Professor Uday Singh Mehta is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The City University of New York. A renowned political theorist, his publications include The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke (Cornell University Press, 1992) and Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Liberalism and Empire was awarded the J. David Greenstone Book Award in 2002 from the American Political Science Association for the best book in Political Theory.

This paper will examine the US-UK relationship through the prism of two key military interventions in the Middle East after the Suez debacle; Jordan in 1958 and Kuwait in 1961. It will argue that the 1956 crisis led the UK to acknowledge that its international power was in decline and that future interventions in the region would always require American acquiescence. Having learned these lessons, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan endeavoured to use Jordan and Kuwait as a means to realign US-UK policy in the region, believing that he could use US means for UK ends.