| Summary/Abstract |
Ankara at the end of World War II was a grim palimpsest—the remains of an Ottoman provincial city peeked through the republic’s modernist dreams, and upon them both had accumulated new layers of migrant poverty and coal smoke. Turkey had not been bombed or devastated by mass slaughter and war, but it was poorly armed, plagued with inflation, and diplomatically isolated. Now, the fear of Soviet aggression, which had kept the country on the fence throughout World War II, was compounded by the fear of being left out of the new international order. Turkey—and we must be cautious in our assumptions about countries that would later become NATO members—was alone. When the Big Three met at the Livadia Palace in Yalta, the Ankara government had yet to sign the Declaration by the United Nations, was excluded from the Bretton Woods conference, and, most strikingly, was still debating whether to declare war on Nazi Germany and Japan. Along with a handful of other equally isolated neutrals, Turkey was hesitant. The Turkish government’s eventual war declaration—two weeks after Yalta—was a desperate attempt to secure a seat at the San Francisco Conference. With large areas of Eastern Europe falling under Soviet control, the moment was hardly propitious for the Turks to convince British Prime Minister Winston Churchill or U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt that their fears about Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s designs over the Turkish Straits and Eastern Anatolia were warranted. Looking at developments in neighboring countries, the pessimists in Turkey’s leadership had reason to anticipate Western connivance in Soviet demands for security guarantees on the Straits. The absence of any countervailing voices against Stalin meant that the Turks had to resolve their geopolitical disputes through exclusive negotiations in Moscow on Soviet terms—and the costs were high because of their prolonged neutrality.
|