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Economics

Apr 16, 2026 Yanis Varoufakis

The Iran war is not America’s "Suez moment," but it may well turn out to be America’s Gallipoli moment. It was there, in 1915, that the British Empire overreached disastrously—underestimating the tenacity of a decadent regime, overestimating its own military capacity, and demonstrating stupendous strategic confusion.

ATHENS – When Egypt closed the Suez Canal for five months in 1956, it triggered events that shrunk the global standing of Britain’s pound sterling, inaugurated the petrodollar age, and demonstrated how a small country can inflict serious damage upon the economic power that had subjugated it decades earlier.