Thinking atavistically or strategically

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 284.

The ejection of the British from the Canal Zone became an obsession for Egyptian nationalists, particularly among army officers who saw themselves as Urabi’s twentieth-century heirs. From late 1951 there were fitful attacks on British forces, and there was organized unrest among the 60,000-strong Egyptian workforce. What would be the last Wafdist government turned a blind eye to these disturbances, which often involved armed auxiliaries attached to the police. A more robust British response became inevitable when the Conservatives were returned to power in October 1951. The party harboured a vociferous Suez Group with whose strident views Churchill was in sympathy even though their leader, Captain Charles Waterhouse, had been a diehard appeaser in the 1930s. At this stage, Foreign Secretary Eden was not of their persuasion. Late one well-watered December night, Churchill rose from his chair to advance with mock menace on Eden: ‘Tell them [the Egyptians] that if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should never have emerged.’

Yet Churchill’s views varied, depending on whether he was thinking atavistically or strategically. In the first case, he passionately believed that ‘scuttling’ from Egypt and Sudan would be followed by the sudden collapse of colonies in Africa, the British version of the domino theory. But when he thought strategically, as in remarks to three American journalists in January 1952, the Canal was not so vital: ‘Now that we no longer hold India, the Canal means very little to us. Australia? We could go round the Cape. We are holding the Canal not for ourselves but for civilisation. I feel inclined to threaten the Americans that we will leave the Canal if they don’t come in.