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.Yet, however cynical his stratagem may have been, it was notlack of principle but flawed statecraft that caused it to founder.At Suez, Eden provedto be incompetent in Bismarck s art of the possible, or what J.K.Galbraith calledthe knack of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.He was neitherruthless enough nor sufficiently pragmatic to excel in Realpolitik.Instead, he revisitedthe diplomatic battlefields of the 1930s, paid off old scores with the Americans, andfailed to recognize that what we could do in 1882, we could not do in 1956.24 Oneof Eden s principal failings was to ignore the strength of world opinion regardinga moral issue that had become intrinsic to the practice of international relations.Although the West, the East and the non-aligned were selective in identifying themanifestations of imperialism, they were all anti-imperialists now.Ironically, threeyears before the Suez crisis, Eden himself had warned his Cabinet colleagues of thenew international climate to which they had to accustom themselves: In the secondhalf of the twentieth century we cannot hope to maintain our position in the MiddleEast by the methods of the last century. 25Just as the lessons of Suez had been anticipated before 1956, other post-Suezdevelopments had pre-Suez origins.By exposing the vulnerability of sterlingand the reserves, the crisis reinforced the need to press on with existing policies,notably reduction of overseas expenditure.Soon after he became Prime Minister inJanuary 1957, Macmillan initiated a cost benefit analysis of colonial dependencieswhich appears to be refreshingly hard-headed.It was not, however, induced bythe Suez debacle.It resurrected one element of a full-scale policy review whichEden had initiated six months earlier but which had been interrupted by the Suezcrisis.26 Macmillan tempered the economic evaluation of empire by stipulating thatany recommendations made on financial and economic grounds would have to be23 Eden, secret telegram from Geneva to Foreign Office, 30 April 1954, TNA, PREM11/649, also reproduced in Anthony Eden, Memoirs: Full Circle (London, 1960), p.109.24 Trevelyan, The Middle East, p.129.25 Egypt: The alternatives , memorandum by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,16 February 1953, C(53)65, TNA, CAB 129/59.To Eden s discomfiture, Brook re-circulatedthis memo to Cabinet in April 1956; see Kyle, The Mandarins Mandarin , p.65.26 See David Goldsworthy (ed.), The Conservative Government and the End of Empire1951 1957 (London, 1994), pt 1, pp.61ff, 91.Suez 1956 and the Moral Disarmament of the British Empire 235weighed against the political and strategic considerations involved in each case.27Like Disraeli, Macmillan had no use for colonial millstones, but paid considerableattention to global influence.As it happened, officials were not spurred into endingempire.They felt that the remarkable achievement of independence by Ghana on 6March 1957, which had originally been planned for 1956 and therefore had nothingto do with Suez, was exceptional.It had proceeded at a faster pace than the restof West Africa could take, and did not provide a model for East Africa, where a strengthening of United Kingdom interest was required.Early withdrawal fromsettler colonies would bring to a shabby conclusion an important and hopefulexperiment in race relations & and a decline in United Kingdom prestige much moresignificant and enduring than the self-congratulatory applause of the anti-colonial,anti-Western world.28 Whitehall s elaborate profit and loss account of the coloniesproved to be so evenly balanced that, with the exception of Cyprus, decolonizationwas put on the back-burner for the next two years.29 Indeed, while the Suezoperation had revealed the limited strategic value of Cyprus and cleared the way fordisengagement, constitutional change in Malta, where the expedition had assembled,was scarcely affected by the post-Suez reappraisal.30 Thus, contrary to the fears ofprogressives that Suez would delay decolonization and to the hopes of radicals thatit would accelerate it, policy returned to keeping change within bounds.31A few months after Macmillan had called for a cost benefit analysis of thecolonial empire, Duncan Sandys defence white paper announced the biggestchange in military policy ever made in normal times.32 It was a response in part tothe overriding priority of regaining national solvency and in part to an appreciationof deterrence strategy, both of which had exercised Macmillan as minister ofdefence and chancellor of the Exchequer.It had been foreshadowed by analyses in1954 55, and should be seen as one in a series of attempts by post-war governmentsto live within their means
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