The Suez Crisis heralded an era of American leadership and action, while Libya has shown that, though powerful, America intends to rely on its allies to carry larger burdens, and take responsibility for their own regions. America once drove and financed western security, but due to fiscal shortfalls and a decade of conflict, it no longer intends to guarantee European security. ~Patrick McKinney

Let’s think about this for a moment. We can agree that the Suez crisis and the U.S. response to it “heralded an era of American leadership” in the Near East, or at least it marked the eclipse of the old imperial powers, but one thing that Suez and Libya have in common is that neither one of them really had much to do with European security. Perhaps Britain and France believed attacking Egypt served their respective interests because they feared Egyptian control of the Canal, but the security of Britain and France was never really at stake. Taking sides in Libya’s civil war certainly had nothing to do with securing Europe, and the limited U.S. role in the Libyan war should not be taken to mean that the U.S. will ignore existing security commitments to Europe. That’s something very different from throwing massive resources into a war of caprice waged by two European governments embarrassed by their prior dealings with unsavory North African regimes.

As McKinney noted, Eisenhower objected to the attack on Egypt in these terms:

We believe these actions to have been taken in error. For we do not accept the use of force as a wise and proper instrument for the settlement of international disputes.

In the Suez crisis, there was at least some agreement between the U.S. and its European allies that Egyptian control over the Canal was the cause of an international dispute that needed to be settled, but the U.S. objected to the means they employed. The Libyan war was the result of an Anglo-French hunt for a justification that would permit them to involve themselves in Libya’s internal affairs. As Eisenhower saw it, the Anglo-French policy was a misguided response to a real international dispute, and their attack undermined international peace and security. The Libyan civil war was not a conflict that jeopardized international peace and security, but it was one that Britain and France, this time with U.S. support, chose to internationalize.

In fact, what we are seeing in the Libyan war is a willingness on the part of the U.S. to enable Anglo-French military adventurism in a part of the world where the U.S. had previously opposed it. If this is evidence of receding U.S. power, it is a very strange one. The curious thing about this is that Britain and France are no longer equipped to indulge in this adventurism without U.S. help, but even at a time of “fiscal shortfalls” and after “a decade of conflict” the U.S. has facilitated and supported their ill-conceived adventure anyway.