“War of Salvation.”

Of course, Turkish leaders still worked to adjust some of the terms of the post-war settlement to their advantage. During the 1920s and 1930s, they sought to incorporate the territories of Mosul and Hatay. With the 1936 signing of the Montreux Convention, they also re-established control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles, which had been demilitarized after the war. Yet even in modifying the southern border and rewriting the regime governing the straights, Ankara consistently presented its actions as fulfilling the Lausanne settlement rather than revising it. Where some members of the republic’s political and military elite still nursed dreams of retaking further territories—in the Balkans, the Aegean, or the Middle East—their leaders consistently rejected these ambitions. As a result, the Lausanne Treaty came to embody the new Turkish republic’s understanding of its foreign policy: a commitment to preserving hard-won sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of continuing threats.

The Interwar Period

In 1926, Turkey would concede its claim to the Ottoman province of Mosul while in 1939 it would eventually succeed in annexing the smaller Sanjak of Alexandretta (now Hatay) on the Mediterranean coast. In both contests, Ankara was forced to weigh its interests in territorial acquisition—Mosul, of course, had oil, Hatay a strategically important port—with its desire to maintain smooth relations with Britain and France and with the international community at large. In the case of Mosul, Ankara provided semi-covert support for pro-

Turkish guerillas in the territory as a way of maintaining pressure on the British prior the League of Nation’s arbitration in 1925.3 But when the League ruled in Britain’s favor, awarding Mosul to Iraq while providing Turkey with a percentage of its oil revenues, Ankara accepted the outcome and abandoned any irredentist aspirations toward the territory.4

Similarly, in the case of Alexandretta, Ankara’s ultimately successful territorial ambitions were tempered by a pragmatic assessment of Turkey’s broader geopolitical position in relation to France. Alexandretta was less important than Mosul (although it reportedly carried a personal significance for Ataturk, who had been in command of the Ottoman forces there at the end of World War I). As a result, Ankara did not press the issue during the 1920s and early 1930s, conserving its diplomatic and political energy for the more pressing matter of building a new state. But in the late 1930s, with Syria potentially moving toward independence and France desperate for international support in the facing of a rising Germany, Atatürk seized the opportunity. Again applying pressure by arming and infiltrating nationalist guerillas into the territory, Ankara also engaged in some calculated saber-rattling with its military forces at the border.5 At the same time, it made its commitment to a mutual friendship treaty, which France sought to shore up its position in the Mediterranean in a coming war, contingent on a favorable resolution of the Alexandretta issue. In 1939, Turkey’s careful use of both carrots and sticks paid off. France, eager to curry Turkish favor and avoid a fight essentially ceded the province to Turkey, and Alexandretta became the new province of Hatay.

Beyond these immediate issues, Turkish policy in the Middle East remained a delicate balancing act with the imperial powers ruling or threatening the region. In 1925, for example, a widespread uprising challenged French rule in mandate Syria. While some of the revolt’s leaders sought out Turkish support, Ankara declined to get involved. Yet while Ankara would not challenge French and British rule in the region, it still sought to work with the region’s other semiindependent states to prevent new imperial threats. Turkey’s one formal diplomatic commitment in the Middle East during this period was a 1937 treaty with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran called the Saadabad Pact. After the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and amidst fears of Italian designs on Anatolia, it was partly intended as “a signal to the rest of the world that the four independent Middle Eastern states would oppose any attempts by one of the European powers to pick them off individually.”6

Turkey’s interwar balancing act was profoundly pragmatic, but it also resonated with the ambivalent attitudes of Turkish statesmen at the time. Turkey’s new leaders emerged from World War I feeling bitterly betrayed that some Arabs had cooperated with the United Kingdom in revolting against Ottoman rule. But they also maintained a sincere sympathy for the Arabs who fell under European rule. In the case of the Syrian revolt, for example, many of the leading participants were former Ottoman army officers who had served loyally till the war’s end.7 In fact, the tension between these two attitudes would only fully emerge after World War II, when Arab states moved toward independence in a radically transformed strategic environment.