James F. Goode’s The Turkish Arms Embargo: Drugs, Ethnic Lobbies, and U.S. Domestic Politics is published amid recent strains in Turkish-American relations. Reinterpreting a long purported failure in U.S. diplomacy, Goode argues the incident was, instead, an adequate demonstration of a complex foreign policy issue being fought in a sprawling arena among Congressional leaders, the White House, the media, and a range of popular interest groups in response to the 1974 Turkish invasion of Greek Cyprus. Long an ally of the United States during the Cold War, the Turkish government was accused of invading the island using weapons provided by the United States. The results, though not necessarily popular, reflected a response that was far more influenced by ethnic concerns, drug war priorities, and cross-party cooperation than was previously understood.
Goode enters a relatively stale historiography here and does an admirable job of explaining these complicated dynamics in a concise volume. The bulk of academic interpretations were written in the immediate aftermath of the embargo. They tend to paint the incident as a failure of U.S. diplomacy during the dysfunctional transition from Nixon to Ford and to argue that its end was merely a nod to the human rights approach to foreign policy championed by the Carter administration. Goode’s study, supported by new archival sources at the National Archives and the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter Presidential libraries, along with updated access to personal and institutional records from key players, offers a more complex evaluation of the events, and presents a far more nuanced interpretation. Goode’s work elevates the importance of President Carter’s ability to navigate and overcome pressure from ethnic lobbies and drug warriors, both promoting anti-Turkish rhetoric in the media, as well as insurgent members of his own party to end the embargo in 1978.
The chapters run chronologically. The first two chapters cover the background to the crisis and the U.S. response to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. While a lot of familiar ground is trod, especially the tumult of seventies politics in the U.S., as well as the rising importance of U.S.-Turkish relations in the years after the First World War, Goode underscores two understated factors in the historiography. First, working against the rising importance of Turkey in U.S. Cold War diplomacy, was a much longer history of anti-Turkish views that dominated popular understandings of Turkey in the United States prior to the crisis. Second was the rising importance of the U.S.-led, international war on drugs, and an embedded assumption that Turkey was a major source of heroin flooding U.S. cities, which heavily influenced U.S. policy in Turkey, led by members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The middle chapters cover the initial reaction to the crisis. Goode focuses on the various forces shaping embargo policy in Congress during the Ford Administration. With updated evidence from key players in this period, Goode highlights the role of ethnic lobbies and tensions between the executive and legislative branches influencing the initial response to the crisis. Three major Greek-American activist groups—the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association, the American Hellenic Institute, and the United Hellenic American Congress—were successful in pressuring legislators to enact and then maintain the embargo through the end of the Ford administration despite vocal disapproval from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the White House. These groups promoted anti-Turkish and anti-Muslim stereotypes about the inherent violence of Turks and these stereotypes were prominent in media accounts of the event.
