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IS THIS THE AMERICAN SUEZ?  
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Van Gosse
July 13, 2026
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_ If the pointless war on Iran is a historical marker equivalent to
Suez in ignominy, the question becomes, what do we do with this
“Decline of Empire” moment? _

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Flash back to the boastful, triumphalist 1990s, as in Madeleine
Albright’s telling Matt Lauer in 1998, “If 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.”
Well, goodbye to all that. The United States 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’ vast
“empire of liberty” constrained only by the Soviet Union’s
upstart “empire of justice,” as Odd Arne Westad put it in his
now-classic _The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the
Making of Our Times_ (2006).

Following Tehran’s 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—but 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 United States would never regain its dominance
circa 1945, when we had a majority of the world’s industrial
capacity, a nuclear monopoly, and the only globe-spanning naval and
air forces, plus the legitimacy granted by defeating fascism and
creating the United Nations. Nonetheless, from 1991 to 2016, various
Bushes, Clintons, and Obama still hailed US preeminence. That’s 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—not anyone anywhere.

For me, the augury came in 2010. For many years, I taught how in a
single generation, 1870–1900, the United States outstripped Great
Britain, the fabled “workshop of the world,” in the key markers of
industrial capacity—coal, 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.

Here is where the metaphor of “Suez” comes in. That word has no
meaning to Americans, but in Europe, in particular the United Kingdom,
it is a trope as powerful as “Vietnam” here, a single word
conveying loss, hubris, humiliation, and failure. Why?

In 1952, the Free Officers Movement led by Gamal Abdel Nasser deposed
Egypt’s King Farouk and with him remaining British influence over
their longtime 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
United States, 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.

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’s 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).

Suez was the sunset of European imperialism. Never again would the
United Kingdom step out of line. It has diligently, sometimes
abjectly, backed the United States 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
“the Anglo-Americans.”

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 “special relationship” 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.

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
[[link removed]], right now the go-to place for
“trans-partisan” thinking about an ethical and practical foreign
policy.

He began by pointing out that while the US has certainly suffered
humbling defeats—the Bay of Pigs in 1961; intervention in Southeast
Asia, 1964–1975; Iraq, 2003–2011; Afghanistan, 2001–2020—the
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’s
global hegemony is now seriously undermined.

If our politicians and policymakers could be made to acknowledge this
new reality, there is the chance of new foreign and military policies
that 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 “America First,” 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
“forever wars” have not made us safer, and the United States
should not merely accept but actively support a multipolar world based
upon global cooperation at a level never seen before.

Certainly, those premises are just a start, and the devil will be in
all the details—region 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.

_Van Gosse is a professor of history emeritus at Franklin and Marshall
College and cochair of __Historians for Peace and Democracy_
[[link removed]]_. You can find him on Substack
at __https://substack.com/@vangosse_ [[link removed]]

_Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without__ permission_
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Distributed by__ PARS International Corp_
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* History
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* Iran
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* Suez
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* Gamal Abdel Nasser
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* imperialism
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