Cover of Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy, used as the shared image for this summary series.
In 1994, Henry Kissinger published the book Diplomacy. He was a renowned scholar and diplomat who served as the United States National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. His book provides an extensive sweep of the history of foreign affairs and the art of diplomacy, with a particular focus on the 20th century and the Western World. Kissinger, known for his alignment with the realist school of international relations, inquires into the concepts of the balance of power, raison d'État, and Realpolitik across different eras.
His work has been widely praised for its scope and intricate detail. Yet, it has also faced criticism for its focus on individuals over structural forces, and for presenting a reductive view of history. Also, critics have also pointed out that the book focuses excessively on Kissinger's individual role in events, potentially overstating his impact. In any case, his ideas are worthy of consideration.
This article presents a summary of Kissinger's ideas in the twenty-first chapter of his book, called "Leapfrogging Containment: The Suez Crisis".
You can find all available summaries of this book, or you can read the summary from the previous chapter of the book, by clicking these links.
Soviet Entry Into the Middle East
The 1955 Geneva Summit encouraged talk of peaceful coexistence, but Kissinger stresses that the Cold War remained a contest in which one side’s gain was usually treated as the other side’s loss. In Europe, American power had stabilized the Western sphere and deterred Soviet adventurism. The European stalemate left room for movement elsewhere. The 1955 arms sale to Egypt, formally arranged through Czechoslovakia and paid for with Egyptian cotton, showed that Moscow would now compete in areas previously treated as Western preserves.
Kissinger contrasts Khrushchev’s initiative with Stalin’s caution. Stalin had viewed the developing world as distant, unstable, and hard to control, and he had avoided staking Soviet credibility there. Khrushchev saw that arms supplies could penetrate nationalist movements without imposing the burdens of direct rule. Soviet weapons would inflame Arab nationalism, complicate the Arab-Israeli conflict, and challenge Western predominance, but the cost to Moscow was low and the disruption to the West could be enormous.
The pressure fell first on Great Britain. Egypt was one of the central remnants of Britain’s imperial position after India, and the Suez Canal was the main artery for oil shipments to Western Europe. Britain’s regional standing still rested on Iran as an oil base and Egypt as a strategic base, with British forces in Egypt, Iraq, and Iran and with British influence extending into Jordan through Glubb Pasha’s command of the Arab Legion. This structure had already begun to unravel. Mossadegh’s nationalization of Iranian oil in 1951 showed that Britain needed American backing to use force near the Soviet border. The United States helped encourage the 1953 coup that removed Mossadegh; British preeminence in Iran remained broken. In Egypt, the 1952 overthrow of King Farouk by young officers produced a new nationalist leadership centered on Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Nasser embodied the anticolonial politics that Britain and France feared and that the United States misunderstood. He had been humiliated by the Arab defeat in 1948 and regarded Israel’s creation as part of a longer Western colonial process. He also aimed to drive Britain and France from the region and to present himself as the champion of Arab nationalism. His rise exposed the conflict between the United States and its European allies over colonialism. Truman and Eisenhower opposed British military action in Iran or Egypt, publicly invoking the United Nations and privately recognizing that association with British imperialism was politically untenable.
Nasser, Nonalignment, and Western Miscalculation
Kissinger argues that American anticolonialism contained its own illusion. American leaders tended to imagine that new states would resemble the United States after independence. They also assumed those states would naturally prefer Washington once they saw that it differed from the old European empires. Many leaders of the new states, however, governed in authoritarian fashion, used Marxist language, and saw the East-West conflict as leverage against the old imperial system. To them, American opposition to colonialism did not make the United States a natural partner; it made Washington a useful member of the Western camp from which concessions could be extracted.
Containment and collective security nonetheless drew America deeper into the Middle East. The United States believed it had to oppose Soviet expansion wherever it appeared and sought regional alliance structures similar to NATO. The region’s leaders usually regarded Moscow less as a threat to their independence than as a bargaining tool. Nasser, in particular, had little incentive to identify himself with the West. His domestic position depended on proving that Egypt had gained not merely independence but freedom of maneuver from the Western democracies. Nonalignment was therefore both foreign policy and domestic theater.
Britain and the United States initially assumed that Nasser’s resistance reflected grievances that could be satisfied. Britain hoped to preserve a modified version of its historic dominance. The United States hoped to draw him into containment. The Soviet Union, by contrast, recognized that supplying arms to Nasser could outflank Western defenses without requiring Soviet control over Egypt’s internal politics. Nasser used all three impulses against one another. The more the West tried to placate him, the more he balanced Western benefits with gestures toward Moscow or toward radical neutralism.
Kissinger’s preferred response would have been to isolate Nasser after the Soviet arms deal and show that Soviet support brought no advantage. If Nasser then abandoned Moscow, or if a more moderate leader replaced him, the West could have followed with a generous diplomatic initiative. In 1955, however, the democracies chose conciliation. The attempt to build the Baghdad Pact revealed the same confusion. The Eisenhower administration wanted a Northern Tier of states along the Soviet Union’s southern flank, but the alliance lacked common purpose, common danger, and useful military integration. Syria refused to join, Iraq feared Arab radicalism more than Soviet invasion, Pakistan worried about India, and Nasser saw the Pact as an attempt to restore colonial influence and isolate Egypt.
The Failed Search for a Western Formula
Having failed to punish Nasser for the Soviet arms deal, Britain and the United States tried to draw him away from Moscow through Arab-Israeli peace and Western financing for the Aswan High Dam. The peace initiative rested on the belief that the 1948 Arab defeat and Israel’s establishment had driven Arab radicalism. For Nasser, genuine peace with Israel would have damaged his claim to Arab leadership. Egypt demanded the return of the Negev and the repatriation of Palestinian refugees. Israel, which would not surrender half its territory or accept a demographic transformation that could undo the Jewish state, insisted on formal peace and open borders. Arab leaders found that demand intolerable because it implied permanent acceptance of Israel. The deadlock created a pattern that lasted until Sadat’s initiative in Egypt and even longer elsewhere in the Arab world.
The Aswan Dam project was equally contradictory. Eden, although he wanted Nasser removed, became a leading advocate of Anglo-American financing for the dam in order to keep Soviet economic influence out of Egypt and preserve Britain’s diplomatic role. In December 1955, Britain and the United States offered support in two stages, with the United States carrying most of the burden. The offer was strange because both governments distrusted Nasser and worried about his drift toward Moscow. They hoped that eventual funding would give them influence over Egypt, much as earlier financial dependence had given the West power over Egypt in the nineteenth century.
Instead, the dam increased Nasser’s confidence. He haggled over terms, refused to assist Arab-Israeli negotiations, and encouraged pressure against British interests. When Britain pushed Jordan toward the Baghdad Pact, pro-Egyptian riots helped force King Hussein to dismiss Glubb Pasha in March 1956. Then, on May 16, Nasser recognized the People’s Republic of China, directly affronting the United States and especially Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was strongly committed to Taiwan. In June, Soviet Foreign Minister Dmitri Shepilov arrived in Egypt with an offer to finance and build the dam, allowing Nasser to play the superpowers against each other.
Dulles responded on July 19 by withdrawing the American offer. He believed that he had made a major diplomatic chess move: if the Soviets refused to build the dam, Nasser would be humiliated; if they accepted, Moscow would have to justify spending vast sums abroad while its satellites remained poor. Kissinger judges that Dulles confused propaganda opportunities with real strategy. A dramatic move required a willingness to run serious risks, and Dulles had no clear plan for the Egyptian reply. The French ambassador in Washington immediately saw that Nasser could retaliate through Suez, where he could hurt Britain and France directly.
On July 26, 1956, Nasser gave his answer in Alexandria. He cast the issue as a struggle against imperialism and linked Egypt’s cause to Arab nationalism, Israel, and Algeria. By invoking Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French builder of the canal, he gave the code word for Egyptian forces to seize the Suez Canal Company. The nationalization transformed Dulles’s withdrawal of dam financing into a public triumph for Nasser. It also placed Britain and France before a direct challenge to their prestige, their economic interests, and their remaining imperial position.
Britain, France, and the American Dilemma
The crisis revealed sharp differences among the Western democracies. Eden saw Nasser through the memory of Britain’s imperial responsibilities and the trauma of appeasement. France was even more hostile because Nasser’s support for anticolonial movements threatened French positions in Morocco and especially Algeria. French leaders feared that Soviet arms to Egypt could reach Algerian guerrillas. Guy Mollet compared Nasser to Hitler, a judgment Kissinger considers analytically inexact. Arab nationalism sought to erase borders imposed after the First World War rather than conquer historically settled nations. Even so, once Eden and Mollet framed the issue as another test against appeasement, retreat became politically and psychologically almost impossible.
Dulles’s first response appeared to support the Anglo-French position. In London on August 1, he argued that one country, especially Egypt, could not control the canal and that world opinion had to be mobilized in favor of international operation. He proposed a Maritime Conference of twenty-four principal users to design a regime for free navigation. This began a process that frustrated Britain and France because Dulles combined hard objectives with reluctance to use force. Eden and Mollet wanted to overthrow or humiliate Nasser. Eisenhower and Dulles were more concerned about long-term relations with the Arab world and feared that military action would inflame anticolonial sentiment for a generation.
Kissinger argues that both sides misread the situation. Britain and France imagined that removing Nasser might restore the pre-Nasser order, which had already disappeared. The United States imagined that another nationalist leader might still join a containment system, although regional nationalism was built on freedom from such alignment. Analytically, Kissinger believes that America should have recognized Nasser’s militant nationalism as a major obstacle and should have helped demonstrate that reliance on Soviet support was costly. If Washington had to separate itself from Britain and France, the moment should have come after Nasser’s defeat, when the United States could have supported moderate nationalist aims while avoiding a restoration of colonial rule.
Instead, American policy wounded its allies and left the strategic problem unsolved. Britain and France could not accept that defeating Nasser would require concessions to a successor. Washington underestimated how much its allies’ sense of themselves as great powers mattered to their willingness to carry international burdens. It chose to distance itself diplomatically from Britain and France, then publicly oppose them and demonstrate the limits of their independent power.
Dulles deepened the confusion. Kissinger portrays him as a knowledgeable but moralistic statesman whose religious sense of American exceptionalism often sounded like a sermon to European leaders. In London, his combination of moral rhetoric, procedural creativity, and refusal to use force appeared evasive. He supported the stated aim of internationalizing canal operations, but each proposal became a stalling device once he ruled out coercion.
The Maritime Conference produced a majority plan that accepted Egyptian sovereignty while creating an international operating regime. Nasser rejected it on September 10. Dulles then proposed a Users’ Association that would collect dues and operate through ships stationed outside Egypt’s territorial waters, but he undercut that proposal by again renouncing force on October 2. He also stated that the United States would play an independent role in colonial issues outside the NATO treaty area. Kissinger notes that this legal distinction later returned against Washington when American allies refused support in Vietnam and during the 1973 Middle East War. For Britain and France in 1956, it meant that Washington did not define its Middle Eastern interests as they did.
From Diplomacy to the Anglo-French-Israeli Gamble
Eden increasingly argued that the issue was no longer Nasser alone but Soviet penetration. Dulles probably understood the danger, but he was constrained by Eisenhower, who was passionately opposed to war. Eisenhower believed that the United States was strong enough to resist later and that Suez did not justify force. Eden and Mollet misread him, assuming that he was too amiable or politically constrained to oppose them publicly. They ignored repeated warnings, including Eisenhower’s argument that Western military action would unite much of the Near East, North Africa, Asia, and Africa against the West.
The final diplomatic chance came at the United Nations. Britain and France had earlier avoided the UN because they expected the Nonaligned states to support Egypt. Nearing the end of diplomacy, they turned to it partly to show that institutional procedures had failed. For a moment, the UN produced progress: Egyptian, British, and French representatives accepted Six Principles close to the Maritime Conference’s majority view. These included Egyptian operation, a supervisory users’ board, and arbitration of disputes. On October 13, however, the Security Council approved the principles but the Soviet Union vetoed their implementation.
Kissinger treats that veto as the last chance for peace. The United States might have pressured Egypt to have Moscow withdraw the veto, or it might have warned the Soviet Union that America would stand with its allies in a showdown. Instead, Washington tried to preserve both allied friendship and its opening to the Nonaligned world. That attempt to straddle incompatible policies made war likely.
Britain and France then accepted a scheme devised with Israel. Israel would invade Egypt and move toward the canal. Britain and France would issue an ultimatum requiring both Egypt and Israel to withdraw from the Canal Zone, knowing that Egypt would refuse. They would then intervene to occupy the canal in the name of free navigation. Kissinger is severe about this maneuver. It contradicted the prior diplomacy, which had focused on creating an international regime for the canal, and it made Britain and France appear to need Israel in order to confront Egypt. Israel lost the advantage of appearing as the state seeking peace with neighbors who refused negotiations. British positions in Jordan and Iraq were weakened, and Eisenhower was offended by what looked like an effort to exploit his electoral circumstances.
The military execution compounded the political error. Israel invaded Sinai on October 29. Britain and France issued their ultimatum on October 30 before Israeli forces had reached the canal. On October 31, they announced intervention. Their troops landed four days later and never achieved their mission of rapidly seizing the canal. The delay gave international opposition time to gather and made the operation appear both aggressive and indecisive.
America’s Break With Its Allies
The United States reacted with moral and diplomatic fury. On October 30, it submitted a Security Council resolution demanding Israel’s withdrawal behind the armistice lines, with no parallel condemnation of Egyptian-sponsored raids or the Arab blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba. When Britain and France entered the conflict, Eisenhower condemned their use of force and took the matter to the General Assembly after the expected British and French vetoes in the Security Council. Kissinger notes the irony that such an absolute rejection of force had not guided American policy in Guatemala two years earlier and would not guide American intervention in Lebanon two years later. Suez was the first and only time the United States voted with the Soviet Union against its closest allies.
The General Assembly demanded an end to hostilities on November 2 by an overwhelming vote and soon moved toward a United Nations peacekeeping force. By November 5, the force had been established. The same day, Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian uprising, while the UN offered only token opposition. Kissinger stresses the bleak simultaneity: America was helping humiliate its closest allies over Suez while the Soviet Union was suppressing a revolt in Eastern Europe with far greater brutality.
The Soviet Union then exploited the split in the Western alliance. On the night of November 5, Soviet leaders issued communications presenting Moscow as Egypt’s protector. Bulganin warned Britain and France in language that hinted at rocket attacks, threatened Israel’s existence, and proposed joint Soviet-American military action to end the conflict. He also suggested that the war could become a third world war. Kissinger describes this as characteristic Khrushchev bravado. In 1956, the Soviet Union was far weaker than the United States, especially in nuclear forces, and was not in a position to risk a showdown.
Eisenhower rejected joint military action with Moscow and warned that the United States would oppose any unilateral Soviet move. Yet Soviet threats increased American pressure on Britain and France. On November 6, a run on sterling became alarming, and the United States refused to calm the market. Isolated in Parliament, unsupported by the Commonwealth, and abandoned by Washington, Eden accepted a ceasefire. British and French troops had been on Egyptian soil for less than forty-eight hours.
Kissinger acknowledges that the Anglo-French expedition was badly conceived, poorly implemented, and lacking a clear political objective. The United States could not have supported such an operation. His criticism is directed at the brutality and absoluteness of America’s dissociation. In his view, Washington had room for a less absolute break. It could have slowed the UN process while acknowledging the background provocations. Those provocations included earlier schemes for international canal operation, the Aqaba blockade, and Egyptian-supported raids. It could then have linked condemnation of Britain and France with condemnation of Soviet repression in Hungary. By treating Suez as a purely legal and moral issue, the United States ignored the geopolitical effect of giving Nasser an unconditional victory backed by Soviet arms and Soviet threats.
The Conceptual Error and Its Aftermath
Kissinger identifies three American premises behind the Suez policy. First, Washington treated alliance obligations as limited strictly by legal documents. Second, it treated force as inadmissible except in narrowly defined self-defense. Third, it believed that opposition to Britain and France would allow the United States to emerge as the leader of the developing world. Each premise reflected a real American tradition, but each proved inadequate to the crisis.
Eisenhower argued that law required one code for friends and opponents alike. Kissinger answers that diplomacy cannot be exhausted by legal impartiality. In practice, statesmen must distinguish among cases and between allies and adversaries. Dulles later interpreted Article 1 of the NATO treaty as obliging members to settle disputes peacefully, but Kissinger considers this a uniquely pacifist reading of a military alliance. The deeper issue was not whether NATO legally covered Egypt. It was whether an alliance carried some tacit obligation to understand an ally’s view of vital interests beyond the treaty area. George Kennan urged forbearance, and Walter Lippmann argued that once Britain and France had acted, the American interest lay in their success rather than their humiliation.
The hope of winning the developing world also failed. Nixon celebrated America’s independence from Anglo-French colonial policy and expected a major political gain. Kissinger argues that no such gain occurred. Nasser did not moderate his policies. Admitting that American pressure had saved him would have damaged his radical nationalist prestige. Instead, he intensified attacks on pro-Western Arab governments. Within two years, Iraq’s pro-Western government fell to a radical regime, Syria moved further in the same direction, Egypt later intervened in Yemen, and Egyptian-American relations broke in 1967. Because the United States inherited the positions Britain abandoned, Nasser’s radicalism eventually turned against Washington.
Nor did the broader Nonaligned world become pro-American. Its leaders learned that Nasser had gained by playing the superpowers against each other. They also learned a Cold War asymmetry: pressure on the United States tended to produce declarations of goodwill and attempts at accommodation, while pressure on the Soviet Union risked counterpressure. Over time, criticism of American policy became ritual at Nonaligned conferences, whereas condemnations of Soviet actions were rare and careful. Kissinger treats this pattern as a calculation of interest rather than a moral judgment.
The crisis also changed the Atlantic alliance. Anwar Sadat, then an Egyptian propagandist, concluded that only the United States and the Soviet Union were true great powers. America’s allies reached the same conclusion. Suez showed them that European and American interests were not automatically congruent. France drew the lesson that it needed an independent nuclear capability and, under de Gaulle, later moved toward a Franco-German framework symbolized by the 1963 treaty with Adenauer. Britain drew a different lesson. It accepted permanent subordination inside the American “special relationship,” hoping to influence decisions made in Washington rather than to act independently as a great power.
For the Soviet Union, Suez was dangerously encouraging. Within a year of the Geneva spirit, Moscow had entered the Middle East, crushed Hungary, and threatened Western Europe while international outrage focused mainly on Britain and France. Khrushchev interpreted American conduct as weakness rather than principle. The Egyptian arms deal had divided the Atlantic alliance and increased Soviet leverage among developing states. That apparent success contributed, in Kissinger’s interpretation, to Khrushchev’s later confrontational style, beginning with the Berlin ultimatum of 1958 and ending in the humiliation of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
America Inherits the Vacuum
The final irony is that Suez marked America’s ascension to global leadership. The United States used the crisis to free itself from allies it associated with colonialism, Realpolitik, and balance-of-power diplomacy. Power still brought consequences. Vacuums are filled, and after Britain and France were pushed out of their historic Middle Eastern roles, the United States had to shoulder the regional balance itself.
This transformation appeared almost immediately. On November 29, 1956, Washington declared that threats to the territorial integrity or political independence of Baghdad Pact members would be viewed with the utmost seriousness. This was diplomatic language for an American security commitment to states Britain could no longer protect. On January 5, 1957, Eisenhower asked Congress to approve what became the Eisenhower Doctrine: economic aid, military assistance, and protection against communist aggression in the Middle East. In his State of the Union address, he widened the principle further by defining American vital interests as worldwide and linking the United States to every free nation.
The chapter ends by stressing the burden created by America’s attempted separation from European imperialism. During the crisis, Washington still hoped to manage the developing world through the United Nations and a moral distinction between American anticolonialism and European colonialism. Within two years, however, American forces would land in Lebanon under the Eisenhower Doctrine. A decade later, the United States would face Vietnam largely alone, while many allies invoked arguments similar to those Washington had used during Suez. In Kissinger’s account, Suez was therefore both a moral rupture and a strategic initiation: America repudiated the old imperial powers, but it inherited the responsibilities they could no longer carry.
You can read the summary of the next chapter of the book by clicking this link.