Best Books on the Cyprus Crisis and Cold War NATO Tensions

Cyprus should not have been a Cold War crisis. A small Mediterranean island with a population under a million, it had neither oil nor a major industrial base. What it had was location: sitting at the junction of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, with British military bases that covered the entire eastern Mediterranean. That geography turned every internal political conflict on the island into a superpower concern, and it turned the Greek-Turkish confrontation of 1974 into one of the most embarrassing moments in NATO's history. Two NATO allies went to war with each other. The United States, which had strategic interests on both sides, stood aside and watched. The result divided an island that remains divided today, more than fifty years later. ## The Background: Why Cyprus Became Ungovernable Cyprus was a British colony until 1960, and the independence settlement it received was an attempt to balance three competing interests: the Greek Cypriot majority (about 80 percent of the population) who wanted union with Greece, the Turkish Cypriot minority (about 18 percent) who wanted partition or continued British rule, and Britain, which wanted to keep its military bases regardless of what happened to the rest. The 1960 constitution tried to split every government function between the communities according to fixed ratios. It was unworkable from the start. By 1963, intercommunal violence had broken out, Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities were retreating into armed enclaves, and the United Nations was sending peacekeepers to an island that had been independent for three years. ## The Essential History **Cyprus: A Modern History** by William Mallinson is the most comprehensive single-volume account of the island's political history from British colonial rule through the 1974 crisis and its aftermath. Mallinson served as a British diplomat in Cyprus and his account is notably unsparing about British policy: London's decisions during the transition to independence planted the seeds of the later crisis, and British governments consistently prioritized their base rights over the stability of Cypriot democracy. The book covers the EOKA insurgency of the 1950s, the failed 1960 constitution, the intercommunal violence of the 1960s, and the Greek junta's decision in 1974 to attempt a coup that would install a pro-union government. Mallinson explains each decision in its political context without losing sight of how those decisions accumulated into catastrophe. ## The 1974 Crisis: Coup, Invasion, Partition In July 1974, the Greek military junta sponsored a coup in Cyprus intended to overthrow Archbishop Makarios and unite the island with Greece. The coup succeeded in removing Makarios. Turkey, citing its rights as a guarantor power under the 1960 treaty, launched a military invasion five days later. The first Turkish landing secured a bridgehead in the north. A ceasefire was arranged. Then, in August, Turkey launched a second offensive that captured 37 percent of the island, expelling nearly all of the Greek Cypriot population from the north and creating a fait accompli that has never been reversed. **The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion** by Brendan O'Malley and Ian Craig examines the American role in allowing the invasion to proceed. The authors, both journalists, draw on declassified documents and interviews to argue that Henry Kissinger's State Department made a calculated decision not to restrain Turkey. The reasons were strategic: Turkey was a far more important NATO ally than Greece, it controlled the Bosphorus, it hosted critical American intelligence installations, and the Pentagon valued its military cooperation above almost anything else in the eastern Mediterranean. The Greek junta that had launched the Cyprus coup was already collapsing under the pressure of its own failures. There was no reason to antagonize Turkey to save it. The book is polemical in places and attributes more deliberate calculation to American policy than the documentary record fully supports, but it is essential reading because it forces the question that more diplomatic histories avoid: why did the United States, with its leverage over both Greece and Turkey, allow a NATO ally to be partitioned? ## The Cold War Context: Greece, Turkey and the Alliance The Greece-Turkey rivalry inside NATO was one of the alliance's most persistent structural problems. Both countries joined NATO in 1952, bringing it into a relationship with a territorial dispute (over Aegean airspace and seabed rights) that predated the Cold War by decades. The United States needed both countries. It therefore had to manage both, which in practice meant it usually chose Turkey when forced to choose and managed Greek resentment afterward. **NATO's Gamble: Choosing Winners and Losers in the Modern Arms Trade** by Andrew Futter covers the arms supply dimension of the Greece-Turkey relationship, including the specific weapons transfers that enabled the 1974 operations. American-supplied equipment on both sides was a persistent embarrassment: Greek and Turkish forces confronting each other were using tanks, aircraft, and artillery paid for by American military aid. The spectacle of NATO weapons used for a NATO civil war forced changes to American arms transfer policy that lasted through the end of the Cold War. ## The Unresolved Legacy Cyprus remains divided. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, declared in 1983, is recognized only by Turkey. Reunification negotiations have repeatedly failed, most recently in 2004 when a UN plan was accepted by Turkish Cypriots but rejected by Greek Cypriots in a referendum. Cyprus joined the European Union the same year as a divided island, creating a situation where EU law technically applies to territory controlled by a state no EU member recognizes. The Cyprus problem is a case study in how Cold War strategic calculations created frozen conflicts that outlasted the Cold War itself. The partition was tolerated because the alternative, forcing Turkey to withdraw, would have damaged the NATO relationship at a moment when American planners considered that relationship essential. The strategic moment passed. The partition remained. ## Further Reading For more books on Cold War history and Mediterranean politics, browse the full [history category](/category/history) on Skriuwer.