Jonah, Worsthorne’s last two sentences (“On realpolitik grounds the operation may be ill-advised. But on moral grounds it cannot be faulted.”) make a nonsense of the rest of his quote. If a policy is “ill-advised” in terms of Realpolitik, a government has no business attempting it. In fact it would be immoral (so to speak) to do so. In matters of foreign policy, a government’s obligation is to pursue the national interest. Nothing more. If pursuing that national interest happens to be the “moral” thing to do (and quite who decides what is moral in this context is an interesting question), it’s a happy coincidence, nothing more. As to the rest of Worsthorne’s comments, if we understand that in referring to “Arab nationalism” he was referring to Nasserism, and if we remember that he was writing in the middle of the 1956 crisis, it’s possible to understand why he wrote what he did, even if it now looks more than a little overheated. If, on the other hand, we read him as saying that Arab nationalism is an intrinsically “evil ” (his word) force, I don’t get it. Arab nationalism can, like any other nationalism, be good or bad. One of the tragedies of Arab history is the way that the Arab world’s various local nationalisms, as well, I suppose, as the related phenomenon of pan-Arabism, have so often turned toxic. In that context, “Suez,” ironically, made things worse, not better, and would, I reckon, have done so almost regardless of the outcome.