The traveling Briton has lost his old status in Europe. The British tourist with his limited allowance of francs, marks, or lire is no longer the "milord" of the nineteenth century. That role, with its privilege of being the target for every taxi-driver's avarice, now belongs to the Americans.
During the peak years of the cold war between 1945 and 1953, Western Europe was threatened by military attack from Russia. The power to whom the Europeans looked primarily was not Britain but the United States. It is a disheartening reflection that, despite this military dependence, successive American administrations failed to create the reservoir of trust which would induce the nations of Western Europe to accept our policies and follow our lead once the Russians altered their tactics.
Despite their precarious economic situation, there has been a revival of British prestige and influence in Western Europe. To some Americans Britain may appear a small, almost insignificant power. But to a small European nation Britain, with its bombers, its atomic and hydrogen bombs, its thriving new industries, presents a different picture. Another factor is the gradual movement of Britain toward some form of union with the Continental nations, as evidenced in the Macmillan government's approach to a common European market. Finally, there are doubts about wisdom of United States policy, especially as it is practiced and elucidated by John Foster Dulles.
Western Europe was not impressed by the statesmanship of Mr. Dulles at two serious crises: one arising from the possibility of Western military intervention in Indochina, and the other emerging after the collapse of the European Defense Community. Nor was Mr. Dulles's attitude toward America's closest allies, the British, in the period of British and French intervention in Egypt calculated to create the impression that the United States, as an ally, would remain true in good times and bad.
Nowhere has British prestige and influence declined more rapidly as in the Middle East. Yet nowhere are Britain's economic interests greater.
Recent events have emphasized the economic connection between Britain and the Middle East. But the ties that connect a group of islands set in the cold waters of the northern ocean with the arid, sunny lands of that area were established long before the discovery and exploitation of oil reserves made the Middle East vital to Britain's economic life. Sidney Smith, Abercromby, Nelson, Gordon, T.E. Lawrence—a whole battalion of British heroes won fame in the area. The empty deserts and clamorous cities have exercised a fascination on Britons for more than two centuries, have called explorers and scientists, missionaries and merchants eastward. Nor was the Middle East's strategic importance to Britain born with oil. Nelson destroyed the French on the Nile, Kitchener triumphed at Khartoum, and Montgomery fought at El Alamein because the land bridge between Asia and Africa and later the Suez Canal were considered vital to the existence of Britain as a world power.
Centuries of involvement in the Middle East resulted in a strong British bias in favor of the Arabs. No such favoritism was extended to the Egyptians as a people, although certainly the British were at first as willing as the Americans to trust Colonel Abdel Nasser of Egypt. This bias, amounting in some cases to a blind affection, played its part in the formulation of British policy especially in the years when the state of Israel was taking shape. One example is the fact that the British consistently underrated Jewish military ability and overrated that of the Arabs.
Egypt's seizure of the Suez Canal on July 26, 1956, was a punctuation point in the long history of Britain's involvement in the Middle East. No British government could permit control of the canal to be vested in a single country, especially a country so openly hostile, without going to the utmost lengths to break that control. Given the shipping and pipeline facilities of the summer of 1956, the passage of oil tankers through the canal was essential to Britain's economic life.
Even when the program for the industrial use of nuclear power has been completed, oil will remain important to the British economy. The British government of the day was angry with Colonel Nasser, it was worried by Soviet infiltration in Egypt. But the primary cause of Britain's intervention in Egypt was that she could see no other way of securing freedom of passage through the canal. Reliance on oil was an elemental fact of Britain's position as a world power; it is extraordinary that the administration in Washington was so surprised when Britain took steps to insure her oil supply.
The influence of Britain in the Middle East at the time of intervention in Egypt was extensive. Tiny states on the Persian Gulf and on the south side of the Arabian peninsula behind the Aden protectorate were managed, if not ruled, by a few scores of officials from London. Iraq, Britain's firmest friend in the Middle East, benefited from British technicians and advisers. In Egypt and Jordan and Syria, Britain's prestige had fallen. But as late as January 1956, when I toured the Middle East, there was an evident respect for Britons and for British power, a respect which often was difficult to reconcile with the actual dimensions of that power.