The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece

by Bruce Robellet Kuniholm

Overview

Bruce Kuniholm takes a regional perspective to focus on postwar diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece and efforts in these countries to maintain their independence from the Great Powers. Drawing on a wide variety of secondary sources, government documents, private papers, unpublished memoirs, and extensive interviews with key figures, he shows how the traditional struggle for power along the Northern Tier was a major factor in the origins and development of the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

Originally published in 1980.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691643618
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #732
Edition description:	With a New epilogue by the author
Pages:	536
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

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The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East

Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece

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By Bruce Robellet Kuniholm

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10083-8

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CHAPTER 1

The Turkish Context

The Historical Background

THE historical conflict between Russia and Turkey dates back three centuries, to the first of their thirteen wars. The source of conflict was in essence a question of power which manifested itself in tsarist Russia's territorial expansion at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. Since this exchange was not in Britain's interests, Russia's conflict with the Ottoman Empire was never entirely separable from its rivalry with Great Britain. Thus, by the time of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1774, tsarist Russia's expansion was underway, the Ottoman Empire's deterioration had begun, and the Eastern Question — the question of what should take the Ottoman Empire's place — was a matter of international concern.

The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, which conveniently dates the Eastern Question, recognized the Russian Empire as a riparian power and guaranteed her merchant ships free passage in the Turkish Straits. By conferring an international status on the Straits it created the problem of their jurisdiction.

A factor further complicating the Eastern Question was the awakening of the declining Ottoman Empire's subject nationalities. Ethnic and religious dimensions compounded what was already an economic, legal, political, and strategic problem. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the Eastern Question became increasingly central to the rivalry of the Great Powers, whose interests clashed in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. Thus, out of necessity, the Sublime Porte developed a broad view of diplomacy and foreign policy which neither the Ottoman Empire nor its successor, the Turkish Republic, has ever relinquished. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Turkey has been forced to maintain tenuous diplomatic positions which, as one historian describes them, "built upon a central strategy of inhibiting the most dangerous and threatening power by invoking the assistance of the others."

Concomitant with this strategy of survival, Turkey has followed a more constructive course, which Bernard Lewis refers to as "the Turkish Revolution." This line of development began not with the establishment of a new political order under the Young Turks in 1908, but in the eighteenth century, when a series of defeats forced the Turks, for the sake of survival, to accept and utilize new ideas and institutions that have served as foundations for the modern state and army. Thus, according to Lewis,

the basic change in Turkey — from an Islamic Empire to a national Turkish state, from a medieval theocracy to a constitutional republic, from a bureaucratic feudalism to a modern capitalist economy — was accomplished over a long period, by successive waves of reformers and radicals.

While the processes described above were at work, Great Britain and Russia — especially from the 1830s onward — were the powers chiefly concerned with the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Because Britain feared Russian expansion into the Balkans, the Straits Convention of 1841 has been interpreted as representing "the early application of a policy of containment," a policy not unlike that of the Truman Doctrine a century later. With the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, Britain also feared Russia's potential threat to her newly created lifeline through the Eastern Mediterranean to India. The question of whether or not Russia required containment depends on one's frame of reference. She had strategic as well as economic interests in the Straits. She also had a strong interest in the Slavic peoples of the Balkans and in the many Orthodox Christians who lived in the sultan's dominions. But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, while on the offensive against the Ottoman Empire, Russia may have been more defensive in her position than Britain realized. At least one scholar believes tsarist policy was dominated more by desire to exclude the fleets of the Great Powers from the Black Sea than to project Russian power into the Eastern Mediterranean.

Whatever the motivations behind her foreign policy, tsarist Russia expanded southward, forcing the Ottoman Empire to resort to geopolitics in an effort to contain her. But as the twentieth century began, the Sublime Porte's tactics became increasingly precarious. The settlement of differences between Russia and Britain in the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907, and the subsequent strengthening of that entente by the inclusion of France, sharply narrowed the options of an emerging nationalist movement in Turkey. After the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, German influence was ascendant. But so was Russian traffic through the Straits. By 1914 approximately 40 percent of all Russian exports and 54 percent of her maritime exports passed through the Straits. The Turks, who continued to harbor a traditional hatred and well-founded fear of Russia, were certain that the Triple Entente would partition the Ottoman Empire whether it won or lost. They were also discouraged by their failure to exact any tangible benefits from Britain and France. Because of these factors and the personal role of Enver Pasha (Turkey's Germanophile minister of war), the Sublime Porte cast its lot with Germany. As A.J.P. Taylor observes:

This was a supreme blunder, which brought down the Ottoman Empire. The Turks had made up for their internal weakness by a subtle diplomacy playing off one Great Power against another; now they gratuitously involved themselves in the European conflict. Perhaps they had no choice.

At war's end, the sick man of Europe was in his death throes, his dismemberment prefigured by four secret treaties which pointed to a dismemberment prefigured by four secret treaties which pointed to a resolution of the Eastern Question through the Ottoman Empire's partition. Although the new Russian government renounced Russia's part in the treaties, it was alone. An armistice signed at Mudros on the island of Lemnos in October 1918 provided for the loss of 50 percent of the Ottoman Empire's territory and population. The Straits were opened to the Allies who now had the right to occupy forts on the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, as well as "the right to occupy any strategic points in the event of a situation arising which threatens the security of the Allies" (Article 7).

The ensuing occupation of Turkish territories by the British, French, and Italians aroused the Turkish nationalist spirit, but was of little consequence compared to occupation by the Greeks." The Greek landing at Smyrna (Izmir) in May 1919 had been encouraged by President Wilson, Prime Minister Clemenceau, and Prime Minister Lloyd George — the latter of whom was anxious to safeguard British communications with India. The British prime minister found legitimization of the act in the vaguely phrased Article 7 of the Mudros Armistice.

As a result of the Greek occupation, a nationalist movement gathered momentum in Anatolia. Under the aegis of Mustafa Kemal, whose exploits at Gallipoli in 1915 had frustrated the British and forced their withdrawal, national congresses drafted and endorsed what became known as the National Pact. The National Pact was a declaration that emphasized Turkey's territorial integrity as well as her political, judicial, and financial independence. It expressed the terms on which Mustafa Kemal was prepared to make peace.

Hoping to suppress Kemal, the British occupied Constantinople and deported a number of nationalist deputies. This action, in turn, led to the convocation in Ankara of a Grand National Assembly which established a provisional government. When the sultan's government signed the Treaty of Sevres in August 1920, the nationalist government promptly rejected its terms and rallied a number of regular forces to the nationalist cause. The Treaty of Sevres, together with a Tripartite Agreement on Anatolia, would have been far more severe on Turkey than the Treaty of Versailles was on Germany — the two documents would, in effect, have extinguished Turkey's independence. But the nationalists never allowed them to be implemented.

Intent on effecting by force the goals put forward in the National Pact, the Turkish nationalists secured their eastern front and composed their differences with the Soviet regime, which was consolidating its position in the Russian Caucasus. Success against the Armenians in the east was followed by a momentous stand against the Greeks, who in July had come within fifty miles of Ankara. "There is no defense-line," Mustafa Kemal's Order of the Day had proclaimed in response to the Greek attack. "There is a defense-area, which is the whole country. Not one inch of it is to be given up until it is wet with Turkish blood." The new nation heard his call. At the Sakarya River it girded its loins. Women, with babies lashed to their backs, arrived from distant provinces with ox carts laden with food and ammunition. Bound by a sense of solidarity, new recruits held each other's hands as they took their places in trucks heading for the front. When the Greeks withdrew, scorching the earth as they left, they had lost 18,000 men. The Turks themselves lost nearly as many.

In spite of their losses, the Turks found the drift of events to be in their favor. As a result of the victory a t Sakarya, they were able to reach an agreement with France. Three days later, on 13 March 1921, exploiting the problems and jealousies of the Italians, the Turks concluded an accord with them, and three days after that, following detailed negotiations with Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Commissar of Nationalities, they concluded still another treaty with the Soviets. Secure in the northeast, supplied with aid from Russia, and with weapons from France and Italy, the Turks drove the Greeks out of Turkey, and concluded an armistice with the British at Mudanya on the Sea of Marmara in October 1922.

A week later, most of the territory claimed in the National Pact was under Turkish control, and military gains had set the stage for the success of the nationalists' diplomacy. When the Allies invited both the nationalists and the discredited sultan's government to a peace conference at Lausanne, Kemal abolished the sultanate and forced Mehmed VI to leave the country. Ismet Pasha, chief of Kemal's General' Staff, hero of two victories over the Greeks at Inönü during the war of liberation, and now foreign minister, was thus able to negotiate freely with Britain's foreign secretary Lord Curzon. The Hapsburg Empire had disappeared; German influence, at least temporarily, was destroyed; and Russia was greatly weakened. As a consequence, the first two countries were not even represented at the conference, while the latter was unable to effect its goal of a Straits regime restricted to the riparian powers of the Black Sea.

In addition to the collapse of the three empires, other factors worked to Turkey's advantage. Following victory over the Central Powers, Allied solidarity collapsed. Russia sought closure of the Straits while Great Britain sought complete freedom of navigation through them. The Turks, whose territorial objectives were severely limited by the National Pact, were able to manipulate these differences skillfully. The result was a compromise treaty which fulfilled most of the demands of the National Pact and gave Turkey international recognition. If certain questions were unresolved, Turkey's sovereignty was unquestioned over all her territory except the demilitarized Straits; she also held the permanent presidency of a regime with international legitimacy — it was established by an international supervisory commission under the auspices of the League of Nations. The Turks saw the contrast between Sevres and Lausanne as one between night and day; the nation had been saved from imminent burial at the hands of international diplomacy, and set free to follow its own destiny. The Ottoman Empire was dead, and vast territories had been cut away, but a new Turkish Republic had been born.

The Turkish Republic, in a sense, grew out of the Lausanne settlement. Shortly before the signing of the treaty, elections in Turkey returned a new chamber of deputies which opened its proceedings in August. Its first major political act under Mustafa Kemal's presidency was to ratify the treaty. Then, in October, riding on the prestige which accrued to it from the peace, it made Ankara the new seat of government — a symbolic break with the Ottoman past, and an indication of Kemal's intentions for Turkey's future. Within a month (29 October 1923), Turkey was proclaimed a republic and Mustafa Kemal elected its first president. In March 1924 the caliphate was abolished and Kemal's assault on the entrenched forces of Islamic orthodoxy was underway.

The reforms instituted under Kemal's presidency (which lasted until his death in November 1938) included acts which were both symbolic and substantive: the abolition of the fez and the compulsory wearing of hats;19 the adoption of an international (Gregorian) calendar and system of time; the adoption of new civil, criminal, and commercial codes; the secularization of the state; the adoption of a latinized alphabet; 20 the political emancipation of women; the compulsory adoption of surnames;21 and adoption of Sunday as a weekly holiday. While these reforms were revolutionary, one should note that they were conservative in nature. They were carried out from above by an elitist group whose paternalistic guidance, while relatively free of the demagoguery and repression characteristic of later European dictatorships, built on a nationalism that was already mature. Sources of this nationalism were to be found in an elite officer corps and in a bureaucracy which had as its basis two centuries of reform. If Turkey's political system gave voice to democratic ideals, it was democratic only in form; in fact, Turkey under Atatürk could best be described as a paternalistic, single-party state which, while managing to avoid the pitfalls of the European dictatorships, was nonetheless authoritarian.

It is possible that such a rule was necessary to achieve the Kemalist aim: to force the modernization of Turkish society in a manner that would redeem its self-respect. Atatürk recognized the necessity of remodeling not only government and society, but the Turks' sense of identity as well. As a soldier, he had saved the country and won its acceptance by Europe; as a statesman, he renounced foreign ambitions and ideologies which smacked of internationalism (i.e., Pan-Turanism and Pan-Islamic ideologies) and limited his aspirations to the reconstruction of Turkish national territory. By the time of his death, the Turkish people, according to one historian, "were solidly cemented as a national entity around a firm linguistic, cultural and territorial base." Atatürk's biographer, Lord Kinross, has elaborated on his legacy:

What Atatürk left to the Turkey he had freed was a strong foundation and a clear objective of her future growth. He gave her not merely durable institutions but a national ideal, rooted in patriotism, nourished by a new self-respect, and promising fruitful rewards for new energies. He created, by his deeds and his words, a personal myth, to feed the imagination of a people given to the worship of heroes.

In the period of reconstruction and reform under Atatürk, Turkey renounced expansionist, revisionist ventures and concentrated on internal transformation. International peace and hence the status quo were prerequisites to her development. Development, in turn, was necessary to assure continued independence. As a small power, Turkey followed a realistic policy which, while cognizant of international pressures and the global balance of power, remained rooted in her own, national self-interest.

As a concrete step toward fulfillment of her foreign policy objectives, Turkey, on 17 December 1925, signed a Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality with the Soviet Union. Each party pledged itself to neutrality in case of military action against the other, undertook to abstain from aggression against the other, and also undertook not to participate in an alliance directed against the other. Other treaties followed: with Yugoslavia (1925), France (1926), Persia and Afghanistan (1926), Britain and Iraq (1926), Hungary (1927), Italy (1928), Bulgaria (1929), and Greece (1930). The treaty with Greece terminated a hundred years of bitter enmity which had often caused tremendous loss of life and had often invited the interference of the Great Powers; it also confirmed Turkey's intention to support the status quo. To this end, she joined Yugoslavia, Greece, and Rumania in the Balkan Pact (1934), a defensive alliance primarily directed against an irredentist Bulgaria. The core of the pact was a guarantee of the independence and territorial integrity of each power and an obligation to consult other members of the alliance in the event of threats to peace in the Balkans.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East by Bruce Robellet Kuniholm. Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• List of Maps, pg. ix
• Acknowledgments, pg. xi
• Introduction, pg. xv
• Abbreviations, pg. xxii
• Part I. SOURCES OF GREAT POWER RIVALRY ALONG THE NORTHERN TIER, pg. 1
• Part II. THE NORTHERN TIER AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE COLD WAR, pg. 209
• EPILOGUE. Reflections on Writing History and the Historiography of the Origins of the Cold War in the Near East1, pg. 433
• APPENDIX A. The Organization of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs (NEA), pg. 457
• APPENDIX B. The “Truman Doctrine”, pg. 458
• Selected Bibliography, pg. 465
• Index, pg. 493

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations

From the Publisher

"Kuniholm's work should be commended for its careful analysis of British, American, and Soviet intervention into the politics of Iran, Turkey and Greece."

Middle East Journal

"This book is one of the most significant in the historiography of the entire Cold War conflict."

Journal of American History

"An important book to read and a valuable addition to the literature on the Cold War."

Political Science Quarterly