The Ballot and the Strait
Seventy years ago this week, Dwight Eisenhower won a second term on the same day the guns fell silent at Suez. On 6 November 1956 Americans voted while British and French troops were still advancing along the canal and Israeli forces held most of Sinai. By midnight a ceasefire was in place. On 7 November David Ben-Gurion told the Knesset that the 1949 armistice with Egypt was dead and buried. The next day, after letters from Eisenhower and the Soviet premier Nikolai Bulganin, he agreed in principle to withdraw. By March 1957 the last Israeli soldiers had left Gaza and Sharm el-Sheikh.
Israelis took a hard lesson from that week. A president freshly confirmed by his own voters can end a war in this region with a letter, backed later by the threat of sanctions. The question now being asked from Jerusalem to Tehran and across the Gulf is whether last Tuesday’s vote will do the same.
The scale of the result is not in dispute. Democrats took both chambers of Congress, flipping Senate seats deep in Republican territory, from Texas and Kansas to Iowa and South Carolina. The vice president, JD Vance, wrote that the reason his party lost was the war. The president himself conceded that Iran played a part, and that the price rises it caused had hurt. On the morning of the vote he announced that roughly four billion dollars a year in American military aid to Israel would end within two months, although the current aid agreement runs until 2028.
Peace does not follow from that verdict, at least not directly, and there are three reasons why.
The first is constitutional. A Democratic Congress holds the purse, the subpoena and the power to embarrass. It does not hold command. War powers resolutions can be vetoed, and the president has already said he has no wish to spend two years doing nothing but vetoing bills. A third aircraft carrier and thousands of additional troops are still heading to the region. The new Congress will not be seated until January, which leaves a lame duck window in which a wounded president answers mainly to himself.
The second is psychological, and here the Suez comparison turns on its head. Eisenhower could stop a war in 1956 because he had just won. Donald Trump may be tempted to continue one because he has just lost. Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group put the danger plainly: a president humbled at the ballot box may look for redemption on the battlefield. A deal with Tehran would look like an admission that the war achieved little. Victory, or something that can be sold as victory, offers a way out. Pressure from Congress constrains slowly. A frustrated executive can act in an afternoon.
The third is Iranian, and for the Gulf it is the one that matters most. Tehran reads the result as proof that its strategy works: squeeze the region’s economic lifelines, let American voters feel it at the pump, and wait for their politicians to flinch. Mojtaba Khamenei insists the vote will change nothing, yet his negotiators are back with the Qatari mediators, and on the eve of the vote Iran offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within two days if its seven conditions were met. A closed strait as leverage is not new here. In 1957 Golda Meir told the United Nations that Israel would treat closure of the Straits of Tiran as an act of war, and in 1967 it did. This time the strait carries much of the Gulf’s oil, and the leverage is aimed at the world rather than one neighbour.
Then there is Israel, which voted a week before America and has no government yet. Benjamin Netanyahu lost his majority. Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of staff, has been recommended by 67 of the 120 members of the new Knesset, with the backing of Arab parties that turned out in record numbers. President Herzog will name his choice to form a government on Sunday. Michael Oren, a former ambassador to Washington, told CNN that Israel is at the end of an era. Bipartisan support, the quiet foundation of Israeli security for half a century, has become bipartisan scepticism.
The midterms have not made the region peaceful. What they have done is raise the price of war for its most powerful outside sponsor. Whether that produces calm depends on choices made in Jerusalem, Tehran and the Gulf capitals, not in Washington. An Israeli government that reads the aid announcement as a reason to settle with its neighbours, and to look again at Gaza and the West Bank, could turn American fatigue into regional opportunity. One that reads it as abandonment, and strikes Iran while it still can, could turn it into catastrophe.
Suez offers a warning here too. Eisenhower’s pressure bought Israel a decade of relative quiet on the southern front. United Nations peacekeepers deployed into Sinai, and ships sailed through the Straits of Tiran to Eilat. But that quiet was borrowed, not built. It lasted exactly as long as someone stood between the parties. Peace with Egypt came only 22 years later, when Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat chose it for themselves.
In May 1967 Nasser asked the peacekeepers to leave, and U Thant agreed. The posts at Sharm el-Sheikh were emptied. Within days Egypt announced the closure of the Straits of Tiran. Within a fortnight the region was at war.
American voters have just begun to empty a room of their own. A vote can stop a war. It cannot make a peace. That depends on who walks into the room next.