After the Suez War, Winston Churchill was asked whether he would have acted as Prime Minister Anthony Eden had done over the 1956 conflict. “I would never have dared to start it,” he said. “And if I had dared, I certainly would not have dared to stop.”
For some, the same could be said of Donald Trump’s war with Iran—that he should not have started it in the first place, but once he had, he should mobilise the institutions of the American state and rally his allies across the world to shape its final chapters, as George H. W. Bush did before the 1991 Gulf War, and as George W. Bush did before the wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.
This is only one point of intersection between the wars of 1956 and 2026. There are more. For instance, both the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz (that has been closed by Iran since America began its attack) are key maritime passages through which so much trade passes that their closure can strangle the global economy. Both the wars, of 1956 and 2026, can be thought of as historical moments that transcend geography and touch the deeper currents of history.
End of an empire
In 1956, Britain, France and Israel went to war over Suez. In the aftermath, the focus was on Israel’s post-war relations with Egypt, the eclipse of the British Empire, the rise of America, and the new dynamics of the Cold War. The objectives had been to topple Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, crush his rising project after the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, and salvage what remained of imperial prestige.
Militarily, the operation was not a failure. The forces advanced rapidly, and Israel achieved its field objectives in Sinai. It was the politics that proved problematic, when Washington forced London and Paris to retreat. Nasser’s regime did not fall and he emerged more audacious, turning away from the Americans and towards the Soviets. He became harsher at home and more expansive abroad, from the short-lived ‘union’ with Syria in 1958 to the Yemen war in the early 1960s.
Israel, for its part, secured a long truce after its withdrawal from Sinai, strengthened its alliance with France, and obtained the Dimona reactor from Paris. Just over a decade later came the June 1967 defeat. Nasser lost Sinai, Assad in Syria lost the Golan, and Palestinian lands were occupied as well.
No Ben-Gurion
Today, Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel is engaged in an existential battle after the attacks of 7 October 2023. After two rounds of war with Iran focused on disabling the nuclear programme, destroying military infrastructure, and assassinating the Supreme Leader and senior commanders, Netanyahu likely assumed that the regime would collapse from within. But despite the scale of the strikes, the regime reconstituted itself in a more hardline form.
