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Ambassador Livingston Merchant On Anglo-American Relations, 1957, Matt Loayza

U.S. Foreign Relations

In October 1957, U.S. Ambassador to Canada Livingston Merchant wrote to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles with an assessment of Anglo-American relations in the context of recent world events. Although relations between the two countries had been quite positive for several decades, the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain had been strained by the recent “Suez Crisis.” This event was prompted by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s July 1956 decision to nationalize the Franco-British Suez Canal Company, a French-British company responsible for operating the Suez Canal. The Eisenhower administration did not relish the prospect of a rupture …