Gunboat Diplomacy: Turkey, USA and the Advent of the Cold War

Abstract

This article aims to re-evaluate the visit of the battleship USS Missouri to Turkey on 5-6 April 1946, to ascertain whether or not it might be considered an early attempt on the part of the United States to challenge the Soviet Union. Greater historical clarity than previously possible can be afforded by the authors through the use of hitherto unreleased documents from the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Turkish Republic. Moreover, this article aims to achieve a more balanced and comprehensive analysis by integrating the systemic factors with the actions of crucial actors at the individual level based on new archival evidence. By doing this, our main argument emerges whereby the United States displayed its power against the Soviets via the visit of the USS Missouri only in hindsight; while the decision to send the exhumed body of the late Turkish ambassador Mehmet Münir Ertegün home, was the action of an individual. However, due to the advent of the Cold War, the dynamics shaping Turkey's search for security and ultimately the containment policy of the United States, has loaded the event with more meaning than it was originally intended, turning a 'diplomatic courtesy' into 'gunboat diplomacy.'On his last night in Cairo, and utterly exhausted from the intense negotiations of the preceding days at the conference, Franklin Roosevelt lay down on his bed and allowed himself to become immersed in a detective novel he had been reading for some days. He had finally made it to the most gripping part of the book where the protagonist, an honorable man, was reduced to working with the flimsiest shreds of evidence and seemingly against all odds, to attain his desired goal. Despite the lure of the more obvious clues which would tie the case up so neatly, there remained one barely visible undercurrent of opinion, one route however difficult, which could yet enable the man of justice to resolve the case correctly and justly. Perhaps as Roosevelt lay on his bed, he drew parallels with his own predicamentthe elusive quest for long-term stability and world peace in this, the most complex of political contexts. How, for example, was he ever going to convince Stalin that the United States and Great Britain were not hatching a plan to form a block against the Soviet Union when the great united struggle against Nazi Germany was finished? He may, he felt satisfied, have allayed these fears and suspicions in the short term here in Cairo, but would the notion and the trust be sustainable in the difficult months and years to come. A post-war world, he knew, caught between Great

Commodities

“…It posed as the defender of Iranian sovereignty (Hasanli 2006). Its backing for Turkey against Soviet attempts to secure access to the Black Sea (İnanç and Yilmaz 2012) led to the American Sixth Fleet being on permanent station in the Mediterranean (Khalidi 2009). The following year, it intervened to defeat a Communist insurgency in Greece (Jones 1989).…”

Turkey’s quest for NATO membership: the institutionalization of the Turkish–American alliance

“…1 In this increasingly hostile environment, the dispatch of the battleship Missouri to Istanbul, carrying the remains of Ambassador Ertegün who had died in Washington during the war, was perceived as a sign of the growing US support for Turkey. 2 As argued by a recent study based on hitherto unused primary sources (İnanç and Yılmaz 2012), this incident which initially started out as 'diplomatic courtesy', eventually turned into and has been interpreted as 'gunboat diplomacy'. While there was a wish to display power against the Soviets through the Missouri visit, this was not yet a display of power that would mean clear US support for Turkey.…”