Decision-Making in Great Britain during the Suez Crisis (review)

The Suez crisis was by almost any measure a modest affair in and of itself. It was brief; it involved few troops or casualties; and it left little or no imprint "on the ground" in Egypt. But the effects of this misguided venture were profound and far-reaching. For the first time since the Anglo-American alliance was created in 1940, the United States and Great Britain clashed openly and angrily. Suez was thus the moment when American domination of the "special relationship," long obvious to those who managed the connection, was displayed for the world to see and for the British to understand in all its ramifications. Having brought about this display of British weakness—in its military, diplomatic, and economic dimensions—the Suez disaster sealed the fate of Prime Minister Anthony Eden and led to his retirement soon thereafter.

The crisis, almost a non-event, had still more serious consequences worldwide. The U.S. failure to defend British and French neocolonial pretensions in the Middle East foretold the end of empire more broadly. The trend toward decolonization had begun much earlier, and it had been abetted by a genuine antipathy to empire on the part of the United States. But during the first decade of the Cold War, the United States became more tolerant of its European allies' desire to hold on to—or, in the French case, to reassert control over—their colonial possessions. The U.S. attitude was in fact schizophrenic, as anti-imperialism regularly jostled with indulgence toward European imperialism, producing contradictory outcomes in various settings. But Suez made clear that imperialism had no future and that American power would not routinely be deployed on behalf of a system that was destined to fail. Not surprisingly, the effective end of the French and British empires came in the decade after Suez. That meant, almost by definition, the consolidation of nationalist-led governments in much of the developing world. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the local victor in Suez, was in his pan-Arab nationalism a highly appropriate symbol of the new order of post-colonial regimes that would be independent of and often hostile to the West.

Bertjan Verbeek's book on the decision-making process that led to the Suez crisis is both a useful contribution to the literature on how governments make decisions and a timely reminder of the continuing importance and interest of the affair. Verbeek's starting point is "the puzzle" surrounding the British government's disastrous decision to proceed without American support. Experts repeatedly warned Eden's government that the Eisenhower administration was opposed to British plans to impose a settlement on Egypt and to confront Nasser after the nationalization of the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956. Eden and his closest aides chose to ignore this looming fact, and as negotiations dragged on throughout the fall they decided instead to accept a convoluted scheme concocted by the French general Maurice Challe. The idea was to arrange an Israeli attack on Egypt that would serve as the pretext for a joint Anglo-French military intervention. The aim was to reassert control over the Canal and, it was hoped, to inflict such a defeat on Nasser that he would be weakened and perhaps even toppled. The foolishness of the plan only underscores the question of why the British government went ahead when its most important ally was so clearly unwilling to back it.

To explain this puzzle, Verbeek deploys a fairly complicated method to examine "crisis decision-making" among small groups. Central to this approach is the concept of "groupthink" propounded by Irving Janis and others. When combined with decision-makers' prior "belief systems"—which involve both a "cognitive map" and an "operational code"—groupthink inhibits the flow of information and the formation and consideration of alternative policies during a crisis. Whether groupthink occurs is dependent mainly on the impact of domestic political institutions and the organizational framework for taking decisions within the government.

In the case of Suez...