Sowing Crisis, page 7
And at least insofar as a request for revision, in the USSR’s favor, of the Montreux Treaty governing passage through the Turkish Straits was concerned, Stalin was acting in keeping with a tacit understanding reached at Yalta with the Americans and British in response to their inability to use this waterway to send desperately needed supplies to the USSR in the most difficult days of World War II. It was in his demands on Turkey for the reversion to the USSR of its post–World War I territorial concessions to Turkey (which is to say the handover to Russia of provinces that had earlier been seized from the Ottoman Empire and were returned to Turkey after the revolution by the Bolsheviks), and his meddling in Iranian internal affairs that Stalin’s behavior was the most indefensible.
Stalin can undoubtedly be said to have been following in the footsteps of the tsars in bullying both Turkey and Iran, taking advantage of the USSR’s newfound power. However overbearing they may have been, his government’s demands on Turkey and interference in Iran may also have been a defensive reaction to the USSR’s demonstrated vulnerability along its southern frontiers during World War II. If this is the case, it was prompted as well by Stalin’s long-standing fear of moves by the Western powers in this region, where his own career as a revolutionary started. More specifically, the Kars-Ardahan region abutted the Soviet port of Batum, where major Soviet oil facilities were located, and thus, as in Iran, this attempted push southward may have involved an attempt to create a buffer around the strategically sensitive area of the southern Soviet Union. In any case, once rebuffed by the Turks over the issue of frontier revisions, the Soviets dropped the matter, which was not mentioned again after the spring of 1946.26
Stalin’s aggressive initiatives were in turn interpreted by Churchill (who had first entered British public life as an MP in 1900 when the Conservative statesman Lord Salisbury was still prime minister) as a continuation of the old Anglo-Russian rivalry over these regions dating back to the high epoch of the Eastern Question, the competition between European powers for domination over the Ottoman Empire and adjacent regions.27 And even after Churchill left office in 1945, there seems little doubt that his deep and enduring suspicions of Russia, and his virulent anti-Bolshevism, were shared by key members of the government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who succeeded him. As I suggested in chapter 1, it also seems clear that these attitudes helped to influence the thinking of many American decision-makers who were new to dealing with this part of the world, and gave a patina of respectability to the existing anticommunist prejudices of others in the United States, especially formerly isolationist Republicans.
Nevertheless, for all the enduring strategic elements that were at work here, the focus by both the United States and the Soviet Union on Middle Eastern oil was a new factor, and marked the beginning of a novel phase for both. Rarely had the foreign policy of either resource-rich power previously been so closely linked to attempts to achieve exclusive control over such resources outside their own territory (although the American oil industry had long dominated the oil production of the Western Hemisphere, and aggressively pursued opportunities elsewhere, including its striking success in Saudi Arabia in 1933).28 The two new superpowers’ parallel moves regarding Middle Eastern oil, the defensive sensitivity of the Soviets regarding their own nearby domestic oil resources, and the projected targeting of the latter by United States strategic planners, were all clear signs of the dawning of a new age of competition for world dominance. They marked an extension into the postwar era of both sides’ newly enhanced strategic concerns and fears regarding what is today called “energy independence,” fears born of their traumatic experiences involving threats to their own oil supplies in World War II.
The United States and the Soviet Union were in fact both acting in the Middle East (and elsewhere) in ways that marked significant departures from their previous practices. Since the foundation of the Republic, American statesmen, fortified by the injunctions of the founders and framers, had traditionally disdained involvement in the entangling alliance systems and balance-of-power calculations of the “Old World.”29 This did not for a moment stop the United States from playing a predominant, often overbearing, and sometimes nakedly imperialist role in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in its own hemisphere, especially in the Caribbean, and it did not in the least inhibit American industry, trade, and finance from expanding worldwide. Nor did it prevent an expansion of American naval and economic power into the Pacific with the forcible “opening of Japan,” the colonial seizure of Hawaii and the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, and the capture of a large segment of the China trade.
However, although the United States had become a great power, and indeed in some respects a hegemonic power, in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific long before World War II, it was barely acting like a major power on the rest of the world’s stage. Even President Wilson’s decision to bring the United States to enter World War I alongside Britain and France and against Germany had been undertaken as an exception to previously accepted patterns of disdain for European entanglements. Moreover, in order to overcome the isolationist instincts of large segments of the American people, this exceptional action had to be clothed by Wilson in the loftiest of ideals, and portrayed as a crusade for democracy and self-determination for oppressed peoples. This was the case irrespective of both the severe limitations intended by Wilson on his Fourteen Points (he never meant them to be extended to the colonized countries, for example),30 and of the less-than-idealistic outcomes of the war as they were later hammered out at the Paris Peace Conference, at Versailles, and afterward. Wilson’s unprecedented initiative, which briefly turned the United States into not just a world power but in some respects the most formidable power of its day, had been followed almost immediately by the rapid withdrawal of American troops from Europe. Soon afterward, the United States returned to its traditional position of semi-isolationism regarding Europe and much of the rest of the world, in spite of its demonstrated economic and financial power, a stance that lasted throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
The presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and more immediately the outbreak of World War II, marked a completely new departure for the United States. Before Pearl Harbor, at Roosevelt’s instructions, the United States launched a major military buildup and began extending vital aid to Britain, whether in the form of destroyer sales, the extension of Lend-Lease assistance, American destroyers convoying ships part of the way across the Atlantic to Britain, or financial support. Attacked at Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941, and soon afterward subject to a declaration of war by Nazi Germany, the United States responded by upping war production to unprecedented heights and launching a truly global military campaign, sending troops, fleets, and planes from North America to five continents. Thereafter, as the war ended there was no complete withdrawal of American troops and no return to isolationism as after World War I: far from it. Although many troops were withdrawn as the size of the U.S. armed forces shrank after the war’s end, numerous new American military bases spanning the globe, which were originally established to prosecute World War II, were kept in place, and base rights were requested in a host of new areas. The shrinkage of the size of the U.S. military at war’s end, especially the army, was not paralleled by the removal of U.S. forces based in far-flung places like South America, Morocco, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Korea, and China, not to speak of Western Europe and the territories of the defeated enemy powers that remained under occupation. And the navy and the air force, although reduced from inflated World War II levels, retained much of their strength.
Suddenly, starting with World War II, the United States began to behave in every way like a traditional great power on the world stage, and not just in the Western Hemisphere and in the Pacific. It had the wherewithal to do so. At war’s end American production constituted half of world GDP. The United States had “almost doubled its GNP during the conflict: by 1945, it accounted for around half of the world’s manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses, and almost all of its financial reserves.”31 By contrast, all of the traditional Western European powers and Japan, as well as much of the rest of the world, were economically prostrate, the military establishments of most had been smashed, and vast swaths of the Soviet Union had been devastated by the war. Given these facts, and given the vast size, reach, and potency of the American armed forces, particularly those elements most suited to power projection, the navy and the air force, not to speak of America’s sole possession of atomic weapons, the attraction of wielding such immense power to those responsible for the task in Washington must have been great. Moreover, Roosevelt and other American policymakers took away from the slide into a second world war the determination to use American power to prevent the recurrence of another such catastrophe. The new activism was clothed in a rhetoric very much suited to a great power, suggesting that after fighting and winning two world wars, the United States had global “responsibilities” it could not shirk. And like every traditional great power with global capacities for nearly two centuries, the United States began to take an intensive interest in the strategic Middle Eastern region. That interest was greatly accentuated by the presence there of what were known to be vast unexploited deposits of oil, the heightened strategic importance of which had just been emphasized by wartime events.
The Soviet Union was acting in new and different ways as well after World War II. All around its vast periphery, the USSR was now flexing its newly developed muscles in a fashion not seen in most regions since the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent civil war, when revolution in much of Europe seemed a possibility and the Red Army under Leon Trotsky was sweeping into Poland. Thereafter, for the better part of two decades an inward turn had been marked by Stalin’s slogan of “Revolution in one country,” and an attempt to develop the Soviet economy in the direction of self-sufficiency, while Soviet foreign policy overall had been marked by belligerent defensiveness and suspicious caution.
Although this was generally true of Soviet policy, it only applied in part to dealings with countries to the south of the USSR. Soviet relations with the states of the Middle East after the end of the Russian Civil War had been characterized by an effort to give the appearance of a sharp break from the heavy-handed imperialist practices of the tsarist regime. Generations of Russian rulers had bullied and seized territory from Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia’s other southern neighbors. Even as the newly formed Soviet Union in effect re-created the tsarist empire at home in a new and different form, through the imposition of Soviet Socialist Republics on the subjugated peoples of the former Russian domains, in its foreign policy and economic dealings with Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan in particular, the young Soviet regime was careful to take an entirely new tack.32 This started immediately after the revolution with Trotsky, the first commissar for foreign affairs, publishing the tsarist secret treaties, including those between Russia and Britain and France for the partition of the Ottoman Empire. It continued with a series of bilateral treaties negotiated in 1921 with Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, whereby the Soviet Union renounced all tsarist concessions extracted unfairly from these countries, returned border regions earlier seized from the Ottoman Empire, and promised noninterference in their internal affairs.33 Followed by other similar treaties that reinforced this emphasis on equitable relations, these accords were by and large respected for two decades by a Soviet Union still weak from the civil war, foreign intervention, and the tumultuous internal upheavals caused by Stalin’s brutal rule. Lenin and his colleagues and successors thereby secured Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan as friendly buffer states to the south. At the same time, they prevented any possible continuation of post–World War I British efforts to use these countries as springboards for anti-Bolshevik intervention.
With the new dangers and new opportunities World War II revealed to Stalin and the leadership in Moscow, and with the new power the war offered them, the Soviet Union, too, began a series of radical and far-reaching departures in its foreign policy, in particular toward the countries to its immediate south. As we have seen, Iran, whose territorial integrity the USSR had promised to respect in a series of interwar treaties with that country, was invaded and occupied in a coordinated effort by Soviet and British forces in June 1941. The two powers removed Reza Shah and installed his pliable young son Mohammad Reza Shah on the throne. The newly allied powers had feared that Iran under Reza Shah would align itself with the Axis in the wake of Hitler’s invasion of the Balkans and Russia and the ongoing Nazi military successes in North Africa. London and Moscow made common cause in Iran once again, as they had so many times in the past, in spite of the rivalries between them. As in its World War I occupation of Ottoman territory in Iraq adjoining the Iranian oil fields, and in its raising in 1916 of a local force called the South Persia Rifles commanded by British officers from the Indian army and tasked with dominating southern Iran,34 Britain was also determined to control and protect the vital oil supplies it obtained from Iran and other parts of the Gulf region.
The Soviet Union and Britain had another reason for this occupation: it made it possible to turn Iran into a corridor for the shipment of millions of tons of vital military supplies to the USSR. These supplies, mainly American in origin, were crucial to the Soviet Union’s capability to resist the Nazis.35 The corridor through Iran was all the more necessary since, with the Mediterranean and Black Sea having become war zones, the Turkish Straits closed to naval vessels by Turkey under the terms of the 1936 Montreux Treaty, the Baltic controlled by the Nazis, and convoys to Soviet Artic ports subject to constant German submarine and air attack from bases in the North Sea and Norway, Iran was indispensable as a supply route.36 Soon after Pearl Harbor, U.S. military forces joined what became a tripartite occupation of Iran.
None of these pressing reasons for Iran’s occupation by the three great powers made foreign military domination of their country any easier to stomach for the country’s population. Iranians were always leery of British and Russian intervention in their country, which had occurred multiple times in the twentieth century alone. Nor did these reasonable-sounding wartime pretexts for intervention change the fact that Soviet policy toward Iran had changed radically from its relatively benign course between 1921 and 1939. As we have just seen, it changed still more radically at war’s end, with the Soviet effort to obtain oil concessions from Iran, and other forms of pressure on that country, including the Soviets dragging their feet on the withdrawal of their troops, and their clandestine support for Kurdish and Azeri separatist movements and for the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh.
TURKEY AND SOVIET “ASPIRATIONS”
Soviet policy changed toward Turkey as well. In the wake of the founding of the Turkish Republic, Moscow had established reasonably good relations with Kemal Atatürk’s republican regime, marked by the March 1921 treaty and four later ones in 1925, 1927, 1931, and 1933, and it maintained them throughout most of the interwar period.37 However, in 1939, just as World War II began, the Soviet Union had tried in vain to obtain from Turkey revisions in its favor of the 1936 Montreux Treaty governing passage through the Turkish Straits. Beyond this, Turkey’s neutrality during the first years of World War II (which masked the initial subtle tilt of important elements of the Turkish Republic’s politico-military establishment toward the Axis powers), and its closing of the Turkish Straits to the shipment of war material to the USSR, clearly had angered the Soviets by the end of the war. Typically, Stalin forgot none of this, and in 1945 he was in a far stronger position than he had been in 1939. Already at the Potsdam meeting of the wartime allies, the Soviet leader had gotten Truman and Churchill’s assent to a revision in favor of the Soviet Union of the terms of the Montreux Treaty.
This was followed at the end of the war, as we have seen, not just by an insistence on revising the Montreux Treaty in the Soviet Union’s favor, but by Soviet demands for bases in the region of the Turkish Straits and for significant frontier revisions in the areas of Kars and Ardahan in eastern Turkey. The latter demand would have meant a return to the frontiers established under the tsars through annexations of Ottoman territory, and a reversal of the new Bolshevik regime’s generous border reversions to Turkey that had been sealed by the Soviet-Turkish treaty of March 1921. Albeit ostensibly motivated by the bitter lessons of World War II, these aggressive demands for territory and for bases on the straits looked like nothing other than a reversion to old tsarist positions. In any case, they indicated quite a radical shift in Soviet policy toward Turkey. As in its policy in Iran at this time, the Soviet Union too was beginning to act like a traditional great power in the Middle East, and appeared to be reverting to the imperialist approach of the tsars regarding the states to its immediate south.
Two explanations stand out: one is that, as in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union was taking advantage of its newfound postwar power to stake out long-standing claims that it had been too feeble to make earlier, claims that in some respects went beyond what the tsars had tried to do. This is said to reveal an inherent Soviet—or Great Russian—imperialist southward drive, one that had somehow been cleverly masked for decades or had been hidden by the initial weakness of the Soviet regime. Among the evidence adduced for this interpretation is language that emerged from the Molotov-Ribbentrop negotiations in Berlin in November 1940 for a Nazi-Soviet pact in the wake of Moscow’s failure to negotiate an alliance with London and Paris. There the Nazi leaders proposed in a draft treaty that, as part of a partition of the world into spheres of influence with Japan, Germany, and Italy, the Soviets should focus their territorial aspirations on the areas to their south, “in the direction of the Indian Ocean.”38 Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov concentrated on other issues in his discussions with German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the Soviets thereafter rejected this draft, and later responded with one of their own that focused on the matters of primary concern to the Soviet leadership, having to do with the central questions at issue in Europe between the USSR and Germany. Insofar as spheres of influence were concerned, this Soviet counterdraft located “the center of aspirations of the Soviet Union south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf.”
