Author Description

A number of old causes of estrangement continue to enjoy a long shelf life, and new ones have been added to the list in the decade or so following the end of the Cold War, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the geo-political re-alignments to which they gave rise. [...] Turkey became a founding member of the Baghdad Pact and subsequently of the Central Treaty Organization, thus contributing yet further to the success of the Western policy of containing the Soviet Union. [...] While some of the details continue to be debated, it seems clear that during the Soviet-American negotiations aimed at defusing the crisis, the United States government gave tacit assurances to the Soviet Union that as part of a deal to secure the withdrawal of Soviet mis- siles from Cuba, the United States would withdraw the Jupiter missiles which it had recently installed in Turkey. [...] The Arab oil embargo put in place after the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 and the steep increases in the price of oil which ensued led Turkey to re-assess the relatively low level of Turkey in NATO: An Ambivalent Ally 7 importance it had traditionally given to its relations with the Arab world, espe- cially the Gulf states. [...] Portraying the plight of the Turkish-Cypriots as that of a Muslim minority which had suffered grievously at the hands of a non-Muslim majority, the Turkish government sought to enlist the sympathy and support of the Muslim world as a whole through the Organi- zation of the Islamic Conference (OIC).