And while we owe a great debt to Ike as a soldier, his record as a president is more chequered. In later life, he identified his failure to support Britain over the Suez affair as the single greatest mistake of his career, and he was right: what misery the Middle East might have been spared had the Anglosphere stood united against Nasser. ~Daniel Hannan

As Alex Massie said, the push by some British Conservatives to “elevate Reagan to saintly status is embarrassing.” To do so by trashing Eisenhower is even worse. When it comes to embarrassing the British right, Daniel Hannan never fails, but his paean to Reagan is excessive even by his standards.

One of the most important moments of Eisenhower’s genuinely sane, responsible leadership was his response to the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt. Had the attack succeeded in forcing Nasser to yield, and had the U.S. acquiesced in the attack, it would have changed nothing in the modern Near East for the better, but it would have guaranteed that the entire world saw the U.S. as not much more than an enabler of latter-day Anglo-French colonialism. Any pretensions the U.S. made to respecting international law would have been shown to be a joke. Britain and France might have been more satisfied, but the region would hardly have been better off.