Britain, Nasser and the Balance of Power in the Middle East, 1952-1977

From The Eygptian Revolution to the Six Day War

Robert McNamara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9781138870109
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135773021
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: History

A multi-archival documentary history of British policy towards Nasser's Egypt under the Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Home and Wilson governments. The primary focus of the study is an enquiry into the causes of the Anglo-Egyptian Cold War from 1952 to 1967.

1
Introduction: Delusions of Grandeur in the Middle East

OWING TO a combination of historical and economic factors, Britain remained the most important European power in the Middle East until well into the 1960s. While British influence certainly faded, particularly between 1955 and 1962, when a combination of disastrous misjudgement at Suez and straitened economic circumstances forced a retrenchment, it remained a significant military and political power in the region. Furthermore, after 1962, British governments became more determined to hold on to their remaining positions in the Persian Gulf, as the value of Gulf oil continued to increase in significance. Britain remained the most visible outside opponent of Arab nationalism whose most important exponent was President Nasser of Egypt. Nasser was committed to driving Britain out of the region. As a result, between 1955 and 1967, Britain and Egypt engaged in diplomatic, political and military confrontation in the Middle East. Egypt, perhaps with the exception of the Soviet Union, was arguably Britain’s most persistent foreign policy opponent of the period. Anglo-Egyptian relations of this period, except for a brief interregnum (1959–62) of détente, were constantly strained and tense. An irreconcilable conflict akin to a cold war existed.¹ On four occasions after the Suez crisis of 1956, British governments considered military action against Nasser.² British statesmen, especially prominent Conservatives, saw the figure of Nasser behind every anti-Western and anti-British activity in the Middle East. They were convinced Nasser was attempting to wrest Britain’s Middle Eastern position, threatening its oil and economic security. While the United States saw Nasser as a minor danger in comparison to the Soviet Union in the Middle East, British leaders viewed him as their most dangerous regional enemy. None of the five British prime ministers of the period, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Wilson, were able to establish a reasonable modus vivendi with Nasser for any significant period of time. To Harold Macmillan, whose premiership dominates this study, the Egyptian leader was the ‘Mussolini of Egypt …determined to foster discontent and promote trouble in every Arab State’.³ Peter Clarke notes that ‘Nasser seems to have stalked pages of the [Macmillan] diary like an over-promoted understudy for Hitler’.⁴ It is telling that diplomatic relations were severed under both a Conservative government (over Suez) and a Labour government (over Rhodesia) despite the avowed intention of the latter to improve relations. The Conservatives and Labour may have had differences of emphasis in their foreign policy platform but the aims and the results were broadly the same.

The focus of this study is British policy towards Nasser’s Egypt from the Egyptian revolution to the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967. The period is dominated by two wars, Suez and the Six Day War. The former was to make Nasser the great Arab nationalist champion—whilst providing Britain with probably its greatest post-war foreign policy failure. The Six Day War was to switch the focus of Nasser’s foreign policy from attacks on British bases and conservative Arab regimes to battling rather unsuccessfully for the return of Egyptian territory lost to Israel. Indeed, he was reduced to asking his most reactionary Arab foes, the Saudi royal family, for a subvention to allow him to continue the struggle against Israel and, by 1970, the Soviet Union was providing thousands of troops for the air defence of Egypt. Ironically his career began with thousands of British troops occupying Egyptian bases and ended with thousands of Soviet troops doing likewise. For Britain, the Six Day War provided final illustration of its Middle Eastern impotence, as it was unable to keep the peace despite the vast expenditure in bases and infrastructure for just such a purpose. Furthermore, this military presence failed to prevent an Arab oil boycott after the war, demonstrating that a military presence in the Middle East could not secure the primary object of British policy in the Middle East—the free production and transit of oil to Britain. At the beginning of 1968, with sterling devalued, Britain decided to withdraw from the Middle East.⁵

The literature on Anglo-Egyptian relations based on primary British and American documents for the period until 1956 is excellent. Suez is, perhaps, the most studied post-war British foreign policy event.⁶ Afterwards the material, especially on the British side, is less rich. Nigel John Ashton, and Professor Ritchie Ovendale have written the best accounts of the period based on British documents.⁷ Both are more concerned with Britain’s wider Middle Eastern policy than British policy towards Egypt—which is the central focus of this study. They do, however, make considerable use of post-Suez British documentation. Both of the studies end in the early 1960s. My study encompasses a wider period, 1952 to 1967. I have also been fortunate in the release of previously classified material in the United Kingdom Public Record Office and the United States National Archives under recent governmental initiatives, which were not available to the above authors. Particularly interesting material is published here for the first time on the Syrian crisis of 1957, the Yemen crisis of 1964 and the Six Day War. This study also utilises the large number of memoirs, biographies and diaries of presidents, ministers and diplomats.⁸ Equally some valuable studies of Britain’s disengagement from the Middle East in the 1960s have been written. While many are excellent, they are not documentbased.⁹ The different release procedures for American archives have seen a vastly greater output of material on American policy. American-based studies are focused on the position of the United States in the Middle East and its policy towards Egypt. Most tend to play down the role of the British, or focus on an aspect of the Middle East, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, which Britain kept out of as much as possible, particularly after 1956.

President Nasser is perhaps unique in modern British history in that he seemed to vex the British Conservative Party establishment far more than he ever became a figure of hate among the British public. To many Conservative MPs, he never advanced beyond the rank of colonel. George Brown, the Labour Foreign Secretary, complained in July 1967 about this disrespect in a debate on the recent Six Day War: ‘Not one spokesman on the opposition side of the House has managed to refer to “President” Nasser. The most polite called him Colonel Nasser; the least polite called him Dictator Nasser.’¹⁰ Despite the feelings and exaggerated fears propounded by some Conservatives, Nasser, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, never quite entered the popular pantheon of villains.¹¹ Other Conservative ministers, such as lan Gilmour and Anthony Nutting, were on good terms with him. Nutting resigned over Suez and went on to be a very sympathetic biographer of Nasser. The four Conservative prime ministers who were in office during his leadership mistrusted and feared him to a degree that might surprise contemporary observers. The names of Saladin, Mussolini and Hitler were used consistently and with little historical basis to describe Nasser by senior ministers such as Anthony Eden, Macmillan and Selwyn Lloyd. Kennedy Trevakis, a British High Commissioner to Aden in the 1960s, and a consistent advocate of strong measures against Nasser, perhaps best encapsulates the problem of Anglo-Egyptian relations in the 1950s and 1960s:

Once we had left Suez, we had been told we could expect Nasser to welcome partnership with ourselves and the west. But it was not partnership that he wanted. It was Britain’s position of para-mountcy… Having emerged as a leader of the neutralist world at the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in April 1955, Nasser in effect declared a cold war on Britain, with the object of removing her from the Middle East.¹²

While in general, after Suez, Britain abandoned its own bid for regional paramountcy, it remained resolute in its determination to oppose Nasser’s ambitions to gain its former position. It was the Tory broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph, that held him in most contempt right up until his death, and indeed received a request from the Foreign Office to moderate its coverage of Egypt in 1960.¹³ Liberal and left-wing opinion in Britain had a more ambiguous relationship with Nasser. Richard Crossman was a good example of this, holding him in some regard as an anti-colonial figure, whilst being a passionate supporter of Israel.¹⁴

Paradoxically, Nasser seemed to appropriate the language of one of the most famous foreign policy statements of that most Conservative hero, Winston Churchill. In a speech in Belgium in 1948, Churchill had spoken of Britain being at the centre of three interlocking circles of Commonwealth/Empire, the English-speaking alliance and Europe. Churchill claimed that

These three majestic circles are co-existent and if they are linked together there is no force or combination which could overthrow them or even challenge them. Now, if you think of the three interlinked circles you will see that we are the only country which has a great part in every one of them.¹⁵

British foreign policy until the 1960s was dominated by an attempt to both balance and maintain these pre-eminent roles. Rather coincidentally, Nasser outlined in his pamphlet, The Philosophy of the Revolution, that Egypt too lay at the centre of three overlapping though not necessarily conflicting circles—an inner Arab, an African and a broader Islamic circle which encompassed the greater part of the first two. This policy was only formulated into a foreign policy doctrine after Nasser had seized power for himself in 1954.¹⁶ It will be a central argument of this book that these similar, yet mutually incompatible, ‘geopolitical conceits’¹⁷ were one of the primary reasons for tension in Anglo- Egyptian relations for the following decade. They became part of the vital national interests of the two countries. For Britain, the three circles were equally important until the late 1960s, when the European circle became dominant, while Nasser always emphasised the importance of the Arab circle. The Arab circle had the potential to allow resource-impoverished Egypt to become a strong player on the world scene. During abortive Arab unity talks in 1963, he spelt out such a vision:

With the inclusion of Iraq in a union of Egypt and Syria the unified state would secure the oil wells and pipelines in the east to the Suez Canal, from Asia to Africa. The Iraqi army would be brought up to Israel’s borders. Its possibilities would be greater than those of France, commanding a population of fifty million.¹⁸

A shared history and past were also of the utmost importance. Nasser emphasised the suffering at the hands of Turkish and Western oppressors that Egypt and the other Arabs had been through:

There is no doubt, the Arab circle is the most important and the most closely connected with us—its history merges with us, and we have suffered the same hardships, lived the same crises and when we fell prostrate under the spikes of the horses of conquerors they lay with us.¹⁹

Despite the Anglo-Egyptian agreement of 1954 and the end of the British presence in Egypt, the need to expel Britain from the Arab world was an overriding concern of Nasser. The English-speaking alliance with its wish to bring the Arab states into the Western alliance system threatened Nasser’s ambitions in the Arab circle whilst the Commonwealth/Empire circle with its oil requirements in the Gulf, communications through the Middle East and the sprawling British African Empire impinged on both the African and Arab circles. The Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram, pointed out the incompatibility of the British and Egyptian foreign policy philosophies in the starkest terms, arguing that: ‘Nationalism and Imperialism were as incompatible as darkness and light.’²⁰

Nasser also shared with all contemporary British prime ministers from Churchill to Wilson a ‘delusion of grandeur’, that their respective countries had the ability to ‘punch above their weight’ in international affairs, forgetting that it was past fortune that had gained Britain the Empire and an accident of geography that Egypt lay on the Suez Canal adjacent to the Arab world. The British felt that they needed to maintain their global role for economic reasons. Conversely the vast expenditure on men and material to defend possessions against foes such as Nasser merely fed Britain’s need to dominate the strategically and economically important Middle East. Even when Britain in the early 1960s abandoned its formal empire with almost unseemly haste, it attempted to maintain its influence through the ‘east-of-Suez’ role.²¹ Nasser, likewise, in his attempt to dominate the Arab circle overextended his reach in Syria and the Yemen, and most spectacularly in his final bid to seize leadership of the Arab world in the build-up to the Six Day War. Between 1955 and 1967, Britain felt bound to oppose virtually all of Nasser’s bids for region...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chronology of Events
• 1 Introduction: Delusions of Grandeur in the Middle East
• 2 The Historical Context of Anglo-Egyptian Relations, 1800–1952
• 3 The New Regime and the Base Agreement, 1952–54
• 4 Suez, 1956
• 5 Issues and Stakes in the Aftermath of Suez, 1957
• 6 Crisis in Syria, 1957
• 7 From the Creation of the United Arab Republic to the Iraqi Revolution, 1958
• 8 Decision for Détente, 1958–59
• 9 The Difficulties of the Anglo-Egyptian Détente, 1960–62
• 10 Aden, Yemen and the Decline of the Anglo- Egyptian Détente, 1962–63
• 11 Confrontation with Nasser, 1964
• 12 The Labour Government and Nasser, Part 1: 1964–66
• 13 The Labour Government and Nasser, Part II: 1966–67
• 14 Britain, Nasser and the Six Day War, 1967
• 15 The Six Day War and its Aftermath
• 16 Conclusion
• Bibliography