<P> The Suez Crisis very publicly exposed Britain's limitations to the world and confirmed Britain's decline on the world stage, demonstrating that henceforth it could no longer act without at least the acquiescence, if not the full support, of the United States . The events at Suez wounded British national pride, leading one MP to describe it as "Britain's Waterloo" and another to suggest that the country had become an "American satellite". Margaret Thatcher later described the mindset she believed had befallen Britain's political leaders as "Suez syndrome" where they "went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing", from which Britain did not recover until the successful recapture of the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982 . </P> <P> While the Suez Crisis caused British power in the Middle East to weaken, it did not collapse . Britain again deployed its armed forces to the region, intervening in Oman (1957), Jordan (1958) and Kuwait (1961), though on these occasions with American approval, as the new Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's foreign policy was to remain firmly aligned with the United States . Britain maintained a military presence in the Middle East for another decade . On 16 January 1968, a few weeks after the devaluation of the pound, Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his Defence Secretary Denis Healey announced that British troops would be withdrawn from major military bases East of Suez, which included the ones in the Middle East, and primarily from Malaysia and Singapore by the end of 1971, instead of 1975 as earlier planned . By that time over 50,000 British military personnel were still stationed in the Far East, including 30,000 in Singapore . The British withdrew from Aden in 1967, Bahrain in 1971, and the Maldives in 1976 . </P> <P> Macmillan gave a speech in Cape Town, South Africa in February 1960 where he spoke of "the wind of change blowing through this continent". Macmillan wished to avoid the same kind of colonial war that France was fighting in Algeria, and under his premiership decolonisation proceeded rapidly . To the three colonies that had been granted independence in the 1950s--Sudan, the Gold Coast and Malaya--were added nearly ten times that number during the 1960s . </P> <P> Britain's remaining colonies in Africa, except for self - governing Southern Rhodesia, were all granted independence by 1968 . British withdrawal from the southern and eastern parts of Africa was not a peaceful process . Kenyan independence was preceded by the eight - year Mau Mau Uprising . In Rhodesia, the 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence by the white minority resulted in a civil war that lasted until the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979, which set the terms for recognised independence in 1980, as the new nation of Zimbabwe . </P>

Country that became the dominant european imperial power after 1763