, a very broad band of British public opinion was genuinely and deeply angeredby Nasser’s seizure; any British spokesman using less than strong language would have been accused of not representing the true reaction of the nation.* Secondly, urbane Sir Anthony has a temper grown sharper with the years, and Nasser’s act touched off in him a flare of personal contempt for the Egyptian—not the contempt of a loftily bred Yorkshire gentleman for an upstart “wog,” but the contempt of an order-loving, word-keeping diplomat for a disorderly, dishonorable dictator.

So it was not with trepidation but almost with eagerness that Eden summoned Parliament from vacation last week to face up to the Suez crisis in an emergency session. Eden’s political hand was not bad, and only serious misplaying of it could bring him to personal disaster.

The “American Excuse.” One of Eden’s gravest problems was the resistance of the U.S. to any but peaceful means of settling the crisis. But if the resistance of the U.S. to force was a handicap, it was also a tool for agile Sir Anthony. During the Korean war, the Truman Administration employed with some success the “British excuse”—the argument that the U.S. could not engage in all-out war with Red China without alienating, perhaps even losing, Britain and other allies. Now Eden can answer charges that his threats were empty blasts by offering Parliament the “American excuse.” To counter any clamor at Britain’s humiliation by Egypt, Eden might well bare his breast to the foe, move to the brink of war, and then, upon anguished outcries from the U.S., refrain from fighting in order to save the Anglo-American alliance.

Far from being mere domestic expedience, the “American excuse” can serve the only promising Suez strategy left to Diplomat Eden—the strategy of procrastination. Some might call it “dithering,” others “muddling through,” but the Foreign Office likes to call it “resiling.” The strict dictionary definition of “resile” is “draw back, recoil . . . return to its original position as an elastic body.” In Foreign Office usage, however, resile means to appear elastic without actually budging from one’s original position.

In the coming days, Eden will resile in several directions—with other diplomats in London, and probably in the debating halls of the U.N. His enemies are likely to conclude that Eden (and Britain) will never resort to force, even when all hope of any satisfactory negotiated settlement has clearly been exhausted. This could be an unsafe assumption. One purpose of resiling is to wait for one’s antagonist to commit a blunder that weakens him, or a provocation that provides the Resiler with a casus belli.

Because Veteran Resiler Eden did not quite mean what he said in the first flush of the Suez seizures does not guarantee that he did not mean what he said privately to Bulganin and Khrushchev during their London visit, and publicly three months ago: “Our country’s industrial life . . . must depend for many years on oil supplies from the Middle East. If ever our oil resources were imperiled, we should be compelled to defend them.”

* Mirroring the angry humiliation of many Englishmen, Punch Poet W. K. Holmes last week borrowed from Kipling to exclaim:

“Never the lotus closes, never the wildfowl wake,”But England gives up something for somebody else to take;Only a howl in the market or a swelled tub-thumper’s frown,And, deeply apologetic, the English flag comes down.