Israel's four-month-long occupation of the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula enabled it to attain freedom of navigation through the Straits of Tiran, but the Suez Canal was closed from October 1956 to March 1957.

[42] In this spirit, Dulles suggested that Nasser negotiate a deal that would see Egypt assume sovereignty over the canal zone base, but then allow the British to have "technical control" in the same way Ford auto company provided parts and training to its Egyptian dealers.

[59] The presence of the last two states was due to the British desire to continue to maintain influence in the Middle East, and Nuri Said's wish to associate his country with the West, as the best way of counterbalancing the aggressive Egyptian claims to regional predominance.

[86] For Nasser, attendance at such events as the Bandung conference in April 1955 served as both the means of striking a posture as a global leader, and of playing hard to get in his talks with the Americans, especially his demand that the United States sell him vast quantities of arms.

[98] Eisenhower wrote in March 1956 that "If Egypt finds herself thus isolated from the rest of the Arab world, and with no ally in sight except Soviet Russia, she would very quickly get sick of the prospect and would join us in the search for a just and decent peace in the region".

[118] After a session of the House of Commons expressed anger against the Egyptian action on 27 July, Eden justifiably believed that Parliament would support him; Gaitskell spoke for his party when he called the nationalisation a "high-handed and totally unjustifiable step".

In a letter to the British Ambassador on 10 September 1956, Ivone Kirkpatrick, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office wrote: If we sit back while Nasser consolidates his position and gradually acquires control of the oil-bearing countries, he can and is, according to our information, resolved to wreck us.

[125] This was especially the case because earlier in 1956 the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had offered the French a deal whereby if Moscow ended its support of the FLN in Algeria, Paris would remain in NATO but become "semi-neutralist" in the Cold War.

On 13 August, Menzies, who had travelled to London from the United States after hearing of the nationalisation and became an informal member of the British Cabinet discussing the issue, spoke on the BBC in support of the Eden government's position on the canal.

[115]: 13–16, 56–58, 84  An elder statesman of the Commonwealth who felt that Nasser's actions threatened trading nations like Australia, he argued publicly that Western powers had built the canal but that Egypt was now seeking to exclude them from a role in its ownership or management.

Britain, in particular, believed that violation of the association rules would result in military force, but after Eden made a speech to this effect in parliament on 12 September, the US Ambassador Dulles insisted "...we do not intend to shoot our way through" the canal.

This was particularly felt in the form of attacks injuring approximately 1,300 civilians emanating from the Egyptian-held Gaza Strip,[138] during the period of Israel's Border Wars The Israelis were also deeply troubled by Egypt's procurement of large amounts of Soviet weaponry that included 530 armoured vehicles, of which 230 were tanks; 500 guns; 150 MiG-15 jet fighters; 50 Ilyushin Il-28 bombers; submarines and other naval craft.

[143] The 16th Independent Parachute Brigade Group, which was intended to be the main British strike force against Egypt, was heavily involved in the Cyprus Emergency, which led to a neglect of paratroop training in favour of counter-insurgency operations.

Yes, all of us will regret it, because it will have done irreparable harm to the prestige and reputation of our country ... we shall feel bound by every constitutional means at our disposal to oppose it.The stormy and violent debates in the House of Commons on 1 November 1956 almost degenerated into fist-fights after several Labour MPs compared Eden to Hitler.

[205] In the early hours of 2 November, the General Assembly adopted the United States' proposal for Resolution 997 (ES-I); the vote was 64 in favour and 5 opposed (Australia, New Zealand, Britain, France, and Israel) with 6 abstentions.

[207] This proposal of the emergency force and the resulting cease-fire was made possible primarily through the efforts of Lester B. Pearson, the Secretary of External Affairs of Canada, and Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

[211] Adenauer maintained to his Cabinet that the French had every right to invade Egypt because of Nasser's support for the FLN in Algeria, but the British were partly to blame because they "inexplicably" shut down their Suez Canal base in 1954.

[213] Although the Soviet Union's position in the crisis was as helpless as was the United States' regarding Hungary's uprising, Premier Nikolai Bulganin threatened to intervene on the Egyptian side, and to launch rocket attacks on Britain, France and Israel.

[221] The supposedly huge Soviet arsenal of ICBMs, with which Khrushchev would wipe out the cities of Britain, France, Israel, and if necessary the United States consisted only of four Semyorka missiles stationed at a swamp south of Arkhangelsk.

Because the Bank of England had lost $45 million between 30 October and 2 November, and Britain's oil supply had been restricted by the closing of the Suez Canal, the British sought immediate assistance from the IMF, but it was denied by the United States.

The fact that the Eisenhower administration itself applied crushing economic pressure to the British and French to disengage from Suez, and that it subsequently forced an Israeli pull-back from the Sinai as well—all of this, one might thought, would won the United States the lasting gratitude of Nasser, the Egyptians and the Arab world.

[245]Nikita Khrushchev's much publicised threat expressed through letters written by Nikolai Bulganin to begin rocket attacks on 5 November on Britain, France, and Israel if they did not withdraw from Egypt was widely believed at the time to have forced a ceasefire.

Khrushchev boasted in his memoirs:[245] Our use of international influence to halt England, France and Israel's aggression against Egypt in 1956 was a historic turning point...Previously they had apparently thought that we were bluffing, when we openly said that the Soviet Union possessed powerful rockets.

It was only with the quiet abandonment of the Eisenhower Doctrine in a National Security Council review in mid-1958 that Nasser started pulling away from the Soviet Union to resume his preferred role as an opportunist who tried to use both superpowers to his advantage, playing on their animosity.

[255] Revise Phase II failed to achieve its aim of breaking Egyptian morale while at the same time, those civilian deaths that did occur helped to turn world opinion against the invasion and especially hurt support for the war in Britain.

[257] The British historian D. R. Thorpe wrote that the outcome gave Nasser "an inflated view of his own power",[116] thinking he had overcome the combined forces of the United Kingdom, France and Israel, failing to attribute their withdrawal to pressure from the superpowers.

American historian Derek Varble commented, "Although Egyptian forces fought with mediocre skill during the conflict, many Arabs saw Nasser as the conqueror of European colonialism and Zionism, simply because Britain, France and Israel left the Sinai and the northern Canal Zone.

"[262] In October 1956, when the Suez Crisis erupted, Nasser brought in a set of sweeping regulations abolishing civil liberties and allowing the state to stage mass arrests without charge and strip away Egyptian citizenship from any group it desired; these measures were mostly directed against the Jews of Egypt.

During the 1960s there was much speculation that Prime Minister Harold Wilson's continued refusals to send British troops to the Vietnam War, even as a token force, despite President Lyndon B. Johnson's persistent requests, were partially due to the Americans not supporting Britain during the Suez Crisis.

The Soviets' burgeoning influence in the Middle East, although it was not to last, included acquiring Mediterranean bases, introducing multipurpose projects, supporting the budding Palestinian liberation movement and penetrating the Arab countries.