Many narratives of the 1956 Suez Crisis situate the British, French, and Israeli military attack on Egypt as yet another chapter in Cold War history. Months earlier, Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir had nationalized the Suez Canal in retaliation for the withdrawal of Anglo-American financing for Egypt's most important development project at the time, the Aswan High Dam. The United States and Britain had allegedly done so in light of ʿAbd al-Nasir's move towards the Soviets. The oft-told story is one of powerful Cold Warriors and a grabby Middle Eastern dictator. Unsolved, however, is the crisis’ rather puzzling end—the unified Soviet and U.S. demand that the tripartite forces leave Egypt. Frequently omitted aspects of the conflict, such as the general cooling-off of Anglo-American relations in the Middle East and the schizophrenic behaviour of both parties to the United States–Egypt relationship, remain unaddressed.
In Origins of the Suez Crisis, Guy Laron suggests that competition for influence among various domestic interest groups in the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Egypt was a driving factor in their respective foreign policies leading up to and during the crisis. Laron classifies these groups into two categories: (1) internationalists, who generally favored some form of engagement with foreign markets; and (2) isolationists, who generally sought to protect their home market. Laron implies that an economic logic shaped membership in either group. American investment bankers, oil companies, and machinery manufacturers saw potential profits in the industrialization of Egypt and other Third World countries and sought to marshal U.S. aid toward penetrating new markets and extracting raw materials, whereas farmers and consumer goods manufacturers potentially in competition with these countries resisted. In Britain, the banking and service sector sought to reinternationalize the pound sterling, whereas industry feared the loss of captive markets in the former Empire. In the Soviet Union, Stalinists seeking autarky clashed with Khrushchev, who wanted to increase foreign trade. And in Egypt, ʿAbd al-Nasir's revolution empowered an urban and educated effendi class, which sought state intervention in the economy as a means of generating bureaucratic jobs for itself, whereas pre-1952 governments and their domestic and foreign allies had courted foreign capital and staffed the bureaucracy with European technocrats.
Laron utilizes this conceptual framework to situate the Suez Crisis within a broader context: the collapse of the British Empire, shifts in the socioeconomic composition of the Third World, and the ripening of the United States as a global economy and superpower. He portrays Britain's goals in Egypt as fundamentally incompatible with the desires of the effendiyya, whereas in the United States, internationalists in the Executive Branch supported a developmental partnership with the new Egyptian leadership. The isolationist tendencies of the Eden government, the U.S. Congress, and the effendiyya ultimately made previously committed Anglo-American financing of the High Dam impossible. British and French participation in the subsequent attack was an attempt by isolationists in those countries to reacquire the Suez Canal and preserve the protectionist benefits of their crumbling empires. The whole conflict being more a product of Western isolationism than Cold War competition, Khruschev was willing to cooperate with Eisenhower in its resolution. As such, Laron claims that his argument not only rivals existing accounts but also resolves the outstanding puzzles that they left behind.
One of this book's principal merits is its creative challenge to the dominant Cold War narrative of the Suez Crisis through the application of sectoral analysis, which posits that the features of an economy's dominant sector fundamentally shape its domestic economy and politics. There can be no doubt that ʿAbd al-Nasir faced dual pressures to develop the Egyptian economy as quickly as possible while also maintaining the support of the effendiyya, or that sectoral interests in the U.S. Congress have affected that country's aid commitments to Egypt at different points in time. Yet the ambitiousness of the principal claim—that a driving force in the conflict was competition between isolationists and internationalists—demands more conceptual rigor, theoretical substantiation, and historical evidence than this book delivers.
Most problematically, Laron overstretches the internationalist-isolationist conceptual dichotomy to such a degree that it loses much of its meaning. It is highly dubious that “internationalists” or “isolationists” in a postcolonial state, a decaying Empire, a rising superpower, and a communist totalitarian state have much in common other than a vague attraction or aversion to something international. It is also necessary to specify which aspects of the international economy are embraced or rejected. Trade protectionism and heavy state intervention, commonly identified with the isolationist camp, can be perfectly compatible with foreign direct investment, which Laron claims to be a tenet of the internationalist camp. As such, some of the attributes that Laron assigns to certain groups are confusing. For instance, he claims that the effendiyya rejected import-substitution industrialization (ISI) as an internationalist mode of economic development (p. 60), when ISI has historically been a source of market protectionism and jobs for middle-class managers. Some of the positions that Laron assigns to the two groups even seem to defy an economic logic, as, for example, when he states that, “Isolationists also demanded that recipient countries sign formal military treaties with the United States in which they declared their allegiance to the Western camp in the Cold War” (p. 192). Other claims seem contradictory, such as the characterization of Southern senators as “free traders by nature but wholly opposed to foreign aid” (p. 196), which follows the argument that American foreign aid during the Cold War was largely promoted by market-hungry internationalists. And in Britain, the “isolationists” actually advocated international action to preserve the remains of the Empire.
These problematic conceptual foundations and the book's failure to systematically undermine rival hypotheses make it difficult for Laron to situate his narrative as the most plausible. As the text lacks a thorough overview of the Egyptian economy and ʿAbd al-Nasir's political survival strategy, one is left wondering if ʿAbd al-Nasir's two-handed game was a function of genuine economic need rather than the pressure of an isolationist effendiyya. Further, there is little evidence in favor of the claim that internationalist interest groups could so thoroughly permeate the U.S. foreign policy establishment and guide the national security agenda (and, even if they did, it is unclear why they would care about Egypt in contrast to larger markets that were richer in resources). One might still believe that U.S. abandonment of Britain at a critical hour was instead bound to the perception that Britain could not contain Soviet influence in its former territories. Another unanswered question concerns why Israel, which had a mixed relationship with Britain at the time, participated in the conflict.
At the same time, Laron draws on an impressive range of multilingual source material and takes the reader through interesting forays to Bandung, London, Washington, and Delhi, as well as into the thoughts of officials, operatives, and politicians, both renowned and lesser known. At the very least, readers will come away with a creeping suspicion that economic interests did occasionally manifest themselves in national foreign policies during the lead-up to the Suez Crisis and may in some way have affected the course of events. As such, this book initiates an interesting project that other scholars of Egypt and potentially of other industrializing economies may also join. Indeed, it is this reviewer's belief that such an undertaking, which at once delves deeply into the economies, societies, and governmental machinery of multiple countries, will require a corpus of work to make the argument persuasively.
