A Lesson for Our Times

A Global Crisis

The Hungary-Suez Crisis was global in scope, no other crisis of the Cold War having been so, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, which, although usually thought to have been the greatest threat to peace in the period, involved principally just three nations, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. Hungary-Suez involved all four major powers, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union as belligerents, and the United States as peacekeeper, and besides Hungary, Egypt and Israel, many others as members of NATO, the Sino-Soviet Bloc, the Commonwealth, the non-aligned nations, of which India was the foremost, and, for those nations not included in these groupings, members of the United Nations and mainly Arab nations and the Afro-Asian Bloc, whose influence grew as the crisis accelerated. And it involved most of these nations actively, so that American diplomacy became riveted to a single urgent goal, that of assuring world peace, as it hadn’t been since World War II, when the struggle to defeat Germany, Italy and Japan touched all peoples, continents and oceans.

Also involved were the leaders of these nations, beginning with British Prime Minister Anthony Eden as the crisis’ principal architect, and following in this approximate order, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin and Vyacheslav Molotov of the Soviet Union Communist Party’s ruling body, the Presidium, Gamal Abdul Nasser, president of Egypt, Imre Nagy, as he was returning to power and then as premier of Hungary, and President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles, the former becoming the principal player toward the end, and Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary general of the United Nations, who acted largely in concert with the United States.

Moreover, there was a second tier of prominent players, including, also in approximate order of importance, French Prime Minister Guy Mollet and his foreign minister, Christian Pineau, Eden’s foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Harold Macmillan, Eden’s most ardent supporter in the Cabinet, Wladyslaw Gomulka as he regained power in Poland on a track similar to Nagy’s, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies, Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester Pearson, and U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge.

A third tier included many additional prominent leaders. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Arthur Radford was among the best known. Others were two trusted Eden advisers, Ivone Kirkpatrick, permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office, and Patrick Dean, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Soviet Minister of Defense Marshal Georgi Zhukov, Presidium members Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov, Labour Party chief Hugh Gaitskell, CIA Director Allen Dulles, plus a variety of ambassadors, among whom Ambassadors Charles Bohlen in Moscow and Douglas Dillon in Paris were centrally located and highly active.

Hungary-Suez also embodied every major issue of the Cold War, the most challenging being the preservation of world peace so that a general war in which nuclear weapons might be used would be prevented. While this issue dominated U.S. policy-making, it assumed special meaning in 1956 because general war, and specifically World War III, became a possibility virtually from the first moments; for Britain and France immediately threatened to use force against Egypt to resolve the dispute that arose over the Suez Canal after Nasser nationalized the company controlling it. Had the United States supported Britain and France rather than assuming the rôle of peacekeeper, the limited conflicts that eventually occurred in Hungary and Suez would have spread quickly, in all likelihood, and given rise to a war on the world’s two major fronts with all of the major powers participating.

Closely associated with the war-and-peace issue, although a distant second, was the matter of protecting vital interests without using force—Western interests, mainly, but also the national interests of America’s allies directly engaged in the crisis, Britain, France, and Israel. For the most part, the national interests converged in the Middle East and involved a number of complex factors, oil and the canal being the obvious ones, although establishing positions of strategic primacy in the region overrode all others for the British and French, the former in Egypt and the latter in Algeria and North Africa generally. Protecting Western Europe from Soviet attack remained the primary Western interest; and it was here that the United States shouldered the greatest burden even though Britain and France shared it.

Protecting the Middle East from Soviet military incursion, which was Eden’s concern regarding the Suez scheme, had become a vital Western priority by the end of the crisis. Afterward, the United States largely assumed the obligation of thwarting Soviet expansionism in the region because British and French power and influence had been so badly compromised. Washington also greatly extended this obligation to cover other strategic regions, including India really for the first time.

A third major issue was the furtherance of freedom and independence for the nations of Eastern Europe, insofar as this could be achieved by peaceful means, although this