In July 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) nationalized the Suez Canal Company, surprising the world. The government of France, in whose capital of Paris the company was headquartered, and the British government, the company’s plurality shareholder, sought to reverse nationalization in court, but failed—even though they clad their case in the language not of imperial self-interest but, rather, of international public interest. The time in which such language was somewhat acceptable, even at home, was passing, and the Suez Crisis played a big part in this final act.

At the same time, the two governments early on after the canal nationalization decided to remove Nasser by force, for re-compensation was not their central concern. France believed Nasser was enabling the FLN, which in 1954 had started Algeria’s War for Independence, and Britain wanted some say in the canal, which had for decades been its worldwide empire’s “swing-door,” as a member of parliament, Anthony Eden (1897-1977), called it in 1929. In August 1956 France began discussing a joint operation with Israel, which wanted Nasser gone, too, and the Red Sea opened for Israel-bound ships. In early October the two were joined by Britain. On the 29th, Israel invaded the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. On the 30th, France and Britain gave Israel and Egypt a 12-hour ultimatum to cease hostilities, or they would intervene—and Anglo-French forces bombed Egyptian forces from the 31st and on November 5-6 occupied the canal’s northern tip. Although a power play, “Operation Musketeer,” like the court case, could not be an open imperial move anymore, then, and did not present itself to the world as such. No matter: especially in colonies and postcolonial countries, people were outraged.

More problematically for France and Britain, Washington was incredulous. This Middle Eastern affair triggered the worst crisis of the 1950s between America’s rising international empire and Europe’s descending empires, and indeed clarified and accelerated that descent. President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) fumed that Prime Ministers Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet (1905-1977) had disregarded his administration’s opposition to military action. Worse, they had deceived him about their intentions. And worst, their attack on Egypt undermined the supreme US tenet: Soviet containment. The Americans were by association tainted by their NATO allies’ imperialist move while the Soviets looked good—on November 5 they offered Egypt troops and threatened to nuke London, Paris, and Tel Aviv—and that although they had just repressed an uprising in Hungary.

On the very day of the ultimatum, October 30, Eisenhower washed his hands of that move on live US television, and the US mission at the UN organized a cease-fire resolution vote in the Security Council. France and Britain vetoed it. Although sharing its European allies’ emotions about Nasser, the US administration withheld critical oil and monetary supplies from them to bring them to heel and withdraw from Egypt—after which, it promised, they would be warmly welcomed back. It ceased most bilateral communications and froze almost all everyday social interactions with its two allies, even cancelling a scheduled visit by Eden. And it badgered its allies at the UN, supporting an Afro-Asian resolution that on November 24 called Israel, Britain, and France to withdraw forthwith. On December 3, the British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd took the floor in the House of Commons.

Eighty-seven years after the Suez Canal’s completion in 1869 and less than two months after the last British troops had left it in June 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) on July 26, 1956, nationalized the Suez Canal Company.

Nasser announced the step in the text printed here: a speech that would become a classic in the annals of twentieth-century decolonization worldwide. The English translation used here is included in a documentary publication printed in 1956 by the US State Department in Washington, DC, titled The Suez Canal Problem; it is an excerpt of the whole speech.

Nasser pronounced the speech in the Egyptian Mediterranean city of Alexandria in front of a crowd of tens of thousands, during which he also uttered the code word signaling his security forces to occupy the company’s assets and offices in Egypt. Nasser’s step took the world by surprise. The French government, the Suez Canal Company’s Paris headquarters and its many French shareholders, and the British government that was the company’s largest shareholder and that on July 23, following Washington’s lead, had retracted a 1955 offer to back a World Bank loan to Egypt: all they were outraged. (France and Britain would fail to reverse nationalization in court; the outcome, in Britain, of the ensuing Franco-British-Israeli attack is the focus of another document dated 1956 in this collection). Diametrically opposed was the dominant reaction among Egyptians, other Arabs, and people in newly independent and still colonialized countries. They were ecstatic. The reason was not so much that Nasser nationalized the canal in order to find a new way to finance a dam at Aswan, on the Nile, although that project was a linchpin of Egypt’s modernization, a history analyzed in Guy Laron’s Origins of the Suez Crisis (2013). The reason was more existential. Nasser’s act turned himself, Egypt, and by proxy the entire non-white world from a passive object of history into an active subject. “Die of your fury,” Nasser told the Americans, and by extension Europe’s descending imperial powers. And by calling the shots—“Today, citizens, the Suez Canal Company has been nationalized. This order has been published in the Official Journal. It has become a matter of fact”—he symbolically subjugated Britain and France, humiliating those once so powerful empires as only a non-white ex-colonial subject could. Even a cut as historic as India’s independence, in 1947, had not hurt Britain this much. Technically speaking Britain had co-initiated that final act of the British Raj, and it was a loss of a limb, however crucial. Nasser, by contrast, had stabbed the empire in its very heart—a story classically narrated in Keith Kyle’s Suez (1991).

In 1901, Iran granted an oil concession to a foreigner: William Know D’Arcy (1949-1917), a British national who before had worked in mining in British imperial Australia and New Zealand. The 60-year concession gave the Iranian government, then led by the Qajar dynasty (1794-1925), 16-percent of annual profits. In 1908, D’Arcy’s engineers found oil in the southwestern province of Khuzistan, bordering Ottoman Iraq. The same year, D’Arcy’s company became the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC; from 1935 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company [AIOC]; from 1954 British Petroleum [BP]), which by 1913 began to commercially exploit Iranian oil. In 1914, the British government bought 51-percent of APOC’s shares and hence effectively its control, which mattered particularly to the Navy, the world’s largest, that was shifting from coal to oil combustion. In 1933, the 1901 concession was moderately revised. Iran now received 20-percent of annual profits, and APOC made other minor concessions, agreed on in a meeting between Reza Shah Pahlavi (1878-1944, r. 1925-1941) and APOC Chairman John Cadman (1877-1941).

Iranian AIOC laborers’ and the Iranian public’s complaints about the status quo grew audible after the Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran opened up the political sphere in 1941. Later that decade, nationalist parliamentarians, including Muhammad Musaddiq (1882-1967), began to demand a new agreement along the lines of the 50-50 profit-sharing deal that Venezuela’s 1943 Hydrocarbons Law had successfully imposed on foreign oil companies. AIOC refused. Its 1949 counter-offer was accepted by Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919-1980, r. 1941-1979) but rejected by parliament, not the least because in 1950 also Saudi Arabia got a 50-50 profit-sharing deal with ARAMCO. In April 1951, parliament elected Musaddiq Prime Minister.

Having for a long time criticized AIOC’s role—and by extension Britain’s influence—in Iran, Musaddiq demanded AIOC respect sovereign control. When it refused, he cancelled its concession and nationalized its assets in Iran. The following two years were fateful. They ended with a CIA-led coup d’Etat that in 1953 ousted Musaddiq, turned Iran into a US client, and allowed the US government to bring (initially not quite willing) US oil companies into Iran, sidelining BP, and to create a consortium in 1954 that paid Iran 50-percent of its profit. Moreover, Iran’s oil nationalization drama was an international affair. Anticolonial masses treated Musaddiq as a hero also outside Iran, as Lior Sternfeld shows in “Iran Days in Egypt: Mosaddeq’s Visit to Cairo in 1951” (2015). And Christopher Dietrich’s Oil Revolution (2017) demonstrates that among anticolonial elites in many non-Western countries and at international organizations like the United Nations (UN), Iran’s case sharpened conversations about and demands for economic decolonization, i.e. for politically independent countries’ right to also exercise sovereign rights over their resources. (Publics were involved in these debates, too.)

In New York, Iran’s UN delegate Djalal Abdoh (1909-1996) was a leading voice in this regard, together with colleagues especially from Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. Moreover, Musaddiq himself addressed international organizations on economic decolonization. In June 1952, he was at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, The Netherlands, which would accept Iran’s claim that AIOC’s nationalization was a domestic Iranian rather than an international legal matter. And on October 15, 1951, he addressed the UN Security Council’s 560th meeting in New York, speaking in French; as he was frail, after a while Allahyar Saleh, Iran’s ambassador to the United States, took over.

A defensive brief written for Harold Macmillan’s April 1962 talks with John F. Kennedy that outlines the similarities and differences between British and US approaches towards the Sino-Soviet split.

Written for the visit of Italian Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani (January 1962), this brief describes the Sino-Soviet split as well as Albania's international relations.

Kissinger details a plan to hold separate talks with the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain with the aim of bringing them closer to the US position and press them to share responsibility for success.

The CIA’s National Intelligence Daily for Wednesday, 13 June 1990 December 1989 describes the latest developments in USSR, West Germany, UK, Romania, Hong Kong and Canada.

The CIA’s National Intelligence Daily for Friday, 8 June 1990 describes the latest developments in USSR, West Germany, Peru, Warsaw, Nepal, India, Jordan, Morocco and Bulgaria.

The CIA’s National Intelligence Daily for Thursday, 7 June 1990 describes the latest developments in China, UK, USSR, Romania and Czechoslovakia.

The CIA’s National Intelligence Daily for 26 July 1990 describes the latest developments in Liberia, Germanys, the Soviet Union, India, the United Kingdom and Yugoslavia.