My history prof used to say that Sir Anthony Eden was the last Prime Minister to believe the United Kingdom was a superpower and the first to prove that it wasn't.

To be fair, it's not that hard to make bad historical analogies.

"This is what Dwight Clark's catch in the 1982 championship game must have felt like to Ringo Starr."

Yeah?

No its when the decline of the UK as an imperial power became obvious not some rounders player and the least musical beetle.

Why is this Suez? How do you know it's not the British losing a battle in 1761 or something? I mean, there were probably prognosticators at that time saying, "Charlie, did you hear about that British defeat by the French by the old Ohio River. By God they're finished as an empire. Done!"

We won't know the impact this has on anything for a long time. In a decade it probably isn't going to matter. Just seems like a huge overreaction to compare something like this to Suez.

If you really want to get into why it's a bad analogy, we can talk about how Suez was the result of the Egyptians nationalizing the canal and then the new superpower (the US) rebuffing the British when they tried to take it back. Yeah, that was a sign of the end of British power. Seems like this incident is the US taking the ball and going home, with no real response from other nations other than protest. If anything it tells you how much power the US still has.

...but I just liked my Dwight Clark joke. The Catch still haunts me as a Cowboys fan.

No offence you don't seem to have much knowledge of post ww2 history.

Sure, but you didn't know about that catch, did you?

Come on HN. Guy can say "you don't know anything about history" and not even back it up, but as long as it agrees with your biases, upvote. Make a dumb joke? Downvote.

You're better than that. You've all got access to the same wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis

As an online discussion continues, the probability of it all being blamed on Yoko Ono approaches one.