The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

Eden had courageously resigned as Foreign Secretary in 1938 in protest of the appeasement policies toward Mussolini and Hitler. Now, in the summer and early autumn of 1956, it seemed to him that Nasser was embarked on an all-too-familiar program of aggrandizement. To Eden, Nasser’s Philosophy of Revolution read like Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Nasser, too, wished to carve out a great empire, and in his book, he emphasized that the Arab world should use the power that came with the control over petroleum—“the vital nerve of civilization”—in its struggle against “imperialism.” Without petroleum, Nasser proclaimed, all the machines and tools of the industrial world are “mere pieces of iron, rusty, motionless, and lifeless.” Eden had already attempted compromise. He had invested great personal prestige in the 1954 settlement with Egypt over the withdrawal of British forces from the Canal Zone and had been subjected to considerable attack from a segment of his own Tory party because of it. Now, he felt, he had been personally betrayed by Nasser. As with Hitler, Nasser’s promises were not worth the paper they were written on. Was the seizure of the canal, in violation of international agreements, another Rhineland? Would further attempts to accommodate and appease Nasser merely be another Munich? Eden did not want to go through all that again. Two of his brothers had died in World War I; his eldest son had been killed in World War II. He personally owed it to them and to all the other ...