{"id":595,"date":"2026-07-13T16:12:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T16:12:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=595"},"modified":"2026-07-13T16:12:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T16:12:03","slug":"is-this-the-american-suez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=595","title":{"rendered":"Is This the American Suez?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Flash back to the boastful, triumphalist 1990s, as in Madeleine Albright\u2019s telling Matt Lauer in 1998, \u201cIf we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.\u201d Well, goodbye to all that. The US is now enduring a singular humiliation akin to that Britain and France suffered 70 years ago in the Suez Crisis. That event, little-remembered here but iconic for the rest of the world, signaled the end of old-style European imperialism. In its wake arrived something new, the Americans\u2019 vast \u201cempire of liberty\u201d constrained only by the Soviet Union\u2019s upstart \u201cempire of justice,\u201d as Odd Arne Westad put it in his now-classic The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times<\/em> (2006).<\/p>\n

Read more The Joy of Watching the World Cup in Gaza<\/a><\/p>\n

Following Tehran\u2019s systematic checkmating of US authority, only an ostrich could deny our decline as a Great Power. Unless you are like Trump and his minions, who think history stops at our shores, the fall of the American imperium was preordained. Sooner or later, other nations would innovate, expand, recover from defeat\u2014but not this soon, most of us thought! Even 50 years ago, while it was regaining strategic equilibrium after the disaster in Vietnam, it was self-evident that the US would never regain its dominance circa 1945, when we had a majority of the world\u2019s industrial capacity, a nuclear monopoly, and the only globe-spanning naval and air forces, plus the legitimacy from defeating fascism and creating the United Nations. Nonetheless from 1991 to 2016, various Bushes, Clintons, and Obama still hailed US preeminence. That\u2019s gone for good. The myth of the sole superpower has been blown to bits by cheap Iranian drones, and no one buys it anymore. Not the Gulf satrapies whose security we guaranteed, not the European Union, warily gearing up for war over Greenland\u2014not anyone anywhere.<\/p>\n

For me, the augury came in 2010. For many years, I taught how in a single generation, 1870\u20131900, the United States outstripped Great Britain, the fabled \u201cworkshop of the world,\u201d in the key markers of industrial capacity\u2014coal, iron, and steel. Twenty years ago, China had been rapidly moving ahead and then it happened: In 2010, their state-directed economy surged past ours. Now it is China that beats its three rivals combined (the United States, Germany, and Japan) in manufacturing output. Still, I presumed a long, slow draw-down of US power in the emerging multipolar world where America still waved the biggest stick.<\/p>\n

Here is where the metaphor of \u201cSuez\u201d comes in. That word has no meaning to Americans, but in Europe, in particular the United Kingdom, it is a trope as powerful as \u201cVietnam\u201d here, a single word conveying loss, hubris, humiliation, and failure. Why?<\/p>\n

In 1952, the Free Officers Movement led by Gamal Abdel Nasser deposed Egypt\u2019s King Farouk and with him remaining British influence over their long-time protectorate. Nasser spearheaded an upsurge of secular, quasi-socialist Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East, and both the US and the Soviets sought good relations with these newly sovereign nations. On July 26, 1956, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, until then controlled by the Franco-British Suez Canal Company. Keep in mind this is an even more vital waterway than the Strait of Hormuz! Without consulting the US, British, French, and Israeli leaders met in secret and agreed on a plan to seize the Canal and depose Nasser. Israel would attack first, and the two others would then invade on the pretext of separating the warring parties and protecting the Canal. On October 29, Israeli forces invaded Sinai and the Gaza Strip and rapidly advanced, joined on October 31 by French and British air and naval forces and troops. Most of the Canal Zone was soon taken.<\/p>\n

Eisenhower was livid at what he correctly perceived as an underhanded betrayal severely undermining US diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East. He immediately applied extreme financial pressure on the British, threatening the pound. And on November 2, the UN\u2019s General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution brought by the US, and endorsed by the Soviets and their allies, requiring an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of all foreign armed forces from Egyptian territory. The French and the British duly retreated, tails between their legs (Israel defied the UN for some months, but eventually pulled back).<\/p>\n

Suez was the sunset of European imperialism. Never again would the United Kingdom step out of line. It has diligently, sometimes abjectly backed the US in all major cases since then. The French went another way. After Charles de Gaulle came back to power in the 1958 coup ending the Fourth Republic, he dispensed with official empire, granting formal independence to 13 African colonies in 1960 while reestablishing French military and diplomatic autonomy from \u201cthe Anglo-Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more South Carolina\u2019s Process to Replace Lindsey Graham Is What Democracy Should Look Like<\/a><\/p>\n

If the current pointless war on Iran is a historical marker equivalent to Suez in ignominy, the question becomes, what do we do with this moment? Will the US become like the British after World War II, desperately seeking a \u201cspecial relationship\u201d with some other power just to stay in the game? Or will we just keep carpet-bombing other countries, to prove a point in which no one believes anymore? As American citizens, we cannot be bystanders. This is a once-in-a-lifetime window to frame a different course for how to relate to the rest of the world. It will not come again.<\/p>\n

Here is a basic outline for how the US can move past delusions of permanent global domination. My modest proposal below is based on a conversation I was part of with Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, right now the go-to place for \u201ctrans-partisan\u201d thinking about an ethical and practical foreign policy.<\/p>\n

He began by pointing out that while the US has certainly suffered humbling defeats\u2014the Bay of Pigs in 1961; intervention in Southeast Asia, 1964\u20131975; Iraq, 2003\u20132011; Afghanistan, 2001\u20132020\u2014the debacle in Iran is worse. The grand strategy of the United States, premised on its unrivaled military capacity to fight two major wars at the same time, has been shredded. When push came to shove, the US could not even open the Strait of Hormuz. Governments around the world, friendly and otherwise, are rapidly internalizing that American security guarantees are unreliable and questionable, and America\u2019s global hegemony is now seriously undermined.<\/p>\n

If our politicians and policymakers could be made to acknowledge this new reality, there is the chance of new foreign and military policies which could achieve some bipartisan support. Their core premise must be that other countries can, will, and should step up to defend themselves. We really would put \u201cAmerica First,\u201d not in the sense the MAGA right uses, of aggression unconstrained by treaties and alliances, but to focus on the common good here at home. Domestic and foreign policies cannot be separated, and we need a Marshall Plan for the United States, to go forward from the present mess of immiseration for the many, and absurd profiteering for the few. Decades of \u201cforever wars\u201d have not made us safer, and the US should not merely accept but actively support a multipolar world based upon global cooperation at a level never seen before.<\/p>\n

Certainly, those premises are just a start, and the devil will be in all the details\u2014region by region, issue by issue (trade, climate, human rights). But let us start, because there will no going back. The alternative, of imperial senescence and entropy, is too horrible to contemplate.<\/p>\n

Read more Lindsey Graham Chose Evil<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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