Britain, Nasser and the Balance of Power in the Middle East, 1952–1967 (review)

British policy in the Middle East has been the subject of numerous academic studies, but none until now has focused specifically on policy toward Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt from the 1950s through the Six-Day War of June 1967. Robert McNamara (not to be confused with the former U.S. defense secretary), who received his doctorate in history from the University of Ireland, Cork, has been able to draw on recently declassified documents relating to the Syrian crisis of 1957, the Yemeni crisis of 1964, and the run-up to the June 1967 war, as well as to British-Egyptian relations more generally.

McNamara makes a number of confident claims about the continuing signifi- cance of the Anglo-Egyptian relationship for a decade or so after the Suez affair of 1956. During that time, Britain remained the most important external power in the Middle East with significant military and colonial positions to defend, and Nasser remained Britain's most persistent opponent. McNamara uses this point to provide a convincing rationale for Britain's extraordinarily troubled history with Egypt: diplomatic relations severed by Egypt twice, in 1956 and 1965; the perception among a majority of British politicians that Nasser was behind every anti-British action in the Middle East; and the inability of the five British prime ministers to "establish any reasonable modus vivendi" with the Egyptian president "for any length of time" (p. 1).

Nevertheless, it still comes as something of a shock to be told that on four occasions after 1956 the British government actively considered military action to bring Nasser down. Two of these occasions, McNamara writes, arose during the prime ministership of Harold Macmillan, whose antipathy to Nasser was in no way diminished by the way Macmillan himself, as chancellor of the exchequer, had pulled the plug on the British attack on Suez by warning of the huge dangers posed by America's readiness to use economic sanctions to secure a British withdrawal.

Unfortunately the evidence needed to back up such claims remains murky in the extreme. The declassified documents provide no more than hints and whispers. Nor, as it turns out, was there anything really substantial about the plans themselves. For example, on the first occasion, what Macmillan seems to have been toying with was a convoluted plot in which the Iraqis were to be encouraged to invade Syria in 1957, drawing in the Egyptians and thereby creating a possible pretext for an attack on Egypt itself. But as McNamara observes, "whatever ambitious plans Macmillan might have desired were unlikely ever to be carried out" (p. 105).

Another equally murky situation occurred in 1964 under Macmillan's successor, Alec Douglas-Home, when Nasser was believed to be using the presence of Egyptian troops along the Yemeni border with Britain's Aden protectorate to train and equip the anti-British resistance, possibly in response to covert British efforts to supply arms to Nasser's local opponents, the Yemeni royalists. For a short period of time, members of the Douglas-Home cabinet were willing to contemplate the use of military force against the Egyptians, including an air attack on an Egyptian-manned fort. But lack of U.S. support combined with diminishing confidence in the bellicose role being played by Britain's high commissioner in Aden, Sir Kennedy Trevaskis (not "Travakis" as rendered in the book), led the prime minister to try to find a way to calm things down.

Such alarms and excursions aside, McNamara provides a useful account of the ups and downs of the Anglo-Egyptian relationship, including the long, drawn-out negotiations regarding compensation for British-owned property seized in 1956, the brief détente in the early 1960s when Nasser's stewardship of the Egyptian/Syrian union was seen as a vital contribution to keeping Middle Eastern Communism at bay, and the return of acute tension as a result of the confrontation in southern Yemen as well as the fact that Britain...