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The Suez crisis is widely believed to have contributed significantly to Britain's decline as a world power. Eden's miscalculation of American reaction to the attack on Egypt was damaging to Britain's reputation and fatal to his career. However, his actions were contrary to received wisdom in Whitehall. The crisis merely confirmed Britain's dependence on the United States and had no lasting impact on Anglo-American relations. Britain's relationship with its informal and formal empire was already changing before 1956, and the turn from the commonwealth to Europe owed little to Suez. Examination of policy reviews in Whitehall before and after the Suez crisis shows that the Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, and Colonial Office were slow to accept the need for change in Britain's world role. Insofar as they did from 1959 it was because of Treasury arguments about the effect of high defence expenditure on the economy, and slow growth of the United Kingdom's population compared with the United States, the European Economic Community, and the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The First Sea Lord's offer to resign as an Anglo-French taskforce sailed to seize the Suez Canal in November 1956 became known following his retirement in 1965. Mountbatten oversaw naval preparations with consummate professionalism, although his praise for British forces' seizure of Port Said was tempered by admiration of the French, and not shared by all Combined Operations veterans. David Astor of the Observer actually opposed the invasion, and was passed information by a dissenting Mountbatten. An ageing Mountbatten's criticism of British–French–Israeli collusion led to his advancing an alternative version of events highly favourable to himself, which protagonists such as Lord Hailsham publicly contested. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article deals with the temporary but striking breakdown of the Anglo-American "special relations " in 1956. It examines the growth of an anti-American sentiment both in the British Cabinet and in a major segment of the Conservative Party. It also demonstrates that France, initially a minor partner in a circumstantial entente, successfully look advantage of this development to eventually shape British decision making in the Suez crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]