"What is undeniable is that the Munich analogy has had a strong hold over statesmen and -women ever since and has been applied liberally to justify a whole range of policies. Anthony Eden, the British prime minister who succeeded Churchill, employed the analogy to disastrous effect when he tried to deal with Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian dictator in 1936. Like many leaders in what was then called the Third World, Nasser was prepared to take assistance from both sides in the Cold War. He bought arms from Communist Czechoslovakia but also tried to get a loan from the United States to build the Aswan Dam on the Nile. John Foster Dulles, the American secretary of state, was unable to get the loan 'through Congress. In retaliation and to raise the funds he needed, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which up to that point had been owned and managed by the British. Eden's reaction was unequivocal. As British foreign secretary in the 1930s, he had dealt with the dictators. Now he and the world were facing the same thing again. As he wrote in his memoirs, ‘'Success in a number of adventures involving the breaking of agreements in Abyssinia, in the Rhineland, in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in Albania had persuaded Hitler and Mussolini that the democracies had not the will to resist, that they could march with the certitude of success from signpost to signpost along the road which led to world dominion.... As my colleagues and I surveyed the scene in those autumn months of 1936, we were determined that the like should not come again.” But Nasser was no Hitler intent on conquering his neighbours. Rather, he was a nationalist who badly needed resources to develop his own country and stake out a position of leadership in the Middle East. The British action in collusion with the French and the Israelis to seize the Canal Zone was not only badly conceived; it rallied the Egyptians and the wider Arab world to Nasser’s side. Furthermore, it infuriated the Americans who, far from seeing a repeat of the 1930s, worried about the moral impact on other Third World countries."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandDiplomats of the United KingdomAnglicans from the United KingdomConservative Party (UK) politicians
Original Language: English
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Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History’’ (2008), pp. 175-177
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anthony_Eden
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Anthony Eden
Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, KG, MC, PC (12 June 1897 – 14 January 1977) was a British Conservative politician who served three periods as Foreign Secretary and then a short term as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1955 to 1957. He served as British Foreign Secretary under Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II, having previously resigned the office in opposition of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Nazi Germany. His brief premiership ended afte
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