British Diplomatic Oil Crisis: Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Geopolitical Rivalries in the Persian Gulf: Drawing a Lesson? Or Sir Anthony Eden‘s Delusion of Grandeur.
America
decided, for her own reasons, to intervene in internal Iranian
politics. Moreover, as Eden acknowledged (rather resentfully), America
demanded her price for undertaking her new responsibilities in the Middle
East. It seems safe to conjecture that this resentment was at least partly
responsible for Eden’s decision to by-pass the Americans in 1956. But the
Suez crisis only revealed what had been implicit in the Iranian crisis that
preceded it: that Britain could not act effectively without American
assistance and support; and that she would only get that assistance and
support if America identified her own self-interest as involved, and only on
America’s own terms – thus not necessarily to the liking of the British
Government.
Britain and
America could be seen as pursuing policies in the Middle East
that were parallel, but parallel lines never converge, and Britain hoped
that American interests and her interests would converge. They seemed to
converge in the last stages of the Iranian crisis, but in fact America had
her eye on the overall communist threat and was less sympathetic to
Britain’s first rank concern about oil. America saw no virtue in propping up
the British Empire anywhere in the world and therefore, if Britain were to
act in what seemed to be a purely imperialistic mood (e.g. over Suez), that
support would not be forthcoming and the Iranian situation would not be
forthcoming and the Iranian situation would not be duplicated, i.e. Britain
would find herself unable to act in concert with America as in the end she
did over Iran. America was not trying to do Britain down, but rather was
trying to ease Britain into a realistic appreciation of her changed role in
the world, and was therefore furious because Britain in Suez would not
acknowledge the sense of that policy, but seemed to be under the illusion
that she was still an imperial power. At the time of the Suez crisis America
was eyeball to eyeball with Russia over Hungary and America felt that
Britain’s action had distracted the world from the Hungarian crisis and had
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