Best Books on Turkey, Ataturk and the Cold War

Turkey is one of the most consequential and least-read countries in modern history. It was the eastern anchor of NATO, a secular Muslim republic surrounded by the Soviet Union to the north and an unstable Middle East to the south. It hosted American nuclear weapons pointed at Moscow. It nearly went to war with a NATO ally over Cyprus. It experienced three military coups between 1960 and 1980. And through all of it, it remained in the alliance while managing a domestic political system that defied easy categorization. If you want to understand Cold War geopolitics beyond the usual American and Soviet perspectives, Turkey is essential. Here are the books that explain it. ## Ataturk first: you cannot skip him Andrew Mango's *Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey* is the starting point for anyone trying to understand modern Turkey. Mango spent decades researching Mustafa Kemal and produced a biography that is both comprehensive and fair-minded. It does not treat Ataturk as either a hero or a villain, which is harder than it sounds given the intensity of feeling around him in Turkey to this day. What Mango shows is how completely Ataturk's choices shaped everything that came after. The abolition of the caliphate, the shift from Arabic to Latin script, the legal reforms imported wholesale from European codes, the suppression of Kurdish and religious opposition: all of these created a specific kind of state, one that was secular, nationalist, and deeply suspicious of any challenge to central authority. That state was the Turkey that entered NATO in 1952 and navigated the Cold War. ## Turkey in the Cold War system Philip Robins' *Suits and Uniforms: Turkish Foreign Policy Since the Cold War* is the most rigorous English-language account of how Turkey managed its external relationships from Ataturk's death through the end of the 20th century. Robins examines the Turkish-American alliance without treating it as a simple patron-client relationship. Turkey had its own interests and pursued them, sometimes in direct conflict with Washington. The Cyprus crisis of 1974 is the clearest example. Turkey invaded Cyprus after a Greek-backed coup, despite American pressure not to. The US imposed an arms embargo. Turkey responded by closing American military installations. The alliance survived, but it was never the smooth partnership that NATO mythology suggested. ## The internal politics behind the foreign policy Cold War Turkey was not a stable democracy. It was a republic with a permanent military veto over civilian politics. The Turkish Armed Forces saw themselves as the guardians of Ataturk's secular legacy and intervened three times when they decided civilian governments had strayed too far from it. The 1960 coup overthrew a democratically elected prime minister, Adnan Menderes, who was subsequently hanged. The 1971 "coup by memorandum" forced a government resignation without a full takeover. The 1980 coup, backed quietly by Washington because the junta was reliably anti-Soviet, produced a constitution that remained in force for decades. Feroz Ahmad's *The Making of Modern Turkey* covers this period with the kind of analytical depth that general Cold War histories miss. Ahmad traces how the single-party system of the early republic gave way to multiparty competition, how that competition produced instability, and how the military positioned itself as the permanent arbiter of Turkish political life. It is not an easy read, but it is an honest one. ## The strategic geography that made Turkey essential The Soviet Union and Turkey shared a long border, and the Bosphorus strait controlled access between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. For the USSR, Turkey was both a threat and a potential prize. For NATO, it was a forward position that could not be lost. This geography made Turkey unusually important during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Jupiter missiles that Kennedy ultimately agreed to remove from Turkey as part of the secret deal with Khrushchev were stationed there precisely because of this strategic calculus. The removal was presented to the Turks as a routine military decision, not as a concession to Soviet pressure. They found out the truth later, and it added another layer of friction to an already complicated relationship. ## What the Cold War left behind Turkey emerged from the Cold War with a stronger military, a weaker democratic culture, and a set of unresolved tensions, between Kurdish autonomy and Turkish nationalism, between religious politics and Kemalist secularism, between EU membership aspirations and an authoritarian institutional inheritance, that defined its politics for the next thirty years. Understanding those tensions requires understanding where they came from. The books listed here give you that foundation. ## Further reading Explore more books on [modern Turkey and the Middle East](/category/turkey), or browse the full [Cold War history collection](/category/cold-war).