He was determined not to find himself on the losing side of the argument between ‘old’ imperialism and ‘new’ post-colonial nationalism

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 286.

“As we have seen, the British had agreed to withdraw their forces from the Canal Zone, accomplishing this by June 1956. A committed devotee of international institutions since the 1920s, Eden forswore ‘the methods of the last century’ and knew that a compromise was necessary with Egyptian nationalism. Churchill’s views oscillated between resistance and compromise, often depending on whether he viewed the Egyptians through the prism of the past, the dimension he increasingly lived in. During the negotiations he dilated on appeasement, saying that ‘he never knew before that Munich was situated on the Nile’. Yet reality also impressed itself on him. Britain could not afford the luxury of maintaining 80,000 troops at Suez at an annual cost of £56 million. Respected military advisers advised him that such concentrated bases were a compact target for atomic bombs, and that the garrisons should be dispersed to Cyprus, Gaza, Jordan, Kenya and Libya.

Churchill hoped the Americans would help him square the circle. Presuming on his wartime relationship with Eisenhower, he tried to inveigle the US into stationing a few troops on the Canal as part of a regional defence organization, to permit continued Egyptian subordination under a new guise. His letters to Eisenhower, Dulles and Under Secretary Bedell ‘Beetle’ Smith conjured up a host of useful demons: the Cairo mob, the ‘dictator’ Naguib, the interloping Russian ‘bear’, the strain of anti-Americanism in the British Labour Party, German Nazis in Egyptian employ (unknown to him, mainly there courtesy of the CIA) and even ‘50,000 British graves’ in the western desert. This emotive and incoherent guff made little impact on Ike, for like Dulles he was determined not to find himself on the losing side of the argument between ‘old’ imperialism and ‘new’ post-colonial nationalism, least of all in a region whose oil was vital and where America’s only firm friend was Saudi Arabia. The Americans also simply did not understand the importance of the Canal to the British government and to French shareholders, for whom it was like a family heirloom. The Americans wanted as many Arab states as possible gathered in a regional alliance to repulse the Soviets, not a scrappy colonial conflict which would divide those states from the West, not least because of the wild card of Israel, which feared such an Arab alliance being armed by the US.