Might U.S. losing Hormuz end the U.S. empire like Britain’s losing the Suez Canal ended the British Empire?

23 August 2026, posted by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sCGF7gbwBc

“The Suez Crisis stopped the British Empire. Will Hormuz defeat the US? | Laleh Khalili | Deja Vu”

interview of Laleh Khalili, author of (2020) Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula and the even better (2025) Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy

23 August 2026, Al Jazeera

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What happens when a revolutionary movement overthrows a western-backed monarch and then takes control of the world’s most vital waterway going to war with an empire? I’m not talking about Iran or the Strait of Hormuz, but about Egypt and the Suez crisis, because

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that’s exactly what Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser did in 1956 when he nationalized the Suez Canal, prying it out of British and French hands. He was called Hitler on the Nile in British papers as a plot with France and Israel was hatched to invade Egypt and destroy

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Nasser’s attempts at independence. The Suez Canal [connecting the Mediterranean and the Red Seas and thus, by seas, Europe to Asia] remained shut as Egypt took on the three armies alone. The global economy reeled, and by 1957 when the canal reopened now with Egypt in control, the region and the global economy would change forever. >> The

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closure of the Suez Canal proved that if you could blockade a major route of trade, you could change the course of history. >> I’m Muhammad Hassan and this is Deja Vu. My guest today is Dr. Laleh Khalili, professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter. She is the author of

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a number of books on everything from Middle East politics to sea-faring. In 2020, she published Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. Laleh, welcome to Deja Vu. >> Thank you very much. Very happy to be here. >> Now, before we start, I need to get

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something off my chest because I found out that you used to be an engineer. >> Yes, indeed. Um all the parents in the Middle East or well global south um have fantasies of their children be becoming doctors or engineers. >> So when I decided to go to university, I

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thought okay well I wanted to become an engineer first and then a doctor but ended up not doing that either. So I yeah so I’ve had a kind of a circuitous route to getting a PhD in political science. >> I only bring it up because I’m also used to be an engineer >> For your sins.

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>> Yes. engineer are you? >> I used to be a civil engineer. So I mean I was also somebody that really never found myself engineering. I hated it in fact and and I the moment that I was able to leave and do journalism I I leapt at the opportunity. But the one

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thing that has stayed with me over that course of time is I have this weird fascination that I don’t like admitting to myself >> to understanding systems. >> Yes. and understanding flow whether it’s human flow or or in this instance maritime flow and trade and

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>> the last couple of years have been so disruptive in our lives whether it’s co when you wrote your book Sinews or whether it is the current crisis in the straight of hormuz we’re suddenly becoming aware of how the world actually works >> When did you stop paying attention to that

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>> so I started paying attention to that quite a long time ago one of the central puzzles that actually made me very curious about it was that um if you uh are aware, Jabal Ali port in Dubai is usually in the top 10 largest container ports in the world.

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>> All of the other ports that preceded on that list are either in East Asia or Southeast Asia. Um usually Singapore or Shanghai are number one and number two. Uh and then there’s Jabal Ali. and Jabal Ali is an an actually larger port than say Antwerp or Rotterdam both of which

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are enormous. And so the central puzzle that has animated my work since then has been what is it that drives a small city state like Dubai which doesn’t have uh an immediate large hinterland like Rotterdam does for example get to be such a large port and so what is it

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about logistics and its organization in the world that creates such weird geographies but then as you mentioned 2020 was not only the year of co lockdown down where hundreds of thousands of sea-farers ended up being stuck on board ships because all of the

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ports shut down and they wouldn’t let people off. Um and also even if they could get off at the port, they couldn’t fly home because all of the airlines had also ceased really carrying people. And so you had all these sea-farers that were abandoned at sea, some for up to two

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years, which is kind of a horrific thing if you think about. Um but also the little green ship got stuck in the sewers canal. given. Yeah, Evergreen, Evergreen got stuck in the Suez Canal and of course it generated millions of memes. Uh, you know,

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>> my favorite one is the one of the tiny Egyptian digger that was attempting that could >> unblock the global food chain. >> You got to love it, right? With the with the with the driver with who had his ship ships on when he was just trying to get the

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>> incredibly stressed out. There’s so much at stake. >> Yeah, indeed. And of course, you know, the fact that one ship got stuck in the Suez Canal and that really through the whole flow of global um trade and particularly the trade between Asia and

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Europe um it became very clear that this this system was stretched taut and that tautness which is often touted as being efficiency is actually also a major weakness of the system. That was one thing. The other so so this is the question of flows. You also mentioned

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systems infrastructures are also of course necessary to this logistical flow and the year before we had a more horrendous event actually happening which was the major explosion at the port of Beirut. >> Hundreds of people were killed um and it uh and destroyed many many neighborhoods

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um surrounding the port and it really shed a light on how the systems there weren’t working. Um because of course nobody had really since the civil war thought about how significant the port was to the everyday life of the uh Beirut um uh commerce but also to the life of Lebanon.

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>> So since then we’ve basically uh people are much more attentive to what happens in the world around them whether it’s a a question of catastrophe in ports or blockages of flows. This is the thing that struck me when reading your writing is when we think about or when I think

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about global trade and especially global maritime trade. The impression that I have or that I had was that it was this well-oiled machine where everybody is following the rules. Everything is going so well and whenever these disruptions happen these are aberrations. The

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straight of hormuz is blocked. Why would anybody want to disrupt this like perfect synergy of global connection that goes on? And and of course, the way that you write about it, it presents a very different side of it, a much shadier, darker side where there’s a lot

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of things that are happening that we don’t know about. There’s there’s um huge um workers rights issues that take place on the sea, whether it’s slavery that takes place on some of these shipping vessels. What do you think ultimately people misunderstand about

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the way that our global trade actually works? >> Number one, uh that there are uh about 2 million sea-farers working um on ships uh all around the world. Um and that the number of sea-farers that actually work on some of the largest ships is surprisingly small. Some of these

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largest ships, the number of people that work on them is between 20 and 30 people. So you have a ship that is as long as the Empire State Building is tall. If you laid down the Empire State Building on its side, it would be about the same length as some of the larger

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container ships or bulk ships or tankers. And yet on this massive ship, only 30 people work on it. >> Of those 30, maybe about 10 12 work down in the engine room. And what is extraordinary about that is that these are folks that are dealing with some of

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the largest and most complex engines anywhere. And yet when the machine breaks down at sea, they’re basically fixing stuff with the stuff that you would have in your toolbox. Maybe a little bit more sophisticated, but >> it’s it’s crazy how incredibly skilled

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they are. And then on the deck, you have the seafarers that that are going around maintaining the ship’s um uh cargo. So it’s like a neverending work. So this is the second thing that is fascinating about shipping is how the ordinary functioning of today’s maritime trade

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depends on something called open registries. M >> open registries are where you register your ship to a country that has perhaps no relationship at all to the ownership of the ship or to where it operates from and to or to the people that operate the ship or even to the cargo that is

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transporting. So uh the world’s biggest open registries are Panama, Liberia, Mongolia as an open registry. Mongolia’s landlocked. So these are basically money making ventures. And in the case of the top four or five major open registries, they are basically

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former colonies either of Britain or informally of the United States that are often that often have very small economies and therefore are looking for some way to make money. So these ships are basically flying the flags of Panama or Mongolia >> or Liberia or Marshall Islands or Pan or

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Bahamas. >> Even if they have nothing to do with >> they have nothing to do with >> they’re not clearly taking their ships to Mongolia. >> No, they’re not. Definitely not. They’re not probably even going to Panama. What is Well, maybe they they are going to

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Panama. And so labor, environmental provisions, um operational sort of safety, questions of insurance are much laxer in these open registries. >> So the vast majority about 60% of the world’s ships are under open registries. And then if you ever ever actually pay

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attention to mistakes that happen, spillages that happen, when ships run around, when you have explosions happening, when you have terrible stuff that happens, and and certainly when there are sea-farers abandoned at sea with no wages paid for four years and no food

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or electricity on board the ship, reliant on the goodness of charities, um almost always they are they’re flying flags of convenience. So there was a guy, there was a Syrian guy that had been abandoned on a ship in um the Gulf of Suez, >> very close to Suez itself um to the port

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of Suez. Um and he couldn’t leave and the Egyptian government, for example, wouldn’t allow him to leave because somebody needed to stay on the ship to be responsible for the ship. And so the ship was within sight of land, but the guy could not get onto the land. He had

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to swim every couple of days to charge his mobile phone and pick up some phone, pick up some food and then swim back. >> I mean, this is the kind of stuff that happens. So, it’s, you know, flags of convenience is one of those biggest sort of open secrets that people don’t talk about.

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>> And is that a way that countries also use to try and bypass sanctions by flying other flags? >> Definitely. So that actually has been something that has happened for hundreds of years. Usually um in the in the during the imperial era, if a ship flew

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the flag of a country, say if if a Omani ship flew the flag of Britain, it basically put itself in the under the protection of the British. At the time um in the 19th century, early 20th century, the ship wasn’t the flag wasn’t just something that you did to evade uh

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powers. It was a way to actually put yourself under the protection of a power. And now what you’re finding is that you’re finding not only people flying physically flying a different flag in order to evade protection, but also spoofing their digital ID, which

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every ship nowadays is supposed to have, so that it indicates that it’s some other kind of ship and not what you think it is. >> Wow. We’re going to get to that, I think, when we talk about the hormuz eventually. But speaking of the British and the French empires that set up these

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huge maritime trading laws uh and and and uh routes that are still used today, the Suez Canal was this joint projects uh between the French and the British. >> Indeed. >> And this was uh a route that had always been used as a way to bring and transport goods between Europe and Asia

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and Europe and Africa. And then at some point under the uh occupation of Egypt, they they decide that they’re going to fight dig this permanent um trench and turn it into a canal. >> They actually use the canal to occupy Egypt. So they so so the Khadiv of Egypt

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was quite happy to allow for the canal to be dug um and and to collaborate with the French in its construction. And the collaboration of course was quite bloody because a lot of um Egyptian peasants were forced into digging the canal for no pay. So basically they were

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it was slave labor basically. Um but then the British and the French used the debt that the Khadiv had accumulated as an excuse to come and well the British came and occupied. So they lent him money >> debt diplomacy >> uh to pay them to build this canal that ultimately

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>> ultimately benefited them. >> Right. That’s a story that has never been repeated in any other scenario. >> Yeah. I mean this is basically the it’s the it’s one of the most famous instances of that diplomacy which which is the Yes. The British and the French

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lent the Khadiv money. The Khadiv used the money that they had lent to build the canal which was going to benefit the British and the French. And then the British and the French called in their debts. And when the Khadiv couldn’t pay, the British occupied the the Egypt

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basically for the next however many 82 to 52 for the next uh 70 years. >> And then in 1952 there’s a revolution in Egypt. Uh military leaders take over. They brand themselves as being anti-imperialist. At the head of the this movement of the free soldiers is >> Gamel Nasser.

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>> Exactly. and he really rans himself as not only the champion of Egyptian sovereignty but the champion of sovereignty across the third world at the time. >> Yeah. I mean he was a he he was an interesting figure and like all of the postcolonial figures um there are major

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contradictions in in who he was and what he did. He um instituted for example land reforms that were enormously significant for uh Egyptian. Uh and I think that partially explains also the huge and enormous love that people had for him which has basically never been

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repeated for any of his um any of the people that followed him. Um he but he was also he also spoke to the oppressed um in Africa. Um he spoke to the oppressed in the Arab world. When Patrice Lumumba uh was killed by the Belgians and the Americans, his children uh Nasser

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smuggled his children out of Congo and basically took them and raised them. So he was this incredible figure and I think on top of that he was attractive, he was charismatic, he was really tall, he was really funny. Um and I think all of those things made him really quite a

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kind of a figure although he was also incredibly repressive um internally um both communists and Islamists languished in his prisons and so there is again, he he was a complex figure, and perhaps for that reason very fascinating but one of the things that he did which was pretty

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extraordinary was that in 1956 he decided to nationalize the Suez canal this had happened in the wake of when Muhammad Mosaddegh Iran’s um democratically elected prime minister had decided to to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian oil company which later became BP. Um and of course a coup

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happens within a year after that nationalization. Um and Mosaddegh is overthrown and the Shah or king is reinstalled and um and uh you know basically uh the the oil uh the Iranian national oil is then operated by consortium of Americans and British. But

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this the the Mosaddegh moment had been incredibly inspiring across the Middle East. And it’s funny to go through magazines in Egyptian Arabic language magazines from the 1950s because you do find that was actually held as a kind of a hero. But I also think that NASA

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realized that the British and French sovereignty over Suez gave them an inordinate amount of strategic and commercial power and so he decided to nationalize it. Of course we know what happens immediately afterwards. Israel, the U British and the French decide to

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march across uh Sinai uh and and to take Suez. Um Israel had >> the question that I always have is is how why does Israel get involved? >> So Israel has a double uh stake in the Suez Canal from two different directions. One is that uh Israel, one of the things that Nasser had talked

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about for quite a long time was the was the blockade the Straits of Tiran at the entrance to the Gulf of Arabia. At the top of the Gulf of Arabia sits the port of Alet right next to the Araba in Jordan. Brand new port and it gave um Israel a strategic beach head um at the

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top of Gulf of Araba which was at the top of uh the Red Sea. So, that was one interest but just before you get to the Suez canal, just before you get to the Suez canal. So that was one reason. The second reason and people always forget this is that

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Sinai um had oil and uh the Israelis really really coveted that oil and in fact that was one of the reasons that when after the 1967 war they occupied Sinai they wanted to stay there for forever. Um so those were the two reasons and these had to do directly

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with Sinai and with the Suez Canal. But there there was another reason and that is that we also forget that Israel basically has from its inception been a settler colony with a mother country in either Europe or North America. That everybody claims that it is different

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than say Algeria which has a mother country in France. But really it has had I mean the British ba basically sponsored the formation of Israel in the 1950s. The French supported Israel by giving it nuclear weaponry. And of course after 1967, the US basically

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became Israel’s sugar daddy. So um this this was unsurprising. Um and the historian Avi Shlaim who has looked at the archival material has written a lot about the conversations that went on between the uh Guy Mollet of uh France uh Anthony Eden of Britain uh and David

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Ben Gurion of Israel about what they could do once they took over Suez. And and the Israelis did keep saying to the French in this instance, you really should let us keep Sinai. You really should let us keep Sinai. Um and and of course the Suez then would have been the

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natural line and if like the British and the French controlled that then that would have been the border for Israel as it wanted the greater Israel fantasy that they had. And of course we know that this happened exactly at the same time as the uh Soviet Union had invaded

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Hungary in 1956 and Eisenhower could not afford the Soviets to to be able to say well look at the British they’ve just invaded Sinai. So Eisenhower put his foot down and forced um the tripartite powers to withdraw from the Suez Canal. But what that particular event

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showed between the moment of invasion and March of 1958 and those months were transformative for the world. Um it resulted in the construction of the first super tankers because if ships weren’t going to be able to go through the Suez Canal, they were going to have

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to go around the Cape of Good Hope. So both the oil companies and the various other kinds of manufacturers were thinking well we need to have bigger ships because if they’re going to have to if their route is going to be two 3 weeks longer might as well have the

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economies of scale. Um huge um events happened here because of the closure of the Suez Canal and um energy not reaching Britain. Um there was massive shortages uh of both energy factories shut down. there was a shortage of tea and actually one of the longer term

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effects of the 1956 closure was that there was a huge wave of migration of Brits to Australia and New Zealand because of their shutdown in factories. Um and of course also uh acceleration of exploration for oil in places that didn’t lie um in that direction. So

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Libya and Nigeria. So the closure of the Suez Canal proved that if you could blockade a major route of trade, you could change the course of history. >> The Suez crisis often gets talked about as sort of the nail in the coffin of the British Empire. Yes.

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>> That this was a major turning point in the way that British power was perceived in the world. >> Indeed. >> What happens to Britain in this ultimately it’s a humiliation, you know, that they’re forced to drag their feet back at the behest of the Americans. So

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if you look at every empire as operating on the basis of a given form of energy and dominating a particular set of financial weaponry, the the the globe operated really at the by the end of the n 19th century and beginning of the 20th century uh on uh factory production based on coal

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>> and on the sterling. But the second world war and the US domination of oil production in the world changes that calculus. Um and what the Suez canal does is it accelerates that downfall of the sterling. So where oil discovery particularly with the US and Saudi

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Arabia uh and then of course the takeover of the consortium in Iran um it it ends up becoming quite a significant transformative moment energy-wise. uh and then the change in uh financial channels from sterling to the dollar ends up becoming quite significant as

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well. Um and this really these two events uh which are about political economy underline the significance of the strategic defeats as well. So uh okay so the so the British were humiliated by the US. Um but it it took you know between 58 and 71 for their

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protectorates in the Gulf for example to be freed and so the sovereignty for for them or the protection for them being handed from the from the British to the US. It also certainly spelled the same for the French. um Algeria which had been uh settled and occupied by France

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becomes independent as a result also of that suis catastrophe for catastrophe for them victory for Nasser victory for Nasser and also for the third world >> and then it also creates the myth of Nasra himself >> indeed >> because then here is this young uh uh

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anti-imperialist who takes on three of the world’s great powers of the time and you know concludes Israel uh regionally and ultimately they are forced to stand down for whatever reason and Egypt retains control over the Suez Canal. >> Exactly. It does. And so everything that

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happens thereafter and particularly in the 1967 war is really targeted at that. So, uh, maritime access has always been this incredibly significant and important and sensitive matter of conflict in the region. >> And not only that, he’s also fueling uh

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and funding a civil war that’s happening in Yemen. And part of this, from my understanding, is also about who gets to control the port of Aden. Right. >> It does indeed. So if um we want to draw a sketch of this moment uh the country that we recognize as Yemen um in that

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moment was actually divided into I would say three different administrative forms. One was northern Yemen which was um uh governed by a Zadi imam. Then there was the port of Aiden which in 1958 was uh still uh a British colony uh a direct colony. So one of the uh only

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real colonies that the British had in the Middle East with that with that name. And then the rest of what we now consider to be southern Yemen were British protectorates. what we had had going on in 1958 was a series of revolts both in what is uh what became South

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Yemen and what was in North Yemen. In South Yemen, these were also Nasserist officers who rose against the Imam and tried to turn the country >> um into a kind of a bastion of Nasserist PanArabism. Uh, of course this was considered to be a major affront to the British

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>> and the British decided to come in in support of the Zaydis, but because they had their hands full with the insurgency in the south and also they didn’t want to be seen to be directly involved, they got the Saudis involved and the Israelis also >> because the Israelis were thinking,

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“Hey, this is one good place that we can go against Nasser. uh in Yemen. And so the Israelis were flying British jets, delivering goods paid for by the Saudis to the Zaydis in Yemen. Uh and the and Nasser was of course supporting the the Nazerist officers on the other side. So you had

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this really interesting um secret alliance between the British, the Israelis and the Saudis happening behind the scenes. So you had this incredible moment happening in there. And part of the reason that the Yemen was considered to be really such a

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significant um site was not only because of its proximity to Aiden, but also because of the port of Hueda itself, which is actually um on the other side of the peninsula from like right around the corner from uh Aiden, but also quite significant in terms of its access to Bab el Mandeb,

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>> which is another one of those names that everybody’s now become familiar with. because of >> because of the Houthies >> because of the Houthis or the Ansar Allah which are a group of Zaidies therefore descendants of the supporters of the Yazidi imam. It’s I mean it’s a

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kind of an interesting dance that happens. What’s interesting about both Bab el Mandeb and Hormuz and I think this is also something that uh will come up is that they have both been recognized as being really incredibly significant strategic points not just for the last

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100 years not just for the last 200 years but for the last 500 years. There’s a really fascinating letter from a Portuguese explorer uh by the name of Alphonso de Albuquerque who came out to the western Indian Ocean to basically plant the Portuguese flag in all of

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these places. And he has this letter written in 1511 in which he talks about how the three most important and strategic points in the western Indian Ocean are the straight of Malacca near Singapore still one of the largest commercial straits in the world. 30% of

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the world’s goods and 20% of the world’s oil goes through the straight of Malika. Second Bab el Mandeb at the entrance to the Red Sea [at the end of which is the SuezCanal]. And third he says Hormuz which uh he says that is the one that is the most significant because it’s also sitting close to Mesopotamia and to

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Iran. Um and and he and he says in this letter written in 1511 he says if anybody controls these three strategic points they will control the world. One of the things that you write about in this book is about how every military confrontation that takes place around these three areas

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not only changes the way the world thinks about trade and and and the way that the geopolitics of the countries operate but also changes the dynamic of power in the region itself. And you talk about the um 1967 war which again closes the Suez Canal and then the Lebanon

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civil civil war and the involvement of Israel uh and then the Iran Iraq war and the tanker wars that takes place in the in the Gulf. What is happening in the peninsula in the Arab peninsula during this time as a result of this of all of these different fractures? So there are

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multiple um dynamics at play uh from the 1960s onwards which are quite significant in the transformation of the Arabian Peninsula um and therefore the two major straits that lie to the north and to the south of the peninsula Hormuz and Bab el Mandeb.

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>> Uh the first and most significant local uh set of dynamics are the dynamics around nationalization of oil. Uh there’s huge amounts of um negotiations uh threats and counter threats uh bluffs and counter bluffs that are going on really starting from the 1960s

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um in an attempt by the national uh the countries which actually held the um reser reserves of oil against what was then called the seven sisters. So, five uh US-based and two British uh oil companies to extract better deals out of them. Some of the more striking um uh

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statistics that come out is that in 1958 um were basically held by uh the British and the Americans. about 60% uh of the world’s oil reserves international oil reserves not the ones in the US uh were held by the US 18% by British petroleum and Shell and then what remained which

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is about 20% was the residual that was held say in Russia or Mexico that were not necessarily run by these places by 1960s uh the the deals on these had begun to shift and so there was a huge amount of um pressure by a number of different countries that actually lay

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along the spectrum from quite radical to quite reformist um to extract a better deal um out of the seven sisters. So this dynamic was really significant because if these countries nationalize their oil that would also mean that they would gain control over the downstream

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forms of production uh and circulation of oil. So petrochemicals, shipping etc. I >> I learned about this re recently cuz cuz my father-in-law used to work in oil. Upstream is like extraction, getting all of the oil and gas in the ground. Downstream is turning it into things

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that then we can use. >> That’s right. So, anything that happens after you pull the oil out of the ground is downstream. And what the seven sisters used to have was um what was called vertical integration, which means that the upstream and downstream, all of

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the different functions were the same company. It basically ran all of them. And one of the things that starts happening in the 1960s is the unraveling of that vertical integration even before the oil is nationalized. So what you end up seeing is that the Kuwaitis for

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example end up setting up their own shipping company in order to ship some of the oil uh because of course Kuwait had also gone independent in 1961 ahead of the other emirates um on the Gulf. That was a local dynamic. There was also regional dynamic.

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That’s the first half of the interview.

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HERE, the head of MI6 (UK’s CIA) reluctantly acknowledged on March 26th that Trump had already lost his war against Iran. Trump still seems not yet to know it.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.