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.14 Headsof mission overseas  Gladwyn Jebb in Paris, William Hayter in Moscow, HumphreyTrevelyan in Cairo, Malcolm MacDonald in New Delhi  were ignored, and someofficials in Whitehall contemplated resignation.One young diplomat, Evan Luard,did resign, stating:I belong to a generation which was brought up in the belief that for one nation to undertakethe use of armed force against another in order to promote its own interests is morallywrong.I grew up during a war which, I understood, was fought for the establishment ofthat principle.In flouting the UN Charter, the government  seems to have betrayed everything forwhich I had believed that this country stood.15 It was a view shared by many of hiscontemporaries, who, as they rose to prominence in the coming years, would notforget  the lessons of Suez.End of EmpireLooking back on the Suez debacle more than thirty years later, Denis Healeyremarked that it was not only  a demonstration of moral and intellectual bankruptcy ;it was also  a turning point in postwar history since  it signified the end of Britain simperial role outside Europe.16 This judgement has been elaborated along the12 Hennessy, The Prime Minister, p.220.13 See Keith Kyle,  The Mandarins Mandarin , in Kelly and Gorst (eds), Whitehall,pp.64 78.To date, no trace of any British copy of the Sèvres Protocol has been found,but otherwise, the  main story that emerges from [the files released in December 2006] isWhitehall s concern to gather up, safeguard and release papers on Suez.Far from any cover-up, they reveal that a systematic search was conducted within government departments tocollate and review all Suez-related records, many of which were not registered at the time. See Release of files relating to the Suez crisis in December 2006 ,.14 Anne Lane,  The Past as Matrix: Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, Permanent Under-Secretaryfor Foreign Affairs , in Kelly and Gorst (eds), Whitehall, pp.214 16.15 Adam Roberts,  Luard, (David) Evan Trant (1926 1991) , Oxford Dictionary ofNational Biography (Oxford, 2004).16 Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London, 1990), pp.169, 213.232 Reassessing Suez 1956following lines.Suez revealed Britain s incapacity to act without American approvaland reduced its much-vaunted ability to  punch above its weight.Britain s leadershipof the Commonwealth was gravely damaged, and it became  Enemy Number Oneat the United Nations.17 Suez ended Britain s  moment in the Middle East , fannedcolonial resistance in Africa and called into question the future of  fortress colonies.It taught the British government no end of a lesson in international realities, and was a moment of blinding revelation for many British people that the days of empirewere numbered.18 In short, Suez dropped the curtain on the age of deference andhammered home the need for a post-imperial role.Consequently, this interpretationcontinues, after the Suez crisis the British abandoned imperial pretensions and hopesfor an independent foreign policy to return to the fold of the special relationship asvery much the junior partner.At the same time, Macmillan conducted a cost benefitanalysis of colonies, radically reviewed Britain s role in global defence, acceleratedAfrican decolonization, moved away from the Commonwealth and towards Europe,and began a reappraisal of Britain s historic commitments east of Suez which werewound up by the Labour government in the late 1960s.Thus, having been morallydisarmed in 1956, within a decade the empire had all but disappeared.Historians should always be on their guard against falling for the fallacy of posthoc ergo propter hoc, and, as more material has become available on policymaking,they have grown increasingly circumspect about investing the crisis with unwarrantedresults.Eden was neither the first nor the last government minister to lie for hiscountry abroad and to his countrymen at home.Moreover, Suez was neither the firstnor the last instance of imperial aggression to cause a public outcry.As Britain sambassador to Egypt later remarked:In 1882, the bombardment of Alexandria and the British occupation of Egypt had dividedBritish opinion on the same lines.John Bright had declared the British action to be  amanifest violation of international and moral law , while Lord Randolph Churchill hadaccused Mr Gladstone of an act of criminal aggression against Egypt and demanded thathe should be thrown out of Egypt bag and baggage.19Furthermore, the end of empire had been signalled at intervals from the loss of theNorth American colonies to the fall of Singapore in 1942 which surely destroyedBritish authority in Asia.Indeed, the age of imperialism was pronounced dead in theSecond World War, at the end of which, A.J.P.Taylor observed, the British peoplehad  ceased to believe in empire.20 And yet the empire re-formed after each reverse:17 See Wm [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]