1
Background to Crisis
We usually associate arms embargoes with countries that are perceived as enemies of the United States, such as Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, or that stand accused of violating human rights, such as Argentina, the People’s Republic of China, and the Republic of South Africa. Rarely has the United States imposed such sanctions on one of its closest allies, as it did with Turkey in 1974. An examination of how this happened and why it lasted so long provides the focus of this study.
Turkey is one of only a few friendly nations that the United States has subjected to such harsh public retribution. Certainly, no other member of NATO has come close to such a fate. Other allies have violated the spirit if not the substance of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which proscribes the use of American weapons except for purposes of national self-defense. During the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel struck Egypt and Syria without warning, using an arsenal of weapons largely supplied by the United States. Indonesia likewise waged a brutal war in East Timor, beginning in 1975 and lasting a quarter century, without any punishment from either Democratic or Republican administrations in the United States until almost the end of the conflict. Greece, under a military junta (1967–1974), transferred American-supplied weapons to Cyprus, also in violation of the arms agreement with the United States. None of these nations faced immediate American sanctions. In each case, the violations were well known. In the case of Israel, lawmakers often worried that if Ankara were to be punished, Tel Aviv might suffer a similar fate for the occupation of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip beginning in 1967 or possibly for some future preemptive military action. (Their argument was that neither country should be sanctioned.) In the case of Indonesia, a few congressmen questioned the attack in East Timor at the outset, but their interest quickly waned, perhaps because the tiny island lay so far away, beyond the consciousness of most Americans. One-third of the East Timorese population would die before the United States cut off arms to Jakarta in the 1990s.
Why, then, did Turkey alone experience a complete arms embargo almost immediately after its invasion of Cyprus? The complex answer involves a unique set of factors both foreign and domestic. Taken together, they made the Turkish republic an inviting target for much of the American political establishment.
In Ankara, Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit (1925–2006) took two decisive steps in the summer of 1974: he reintroduced the cultivation of opium poppies, and he supported the invasion of Cyprus. Although the Turkish government offered justifications for each, many US lawmakers viewed these actions as malicious. They might have seemed unrelated, but taken together, these moves helped poison American public opinion toward Turkey. Turkish authorities had misjudged the political temper in the US Congress, perhaps focusing too much on the perceived weakness at the White House end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Summer 1974 turned out to be the worst possible time to carry out an attack on Cyprus. The movement on Capitol Hill to check executive overreach, especially regarding foreign policy, was gaining strength. Had the invasion of Cyprus taken place a short time earlier or later, the congressional response might have been much less robust.
To make matters worse, Turkey experienced a troubled period of weak national governments from the fall of 1974 until September 1980. Successive coalitions were unable to reach any compromise on sensitive issues such as the future of Cyprus. At critical times, Turkey had virtually no lobby in Washington; for example, its most effective spokesman, Ambassador Melih Esenbel, spent most of the period from November 1974 to April 1975 away from the embassy, serving as acting foreign minister in Ankara.
In the United States, the timing was perfect for congressional activists to challenge White House domination of foreign policy. After executive violations related to the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, legalists on Capitol Hill could make a strong case against allowing Turkey to break the law with impunity.1 There was already a great deal of animosity toward Turkey due to the poppy decision, which violated a 1971 agreement with Washington. Furthermore, Cyprus, with its majority-Greek population, had strong advocates in Congress and among the US public. All this transpired at a time when the US presidency had suffered a diminution of power and influence and Gerald R. Ford, the first unelected president, occupied the executive mansion. Each of these factors—and there were lesser ones as well—worked against the interests of Turkey, culminating in a foreign policy crisis that no one had foreseen and no one seemed able to resolve.
American ties to the Republic of Turkey and earlier to the Ottoman Empire have a long history. Yankee traders first appeared in Ottoman ports, especially Smyrna (Izmir), in the late eighteenth century. American Protestant missionaries followed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, establishing schools and colleges, as well as medical facilities, in many parts of the empire. Robert College, perched high above the Bosporus on the European side of Istanbul, represented one of the missionaries’ most important educational achievements. From its founding in 1863, it graduated many Turkish students, who would become notable figures in their nation’s history. These included Prime Minister Ecevit, who would take center stage in Turkish politics in the 1970s.
These missionaries often conveyed disparaging attitudes toward Turkish Muslims as well as Christian minorities, such as the Armenians, who resisted their attempts at proselytization. The American public generally held negative views of the Turks, especially in the later years of the nineteenth century, when reports of massacres of Armenians became more common. It was widely believed that the Turks were not to be trusted. When General Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur and former American consul general to the Ottoman Porte, challenged that stereotype in front of American audiences, he was repeatedly shouted down amid a stream of abuse.
Events in World War I exacerbated such sentiments. Especially significant were the Ottomans’ decision to join the Central powers in October 1914 and the Armenian genocide in eastern Anatolia beginning in 1915. In early postwar America, stories abounded of supposed Turkish massacres at Smyrna after the Greek army withdrew in September 1922. Such censorious claims were easily transferred from the dying empire to the early Turkish republic of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk, 1881–1938). Competing with these views, however, was a grudging respect for the transformative and modernizing policies of the Turkish republic, established in 1923. American archaeologists working in Turkey between the world wars shared many positive observations about the new regime, as did US diplomats. They lauded the absence of corruption and the determination to create a modern, democratic, Western state.
The nationalist government, based in its new capital of Ankara, took control of most of the foreign educational institutions. This aspect of society was too important to be left in the hands of foreigners. Education provided an effective means of implementing a nationalist curriculum to produce proud, patriotic citizens of the new republic.
After the bitter experience of World War I and its aftermath, Turkey declared its neutrality in the Second World War. Only when the conflict was almost over, on February 23, 1945, did the Turkish government declare war on Germany. This allowed it to become a charter member of the United Nations.
In the early postwar years, as the United States and the Soviet Union drifted apart and the US government took steps to contain the Soviets, the Truman administration moved slowly to strengthen ties with Turkey, which had assumed new strategic importance. The Soviets pressed Turkey to relax control over Russian naval vessels moving through the straits that separated the Black Sea from the Aegean, and as Greece descended into civil war, the Truman administration decided to support Ankara’s resistance to Soviet demands. In March 1947, after Britain had withdrawn from the area, Truman gave a landmark speech promising American economic and military assistance to both Greece and Turkey to counter communist aggression.2
Three years later, the Democrat Party swept to power in Ankara following free elections. It ruled for a decade. Moving away from many of the statist policies of Ataturk and the Republican People’s Party, the Democrats opened the Turkish economy to foreign investment and international capital. Washington found these reforms appealing. Prime Minister Adnan Menderes also continued to seek membership for his country in the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization.