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Guy Laron , Origins of the Suez Crisis: Postwar Development Diplomacy and the Struggle over Third World Industrialization, 1945-1956 (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press , 2013). Pp. 260. $55.00 cloth.
Global Dilemmas
Many narratives of the 1956 Suez Crisis situate the British, French, and Israeli military attack on Egypt as yet another chapter in Cold War history. Months earlier, Jamal (Abd al-Nasir had nationalized the Suez Canal in retaliation for the withdrawal of Anglo-American financing for Egypt's most important development project at the time, the Aswan High Dam. The United States and Britain had allegedly done so in light of (Abd al-Nasir's move towards the Soviets. The oft-told story is one of powerful Cold Warriors and a grabby Middle Eastern dictator. Unsolved, however, is the crisis' rather puzzling end--the unified Soviet and U.S. demand that the tripartite forces leave Egypt. Frequently omitted aspects of the conflict, such as the general cooling-off of Anglo-American relations in the Middle East and the schizophrenic behaviour of both parties to the United States-Egypt relationship, remain unaddressed.
In Origins of the Suez Crisis, Guy Laron suggests that competition for influence among various domestic interest groups in the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Egypt was a driving factor in their respective foreign policies leading up to and during the crisis. Laron classifies these groups into two categories: (1) internationalists, who generally favored some form of engagement with foreign markets; and (2) isolationists, who generally sought to protect their home market. Laron implies that an economic logic shaped membership in either group. American investment bankers, oil companies, and machinery manufacturers saw potential profits in the industrialization of Egypt and other Third World countries and sought to marshal U.S. aid toward penetrating new markets and extracting raw materials, whereas farmers and consumer goods manufacturers potentially in competition with these countries resisted. In Britain, the banking and service...