Introduction

In April 2026, as American and Israeli warplanes struck Iran—igniting global outrage, exposing geopolitical schisms, and prompting Iran to launch a robust retaliation and close the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for a third of the world’s oil—the grammar of imperial intervention wrote itself anew. Western capitals spoke of deterrence, while the Muslim world saw another act of colonial violence dressed as a strategic necessity. Across the Global South, protesters flooded the streets, leaving their governments caught between alliance obligations and a public clamoring for rupture. Seventy years earlier, during the 1956 Suez Crisis, another Western-led attack on a sovereign nation’s core strategic assets triggered similar convulsions: worldwide uproar, regional solidarity, and governments caught between their Western patrons and their people. That crisis hastened the end of Britain’s empire, enabled America’s rise to hegemony, and revealed the power of global anti-imperialism. Then as now, empire overreached; and then as now, the streets of the Global South and the Muslim world answered with a clamor for change that no alliance could fully contain. This article recovers that earlier moment: not as mere historical analogy, but as the foundational logic of a world order still being contested today.

Dawn, Pakistan’s leading newspaper, captured the public mood during the Suez Crisis: fierce denunciation of the West, firm solidarity with Nasser, and unwavering support for Egyptian sovereignty. The attack had “suddenly turned the clock back hundreds of years” and “unwritten much of what has since been written in the book of human civilization,” with the aggressors “killing and conquering the weak like cowards.”Footnote ¹ Reflecting an anti-imperial sentiment sweeping the world, the report sharply contrasted with the government’s cautious diplomacy. Pakistan’s Cold War stance on Suez did not stem from obedient isolation, it was forged amid an intense contest of ideas over the country’s place in world politics.

From its founding, Pakistan’s identity was irreducibly international: its raison d’être invoked a global Muslim community, not merely a territorial homeland for South Asia’s Muslims.Footnote ² Outpaced by decolonization’s global surge, the state’s decisions lagged behind critiques of its Western alliances.Footnote ³ This juxtaposition revealed a state caught between two irreconcilable orders: the US-led Cold War system after World War II and the processes of global decolonization.Footnote ⁴ Pakistan’s Cold War alignments arose not from client-state submission but from tensions between the country’s pro-Western state and a domestic polity animated by anti-imperialism, Global South solidarity, and Muslim internationalism.Footnote ⁵

This article reinterprets Pakistan’s Cold War politics by moving beyond superpower-centered and state-centric frameworks that portray the country as a passive client of Western alliances. Instead, this article traces the tension between the anti-imperialism of Pakistan’s domestic polity and the state’s pro-Western Cold War alliance—surfacing at the 1955 Bandung Conference, erupting over the 1955 Baghdad Pact, and culminating in the global uproar over Suez in 1956. The article illustrates how domestic contestation over Pakistan’s foreign policy fused with transnational anti-imperial mobilizations to generate new forms of collective agency that crossed borders. These postcolonial polities generated forms of world-making agency that reshaped world politics. Co-constituted across West Asia, these forces hastened the end of Europe’s empires and opened space for postcolonial statecraft—even as they enabled the United States to position itself as the successor to a declining Europe, whose weakness the Suez Crisis exposed. Additionally, the article contends that Pakistan’s contentious early Cold War experience offers a vantage point from which to reconceptualize world order “from below”: as a dynamic field actively constituted by postcolonial states and their domestic polities, not as an external structure imposed by empires and superpowers. The article reframes the Cold War and decolonization as intertwined, demonstrating how ruptures in Pakistan’s foreign policy offer a vantage point that reveals structural changes in world order and arguing that incomplete decolonization—formal independence masking ongoing North-South struggles—shaped the uneasy interplay between Pakistan’s nascent identity and the demands of international politics.Footnote ⁶

The article undertakes an interdisciplinary historical and sociological reinterpretation of Pakistan’s early Cold War foreign policy. Declassified intelligence archives—i.e., Chinese Embassy cables from September 1956 (at the Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson Center) and CIA assessments of the Bandung Conference (in March 1955)—are used to show an external perspective on Pakistani domestic politics during the Suez Crisis and great-power perceptions of Afro-Asian solidarity respectively.Footnote ⁷ The article also deploys press reporting from Dawn (Karachi) and The Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore) to examine evidence articulating Pakistani Cold War perspectives and draws on secondary historical scholarship to provide empirical scaffolding for Pakistan’s state-level diplomacy.Footnote ⁸ The article employs an “agency-in-effect” lens to interpret these sources.Footnote ⁹ Unlike the instrumental agency of a state or an institution, agency-in-effect is a relational social force that becomes observable not through direct command but through the constraints it imposes on political action and the recalibrations it imposes on actors’ geopolitical calculations. Such pressure can actively constrain states, as during the Suez Crisis, and influence global transformations, such as the transition from British to American hegemony in the Middle East.

Beyond the client-state thesis: agency-in-effect, domestic contestation, and transnationalism

The historiography of Cold War Pakistan has long been dominated by its image as a client state, with its foreign policy framed as the predictable product of elite insecurity vis-à-vis India.Footnote ¹⁰ Scholarship on Pakistan during the Cold War, often framed within Eurocentric, statist, or subcontinental paradigms, has generally interpreted the country through its political establishment as either a treacherous client or a resilient frontline state, with a foreign policy defined by the entanglements of Islam, the US, and the military. In this interpretation, Pakistan appears either as a self-interested opportunist or a plucky underdog, criticized yet also admired in Western policymaking circles for its political-military synthesis and counterinsurgency expertise.Footnote ¹¹ However, the client-state paradigm privileges the imperatives of realpolitik and state diplomacy, reducing the opinions, pressure, and opposition of Pakistan’s domestic polity to mere variables.Footnote ¹² While providing vital context, the state and client-centric focus can be an analytical constraint obscuring the vibrant, far-reaching, and influential struggles that sought to reshape the postcolonial world order.Footnote ¹³ Such approaches presuppose a rigid hierarchy between powerful and subordinate actors, producing analyses of postcolonial states as derivative and dependent.Footnote ¹⁴ These approaches fail to recognize the mutual constitution of the Global North and Global South within a single historical field of world politics and instead perpetually situate Pakistan at the margins of the “real” international system. As Tarak Barkawi argues, the international system is a dense field of co-constitution, shaped by imperial legacies and a thick interactive space traversed by multiple relations.Footnote ¹⁵ The boundaries of the postcolonial state cannot be reduced to the temporalities or imagined communities of European state formation. To assume otherwise—as client-state perspectives do—is to obscure the imperial continuities that sustain global hierarchies.Footnote ¹⁶

In contrast to the client-state paradigm, “agency-in-effect” reconceptualizes political action beyond structure-agency binaries. Rather than a fixed attribute, agency emerges relationally and constrained, through interactions, resistances, and negotiations—becoming observable only through its consequences. Building on Julian Go’s postcolonial-relational sociology, this perspective resists structural determinism and voluntarist understandings of agency, emphasizing instead how “peripheral” actors in the world order exercise influence. Go shows that the postcolonial world is not merely acted upon by global hierarchies but is constitutive of them, with its practices helping to reproduce and transform those hierarchies.Footnote ¹⁷ This article adopts the concept of agency-in-effect to emphasize how Pakistan’s domestic polity, comprising labor unions, party members, women’s movements, students, journalists, and intellectuals, exerted pressure on state policy and global politics despite lacking formal diplomatic authority. By foregrounding agency-in-effect, the analysis explores how Pakistan’s domestic polity and its transnational connection to regional and global mobilizations influenced geopolitical outcomes, making visible the relationship between domestic mobilizations and transformations in the world order. In this light, Pakistan’s internal conflicts over its Cold War alignments exemplify and offer an agency-in-effect framework to gauge how collective domestic understandings of Pakistan’s role in the world, ranging from Islamic solidarity to Third World non-alignment, clashed with the state security doctrines and often fast-moving global events.Footnote ¹⁸ Each of the three events examined below—Bandung, the Baghdad Pact, and Suez—reveals a different facet of agency-in-effect: symbolic and generative at Bandung, constrained and delayed during the Baghdad Pact, and most fully realized during the Suez Crisis.

The 1955 Bandung Conference

The April 1955 Bandung Conference included representatives from twenty-nine Asian and African states—representing nearly one-quarter of the earth’s land surface and 1.5 billion people. They convened in the Indonesian city of Bandung to articulate a vision of anti-colonial solidarity and a post-imperial world order. As Adom Getachew argues, Bandung was an ambitious bid for “worldmaking after empire.”Footnote ¹⁹ Yet Bandung was not monolithic: the conference brought together leaders who would later become pillars of the Non-Aligned Movement (Sukarno of Indonesia, Nkrumah of Ghana, Nehru of India, and Nasser of Egypt), pro-Western figures (Bogra of Pakistan and Romulo of the Philippines), and the People’s Republic of China under Zhou Enlai.Footnote ²⁰ The conference’s origins lie in the Colombo Powers meeting held from April 28 to May 2, 1954, in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).Footnote ²¹ The five participating nations—Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, Indonesia, and Pakistan—issued a statement calling for an Afro-Asian conference and established a steering committee to plan it.

When the Bandung Conference convened in April 1955, Pakistan’s delegation arrived and was granted a prominent speaking slot. Despite his pro-Western reputation, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Bogra played an active role in the deliberations, chairing several sessions and positioning himself as a bridge between non-alignment and the more conservative, anti-communist factions of the “Colombo Group.”Footnote ²² Bogra declared Pakistan’s “unflinching opposition to colonialism” while defending Western pacts, stating, “evil is not in the pact itself, but in the purpose for which it is formed,” a veiled reference to the Soviet Union.Footnote ²³ The diplomatic exchanges that followed were sharp. Burmese delegates supported formulations of non-alignment that implicitly sat uneasily with Pakistan’s pro-Western tilt. Differences surfaced in speeches and drafting discussions over collective security, colonialism, and great-power influence.

Pakistan’s official positions at Bandung can be summarized in three areas. First, on colonialism, the delegation supported resolutions condemning “colonialism in all its forms,” but successfully pushed for language distinguishing between “Western colonialism” and “international communism.”Footnote ²⁴ This compromise allowed Pakistan to signal anti-imperial solidarity while preserving its Cold War alignment. Second, on economic cooperation, Pakistan endorsed calls for technical assistance and cultural exchange, but resisted proposals for a formal Afro-Asian economic bloc, preferring bilateral arrangements that left room for Western aid.Footnote ²⁵ Third, on anti-imperial struggles, Pakistan’s delegation condemned atrocities in Algeria and Palestine—a stance that strongly resonated with its domestic polity back home.Footnote ²⁶

What the public record does not capture is the tension within the Pakistani delegation. Bogra, a career diplomat from East Pakistan with strong personal ties to Washington, represented the pro-Western wing of the Muslim League.Footnote ²⁷ But the foreign ministry officials accompanying him, including Ambassador to Indonesia J.A. Rahim, held anti-imperialist, leftist social views and pushed for greater support for non-alignment (Secretary of Foreign Affairs Muhammad Ikramullah, by contrast, remained a staunchly pro-Western establishment figure).Footnote ²⁸ This internal divergence—between Bogra’s public defense of alliance politics and his diplomats’ leaning toward non-alignment—foreshadows a split between the state and Pakistan’s domestic polity over foreign policy that would erupt during the Suez Crisis.

To view Pakistan’s role at Bandung solely through the actions of its delegation, however, is to overlook the conference’s significant domestic impact in Pakistan. The conference was closely followed with intense interest in Karachi, Lahore, and Dhaka. Coverage in Dawn hailed it as “a new epoch in world history,” while letters to the editor demanded that the government “live up” to the spirit of Bandung by actively supporting decolonization struggles abroad.Footnote ²⁹ For leftists within Pakistan—the Communist Party (banned but active underground), the unions, socialist factions within the Awami League, the Progressive Writers Association, journalists at the Pakistan Times and the student federations—Bandung signified an alternative horizon for Pakistan’s international future.Footnote ³⁰ Its principles of non-alignment, anti-colonial resistance, and Afro-Asian solidarity shaped their vocabulary of dissent. This enthusiasm, however, did not translate into immediate policy change. The state, through its intelligence apparatus and press censorship, sought to contain Bandung’s radical potential, but the conference’s ideals fueled a latent counter-narrative to the state’s discourse on the necessity of Western security alliances. Bandung refracted Pakistan’s internal struggle over its geopolitical future. Pakistan’s presence at Bandung and its membership in the Baghdad Pact (signed just months earlier, in February 1955) captured the core contradiction of Pakistan’s early Cold War history. Would it join a global post-imperial project rejecting great-power dominance or acquiesce to incorporation into the US-led order?

Pakistani leaders sought superpower patronage while navigating a domestic polity profoundly committed to the internationalist solidarities celebrated at Bandung. The conference offered Pakistani elites a platform to project an image of an independent postcolonial state, but Bandung’s global resonance also gave opposition forces a framework for linking domestic grievances to transnational anti-imperial movements. While the Pakistani domestic polity’s embrace of Bandung’s anti-imperialism did not force the state to realign itself, it did energize a reservoir of popular sentiment the state could not ignore, a moral vocabulary that would be mobilized when the contradictions between state realpolitik and popular aspiration became apparent. Bandung was not the cause of those contradictions, but it made them visible and gave them a name.Footnote ³¹ Bandung’s legacy is divergent: internationally, it underpinned a language of ongoing South-South cooperation in a “post-Bandung world” in which transnational conferences, diplomatic engagement, and intellectual exchange became key sites for Pakistani progressives to debate politics, socialism, and anti-imperialism; sub-nationally, the conference contributed to a radicalization of political thought that questioned the state’s role within a neocolonial order.Footnote ³²

The 1955 Baghdad Pact

If the Bandung Conference represented the global aspirations of the global majority, the Baghdad Pact was a concrete manifestation of elite grand strategy. The Baghdad Pact, officially known as the Central Treaty Organisation, was a Cold War-era mutual defense alliance formed in 1955 to contain Soviet expansion in the Middle East, initially comprising the United Kingdom, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. By joining the 1955 Baghdad Pact, Pakistan tied itself irrevocably to the US Cold War alliance.Footnote ³³ For the ruling military-bureaucratic triumvirate of Ghulam Muhammad, Iskander Mirza, and General Ayub Khan, the alliance served a strategic agenda: securing economic and military aid, deterring India, and gaining international stature as a bridge between the Muslim world and America.Footnote ³⁴ However, the Baghdad Pact also exposed a fault line in Pakistan, pitting the emerging security state against the global aspirations of its domestic polity. Bandung’s principles infused the repertoires of dissent, as public condemnation of Pakistan’s alignment with the US-led alliance system grew.

While the Bandung Conference opened the possibility of a postcolonial geopolitical order, the Baghdad Pact anchored Pakistan’s early Cold War politics within the Western alliance. Pakistan’s strategic location made it a key asset for Washington’s strategic planning following the 1949 Chinese revolution and Soviet expansion in Central Asia. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles viewed Pakistan’s geostrategic location as a counterweight to anticolonial and socialist currents, while the British, wary of a rising India, used their leverage in Pakistan to retain their dwindling influence in the region.Footnote ³⁵ After signing the security agreements, Pakistan’s “strategic stock soared” in Western capitals.Footnote ³⁶

Yet Pakistan and other Asian members of the Baghdad Pact faced stern backlash from Arab and Global South states. A 1956 Chinese state report notes, “Britain and France’s aggression against Egypt sparked intense opposition among the Asian member nations of the pact.” The Tehran meeting in April 1956 was an emergency session of the Baghdad Pact’s Asian members—Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq—convened in response to widespread criticism of the pact following the Suez Crisis. The meeting aimed to distance the pact’s Asian signatories from British and French aggression against Egypt, and to reaffirm the defensive character of the alliance.Footnote ³⁷ The meeting “was held at the suggestion of Pakistan and Iran in order to convey that … the Asian member countries have nothing to do with Britain’s aggression, and to give an explanation to the people so the Pact does not collapse.”Footnote ³⁸ Despite its rising strategic value in Western eyes, Pakistani leaders faced escalating criticism, striving to present the Baghdad Pact as defensive while struggling to maintain their fragile legitimacy at home.Footnote ³⁹

The decision to remain in the Baghdad Pact sparked intense public controversy and scrutiny. The suppressed Left condemned it as a betrayal of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s founding vision of a sovereign Pakistan, alienating supporters of non-alignment and Muslim internationalism. The state responded with repression, invoking the memory of the 1951 Rawalpindi Conspiracy—a failed coup by left-leaning military officers who resented lingering British influence, which exposed sympathy in sections of the military officer class for a pro-Soviet, pan-Islamic orientation—to justify targeting anti-imperial and socialist groups. The state’s crackdown on dissent was not new. The Communist Party of Pakistan had already been banned in 1954, following electoral disturbances in East Bengal, and the state had long framed any alternative vision for foreign policy as seditious.Footnote ⁴⁰ What was new was the Baghdad Pact itself—a move to consolidate elite power, tie the state to global anti-communism, and suppress opposition under the banner of Cold War alignment. Unlike Egypt’s 1952 military coup d’état, which brought a nationalist, anti-imperial coalition to power, Pakistani opposition forces lacked the cohesion and organizational depth to mount a sustained challenge to the establishment.

But dissent could not be fully silenced. The Baghdad Pact was widely seen as an imperial tool of divide-and-rule, placing Pakistani elites in a domestic political bind. Their claims to Muslim and Global South leadership conflicted with an alliance that included Britain and targeted Egyptian and Arab nationalism, especially after Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. A 1956 Chinese cable noted the ruling elite’s delicate balancing act, leveraging Egypt’s plight to assert regional influence while securing substantial American aid.Footnote ⁴¹ The Baghdad Pact was less a military strategy than a political signal. By joining, Pakistani state managers aligned with the West but alienated large parts of its domestic polity, a fracture that erupted during the Suez Crisis. This dissent encompassed segments of Pakistan’s population who viewed the Baghdad Pact not as a strategic necessity but as a betrayal of Muslim internationalism and the anti-imperial principles that defined the country’s raison d’être.Footnote ⁴²

Protest movements in Pakistan contributed to a broader alarm in US policy circles about fallout from the Baghdad Pact. US intelligence agencies closely monitored anti-Western sentiment in Pakistan. A CIA assessment from November 1956 noted that “popular hostility to the Baghdad Pact has intensified dramatically,” warning that “continued unrest in Pakistan may jeopardize the utility of key communications and intelligence facilities.”Footnote ⁴³ Eisenhower’s National Security Council meetings from this period show sustained concern about the political stability of US allies in West Asia—Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Iraq—in the face of regional pro-Nasser sentiment.Footnote ⁴⁴

US diplomatic officials in Karachi reported on the protests in Pakistan. US Ambassador to Pakistan James Langley, who served in Karachi from 1953–1957, reported directly on the scale and intensity of the protests. His cables to the State Department described “mass demonstrations” and warned that “the government of Pakistan faces a legitimacy crisis of the first order.”Footnote ⁴⁵ These reports shaped Washington’s perception that the Baghdad Pact—already fragile—might not withstand further strains. US strategists calculated that if Pakistan’s pro-Western government fell, the entire northern tier alliance system might collapse. The convergence of anti-imperial mobilizations across West Asia thus created a regional political field that constrained US options. Eisenhower’s private remarks reveal his calculation: “If we now proceed to implement the program developed by the Middle East Emergency Committee,” the president observed, “such action would be regarded … as U.S. participation in the aggression against them.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Eisenhower referred not only to Egyptians but also to a transnational West Asian sphere that included Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and the Arab states, whose opposition to Western intervention was both palpable and politically consequential.

This is not to claim that protests in West Asia and Pakistan caused US opposition to the subsequent British and French occupation of the Suez Canal. Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, fear of losing Arab oil, and the logistical difficulties of restoring canal navigation all played roles. Rather, these protests constituted part of the political environment within which US decision makers calculated costs and benefits. The political unviability of overt colonialism in the post-Bandung era—a fact manifested by global anti-imperial momentum—was a necessary condition for that choice. Such momentum was not generated in Washington or Moscow, but in countless sites of anti-imperial struggle. The elite gambit of the Baghdad Pact had alienated large parts of Pakistan’s domestic polity. It would take only a spark—the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956—to ignite the powder keg.

The 1956 Suez Crisis

Nasser’s world-historical nationalization of the Suez Canal in July 1956 was hailed in the decolonizing world as a courageous assertion of sovereignty. Before its nationalization in July 1956, the Suez Canal was controlled by the Suez Canal Company, a joint British-French enterprise. While legally operating in Egypt, the company was dominated by British and French shareholders who maintained control over the strategic waterway from its opening in 1869 until 1956. In Pakistan, the actions of Nasser’s government sparked widespread support rooted in anti-imperial solidarity and sharp opposition to Cold War alignment.

However, the October 1956 attack on the Suez Canal put the Pakistani government in a bind, forcing it to balance its Baghdad Pact obligations against a domestic outcry in support of Egypt and a demand for material solidarity. Publicly, Pakistani officials condemned the attack as “pure and naked aggression.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet behind the scenes, state elites rejected the idea of breaking with their Western patrons over the Suez Crisis. Instead of unequivocally supporting Egypt’s sovereign rights, Pakistan’s government sided with US-led calls for “international” control of the canal. The bid to please both its domestic polity and its global allies backfired. Nasser denounced Pakistan’s position as a betrayal, while at home the administration was rocked by the largest protests since independence.Footnote ⁴⁸ The political fallout was severe. Prime Minister Suhrawardy’s equivocation split his own Awami League, with the party’s more radical wing under Maulana Bhashani breaking away to form the National Awami Party in 1957, a socialist organization that would become a key vehicle for anti-imperial and pro-non-alignment politics. The Suez Crisis thus did not merely embarrass the government; it fractured the governing party and accelerated the realignment of Pakistani political divisions along Cold War/anti-imperial lines. Suhrawardy’s government would survive only another year before falling, paving the way for President Iskander Mirza’s intervention and, shortly thereafter, Ayub Khan’s military coup in 1958.

Lahore and Karachi witnessed massive demonstrations demanding that ties with Britain and France be severed and that Egypt receive full backing. The marches and strikes were a potent articulation of priorities that placed anti-imperialism and Muslim solidarity above the state’s realpolitik. In a testament to how threatened it felt, the state cracked down on opposition and banned public meetings.Footnote ⁴⁹ The crisis exposed Pakistan’s foreign policy not merely as out of step with public opinion but as directly opposed to and undermined by it. This gap between the state and Pakistan’s domestic polity is captured in international diplomatic documents. In September 1956, Chinese reports from Pakistan noted that “the Pakistani people’s dissatisfaction with diplomatic policies” was so intense that the government was obliged to launch a public relations campaign.Footnote ⁵⁰ Protests on the government’s response to the Suez Crisis significantly challenged the state’s US alignment, underscoring the potency of popular anti-imperial sentiment and its impact on maintaining pressure on the country’s Cold War positioning. Thus, Pakistan’s international politics from 1955–1956 should be read as a field of contested possibilities in which the state sought to wield the language of Muslim universalism to its strategic advantage, even while laying the foundations for an alliance that would profoundly contradict that unity.Footnote ⁵¹

The Suez Crisis was transformative, influencing the structures through which politics unfolded.Footnote ⁵² It was not merely a diplomatic incident but a world-historical moment reshaping postcolonial state-society relations, anti-imperial politics, and superpower strategy. Viewed through this lens, the Suez Crisis, along with the Bandung Conference and the Baghdad Pact, did more than shift foreign policy. Together, they reconfigured the terrain of Pakistan’s Cold War identity. The state’s navigation of domestic opposition, its mediation between the US, the Muslim world, and the broader Global South, and its anxious diplomacy after Suez were driven by both international strategy and domestic criticism of that strategy. Caught between its domestic polity and the material pull of the US alliance, Pakistan’s Cold War trajectory was both more constrained and more generative than the “client state” label suggests.

Before 1955–1956, Pakistan’s foreign policy projected modernity and sovereign independence, undergirded by integration into global capitalism. However, Western security alliances awakened an increasingly anti-imperialist domestic polity. Entry into the Baghdad Pact was the initial rupture, an action that started “a chain of occurrences that durably transformed … the structures that made them possible.”Footnote ⁵³ The pact exposed the tension between the state’s political and security institutions and the domestic polity’s internationalist views, amplifying grievances over development, inequality, and hierarchy. Subsequently, Prime Minister Suhrawardy struggled to balance the Western alliance with domestic outrage.Footnote ⁵⁴ At the same time, secular Arab regimes, wary of Pakistan’s pan-Islamic discourse, withheld backing despite outwardly friendly relations. Frustrated by this diplomatic impasse, Pakistani elites pivoted further toward Washington.Footnote ⁵⁵

The Suez Crisis amplified domestic tensions in Pakistan, energizing opposition groups, student unions, the workers’ movement, and the previously dormant ulema. Widespread strikes and protests became a forceful reassertion of an alternative vision for Pakistan’s world politics. The state responded with increased authoritarianism, attempting to shield foreign policy from domestic pressures. It marked a moment in a broader struggle between the forces of empire and anti-imperialism, following a pattern seen earlier in reactions to the 1953 coup against Iran’s Muhammad Mossadegh and continuing with protests in 1961 against the military coup that murdered the democratically elected Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Perceiving Western powers as undermining decolonization efforts, Pakistani students, workers, and Marxist groups staged nationwide protests, affirming a commitment to Global South solidarity that transcended state nationalism.Footnote ⁵⁶ Pakistani students protesting Lumumba’s murder, as reported in left-leaning newspapers, called upon “Afro-Asian countries which themselves have only attained freedom” to unite against colonial violence, exemplifying a political consciousness that transcended national borders.Footnote ⁵⁷ The 1961 protests in Lahore over the US and Belgium-backed assassination of Lumumba reveal how Pakistanis framed their intertwined struggles as part of a global fight against resurgent European colonialism masked by Cold War narratives.

Contested aftermaths: postcolonial worldmaking and inter-imperial reconfiguration

Washington’s public denunciation of Great Britain, Israel, and France during the Suez Crisis is often attributed to Cold War anxiety, but that fear stemmed from panic over intensified global anti-imperial organizing—from Algiers to Hanoi—that made old-style European colonialism politically unsustainable.Footnote ⁵⁸ Protests in Pakistan were part of this global trend, alongside those in Iran, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The Pakistani case shows that Global South defiance was not an abstract or background idea. Instead, it was a new political reality that superpowers, such as the US, had to factor into their strategies following decolonization and the emergence of postcolonial sovereignty.

American President Dwight Eisenhower feared that accepting the Suez invasion would damage the US’s credibility in the Global South and give Moscow a powerful opportunity to portray the US as an extension of earlier European empires. In a furious response to the Suez Crisis, the US forced the aggressors to withdraw through diplomatic and economic pressure, including threats to destabilize the finances of Great Britain and France. After denouncing the November 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary, and framing the invasion as a form of imperialism, US officials feared being viewed as accomplices to European aggression.

The Suez Crisis strained alliances, contributed to the resignation of British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, and led the US to fill the Middle East power vacuum through the Eisenhower Doctrine, which strengthened regional anti-communist capacity in ways the Baghdad Pact could not.Footnote ⁵⁹ Moreover, the crisis offered a moment for the US to promote its support for postcolonial sovereignty whilst simultaneously auditioning for the role of chosen modernizer and patron for newly decolonized states. Henceforth, “Pakistan became a cornerstone of the Eisenhower Doctrine, a crucial component of its collective security project in fighting Communism.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The Suez Crisis highlighted the tension between US-led strategic imperatives and popular aspirations, positioning Pakistan at the intersection of Cold War geopolitics and domestic demands for foreign policy informed by the struggle for decolonization.

The Suez Crisis was globally unpopular and sent shockwaves through oil markets. The crisis was compounded when Syria and Lebanon barred British and French trade, forcing tankers to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, disrupting international finance and striking Pakistan’s aid- and trade-dependent economy.Footnote ⁶¹ British and French standing in the world fell as the old colonial empires were made to look weak and at odds with the global momentum for postcolonial sovereignty. Yemen expelled the British from Aden and granted the Soviets permission to dock their naval vessels at its ports. The Soviets secured the Al-Anad air base outside Aden, the largest base of its kind anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula at the time.Footnote ⁶² This was viewed in Washington as an existential threat to US power in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean region.

In response, the Americans ramped up the Cold War in Asia. Regional powers such as the Pakistani state could, the US believed, become increasingly involved in fulfilling geopolitical ambitions if aligned with US grand strategy and Western security designs.Footnote ⁶³ Pakistani political elites began playing “an unequivocally reactionary role”, providing officers for the Sultan of Muscat’s army in Oman, whilst helping the British bolster Royalist forces during the North Yemen Civil War (1962–1970).Footnote ⁶⁴ In this context, a rapidly militarizing postcolonial state in South West Asia was a valuable ally for the Americans.

Transnational anti-imperialism—marked by movements, insurgencies, protests, periodicals, strikes, and public dissent—thus contributed to the conditions that enabled the US’s ascendancy over its European allies, rendering British imperial politics (especially in the Middle East) unsustainable. The Eisenhower administration’s decision to contest the invasion of the Suez Canal was, in part, an acknowledgment that old imperial methods of gunboat diplomacy were no longer viable in the age of decolonization.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, the Suez Crisis also exposed the power and structural limits of global decolonization. The Pakistani state’s reaction to the crisis was to further insulate foreign policy from domestic accountability, thereby exacerbating dissent. Unrest over the new state’s economic and logistical challenges, combined with political repression and challenges to its international standing, fueled growing friction and political disorder for the government, culminating in Ayub Khan’s 1958 military coup. The decade that followed was the quintessential example of a Cold War replacement for decolonization, a model of uneven development: technocratic, US-backed modernization that empowered the military-bureaucratic apparatus while leaving colonial structures, hierarchies of dominance, and extraction from the land, assets, and production intact.Footnote ⁶⁶

Superpower rivalry was similarly refracted through the prism of postcolonial states grappling with the fractious legacies of war, empire, and upheaval. The Pakistani state’s attempt to navigate the competing imperatives of Cold War alliances and domestic anti-imperialism reproduced a broader tension within postcolonial statecraft. This was a structural condition of postcolonial sovereignty, with legitimacy produced through anti-imperialist struggle even when material practices frequently undermined it. In this way, postcolonial states regularly operated within what has been aptly described as a “permanent dilemma,” compelled to narrate and perform anti-imperial legitimacy and solidarity for a domestic polity while being incorporated into global hierarchies that demanded compliance with international orders.Footnote ⁶⁷ The rupture between aspirations for postcolonial self-determination and great-power patronage produced legitimacy crises wherever it occurred. In 1950s Pakistan, the repercussions would be felt for decades.

The domestic uproar over the Suez Crisis directly challenged the Pakistani state’s claim to represent the anti-imperial will of its people, exposing the gap between Bandung rhetoric and Baghdad realpolitik—a rupture that shaped a generation of popular, internationalist dissent that would topple Ayub Khan’s military government in 1969. By repressing dissent, the state prioritized the security and economic gains of the US alliance over the transformative, albeit high-stakes demands, of a transnational, anti-imperial foreign policy. Pakistan’s Cold War trajectory became a contest over the very terms of postcolonial sovereignty: a struggle between a state that instrumentalized anti-imperialism to preserve elite control and a populace that (at least in part) embraced it as a lived ethic of international solidarity. Contention over the state’s geopolitical choices did not lead to a shift in strategic alignment. However, societal conflict over Pakistani foreign policy generated a distinctive agency-in-effect—a form of postcolonial agency that emerged not through overt institutional power, but through material organizing, moral positioning, and transnational resonance.Footnote ⁶⁸ The effect of regional uproar was evident in the stark US condemnation of Great Britain and France over the Suez Crisis, reflecting both strategic concerns about their lack of communication and acknowledgment of the political impossibility of classical European colonialism in a post-Bandung world. In this way, global mobilizations during the Suez Crisis demonstrated that postcolonial societies were not passive spectators of the Cold War, they were engaged participants whose collective, transnational actions could influence the limits of state power and imperial authority.

Domestic dissent—articulated through socialist meetings, Islamic solidarity rhetoric and appeals to the Bandung spirit—produced a counter-imaginary of sovereignty that sought to re-inscribe Pakistan within a Global South moral geography rather than a Western geopolitical one. Through the “relational labor” of agency-in-effect, the domestic polity of Pakistan and its West Asian counterparts exercised a dispersed yet consequential influence that reshaped the normative terrain of international politics. During the Suez Crisis, this field of contestation became a site of co-constituted agency: the convergence of publics, movements, political parties, and unions across the Muslim, Arab, and Global South worlds generated a shared critique of Western intervention and direct pressure on individual governments that exceeded the control of any single state. Pakistan’s internal struggles, along with those of other postcolonial states, helped undermine the moral legitimacy of Western security alignments. Such struggles compelled superpowers, such as the US, to navigate the terrain of anti-colonial politics that could, as in the Suez Crisis, recalibrate engagement strategies with the Global South. The episode illustrates how postcolonial polities—through contention, resonance, and relationality—generated a world-making agency that reshaped international politics during decolonization after World War II.

Legacies of Suez: infrastructural imperialism and global change in West Asia

The Eisenhower administration recognized that classical colonialism—territorial occupation, violent extraction, and formal empire—was politically unsustainable in the age of decolonization. In January 1957, the Eisenhower Doctrine pledged US economic and military aid to anyone “requesting assistance against armed aggression from any country controlled by international communism.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Through this doctrine, the United States distributed tens of millions of dollars in aid to Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Libya.Footnote ⁷⁰ Yet the Eisenhower Doctrine was not merely a security policy; it was also an infrastructural project. As Laleh Khalili demonstrates, the US military—specifically the US Army Corps of Engineers—embedded itself across West Asia during the late 1950s and 1960s, constructing highways, military bases, airfields, port facilities, and telecommunications networks.Footnote ⁷¹ The US Army Corps of Engineers worked from Riyadh to Helmand and collaborated with Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned petroleum company. The engineers built logistics networks from Dubai to operate container terminals in Karachi, constructed military facilities in Iran and Turkey, and surveyed routes for pipelines and highways, thereby integrating the region into US supply chains.Footnote ⁷² Henceforth, “this moment also marked the introduction of the US Army Corps of Engineers’ construction programs in the Middle East … from Morocco to … Pakistan, Afghanistan … encompassed by highways, military bases, airfields and other strategic infrastructure projects.”Footnote ⁷³ Khalili argues that this was a new form of imperialism, one based on infrastructure development: the projection of power through logistics and capital rather than direct territorial control.

This transformation toward infrastructural imperialism had profound implications for Pakistan. The country became central to US strategy in West Asia, with its territory hosting communications facilities, its military receiving extensive training and equipment, and its government integrated into US-led regional security architectures. As Ayesha Jalal shows, this alignment empowered Pakistan’s military and bureaucratic elites, providing resources and legitimacy that insulated them from domestic accountability.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet the alignment also deepened the contradiction at the heart of Pakistan’s Cold War history: it was a state whose material interests were increasingly tied to US global dominance while its domestic polity was strongly oriented toward the anti-imperialism of Bandung, Nasser, and Afro-Asian solidarity.

In a paradoxical sense, the US infrastructural turn was a testament to the effectiveness of anti-imperial resistance. To avoid a fate like that of colonial Europe, the US adapted. Rather than colonies, it built bases. Instead of gunboats, it built pipelines. Rather than formal empire, it built a “grammar of capitalist relations” through contracts, procurement, and development assistance.Footnote ⁷⁵ This adaptation was not a concession to anti-imperial movements, it was a strategic response—an acknowledgment that the agency-in-effect of Global South publics made certain forms of domination unfeasible. The Suez Crisis marked the moment when the US signaled it would no longer follow the European colonial model and instead forge a new, informal kind of great power for the 20th century. With empires “out” and states “in,” imperial politics became both a stigma to avoid and a weapon to wield, as Washington and Moscow mobilized anti-imperialist discourse to advance their rival hegemonies. The subsequent consolidation of US infrastructural power in West Asia reveals the dialectical logic of this process: success in constraining one form of domination contributed to the emergence of another, more flexible and indirect form.