Read: Even now, Brexit remains impossible to understand

There has been much discussion of the roles of history and memory in relation to Brexit. It may be easy to overstate a simplistic, literalist connection between the empire—imagined as glorious, and unjustly lost—and the impulse to leave the EU. Yet it is hard to avoid the sense that embedded in Brexit is a form of “Make Britain great again.” Sharper parallels are perhaps drawn between Britain’s collective recollection of its part in World War II, heavily mythologized as the moment it stood alone against Adolf Hitler, and the attitude of Brexit supporters to the isolation and hardship Brexit may bring.

While the myths constructed around the history of empire and World War II reinforce British exceptionalism, they are contradictory. The first casts Britain as a superpower; the second as a lone, plucky underdog. This dissonance is not new, nor is it unique to the Brexit process. It has helped produce disasters on an international scale before. The Suez crisis—during which Britain was neither able to take control of the Suez Canal, nor able to oust Egypt’s anti-imperialist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser—is often cited as a precursor.

Brexit is a public withdrawal from a voluntary union; Suez was a covert invasion of a sovereign state. They are wholly different. Yet there is a familiarity to the grand aspirations undercut by slapdash and delusional strategic planning; to the frantic rush to act, even as it becomes clear that most or all of the options are damaging; to leaders fixated on a path that many can see will probably end badly.

In general, Britain remembers Suez as a blip in what is widely viewed as a mostly well-intentioned and competent imperial policy. Far from ending British exceptionalism, the disaster has been used to reinforce it. Suez can be framed as a unique aberration if it is blamed on what is erroneously held to have been a betrayal by the United States, and on the folly of one man, the physically and mentally exhausted Prime Minister Anthony Eden. That heads off more troubling questions about whether there were deeper problems with cabinet decision making, military advice, foreign policy, the political culture as a whole, and even the nation’s understanding of itself.

The historian Kim A. Wagner has made a similar argument about the Amritsar Massacre of 1919. Winston Churchill denounced that event—in which imperial forces fired on Indian civilians in an enclosed space, killing hundreds—as “without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire” and “absolutely foreign to the British way of doing things.” Churchill, who was a strong believer in empire, had not suddenly become a critic. As Wagner points out in his book Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre, Churchill’s speech “was, on the contrary, an elaborate act of deflection and a staunch attempt to reassert the moral legitimacy of the British Empire.” Just months later, Churchill was part of the cabinet that deployed the Black and Tans, temporary constables who gained a reputation for violence against civilians in Ireland.