“Oh, yes, the Straits; that’s different,” admitted my friend. “We should have to fight for the freedom of the Straits. No alternative there if the Greeks should lose out and the Turks push us.”
“Having been incited to push you,” I commented.
“Having been incited to push us,” he repeated gravely. And the others bowed assent.
This took me back to the previous week in Paris, when I had twice secured modifications of sweeping statements from men in the highest position by the same simple question. When one statesman told me that France would never extend the hand of fellowship to the Bolsheviki, I asked, “How about the Straits?” And when another statesman declared that France and Great Britain must and would see eye to eye in perfect solidarity “for the sake of the future of civilization,” I asked, “How about the Straits?” In both instances there was the admission that making up with Lenin and destroying the Entente were lesser evils to France than seeing the English, either openly or indirectly through Greece as a tool, installed at Constantinople, and, ergo, in control of the Straits.
Without going into history further than the Conference of San Remo in the spring of 1920, we see that the determination of France to oust Great Britain from Constantinople and of Italy to prevent Greece from profiting by her intervention in the World War has made strange political bedfellows, has split the Entente alliance, has given Russia her chance to get back into the councils of the great powers, has made possible the repetition of massacres of Christians by the Turks, has jeopardized the advantages granted in the Treaty of Sèvres to the Entente Powers as well as to Greece, and has created the dangerous precedent and example in allowing one of the enemy states, to whom a victors’ treaty had been dictated, to tear up the treaty and turn the tables by dictating a new treaty to the erstwhile victors.
It is not too much to say that the quarrel among the Entente Powers over the disposition of the Straits has ended in robbing them of virtually all the spoils of their victory over the Central Empires, in damaging their prestige, and in undermining still further their authority in the Mohammedan world, already seriously impaired during the World War and the Peace Conference. The Conference of San Remo came to an agreement that saved the Entente from dissolution. But the failure of the three contracting parties—Great Britain, France, and Italy—to live up to the agreement and to enforce the Treaty of Sèvres revealed a house divided against itself and demonstrated the fact that treaties imposed upon the vanquished by force would be upset the moment the force was dissipated. When the Entente generals met the representatives of Kemal Pasha at Mudania, they were confronted with demands the acceptance of which meant the first step in the inevitable surrender of all that had been gained by the World War. It was an hour of supreme danger when Ismet Pasha demanded the surrender of Constantinople before the terms of a new peace settlement in the Near East had been arranged. And yet France dared to support this demand, which Great Britain and Italy opposed, risking everything on playing the card that would get the British out of Constantinople.
Why did the triumph of their respective points of view in regard to the Straits seem of such vital importance to the British and French statesmen that they were willing to sacrifice friendship, alliance, and the war aims in the defense and furtherance of which they fought to a glorious and successful end the most stupendous and costly war of history? Both nations professed to be defending “the freedom of the Straits” and to be working to avert “a more horrible war than we have yet known,” as Lloyd George put it. But they acted toward one another more like enemies than friends, and their premiers, with the support of Cabinets and the press, advanced diametrically opposite opinions as to the best way to prevent the war they dreaded.
If the sorry mess in the Near East is settled without war, we shall be told that a dreadful calamity has only been postponed; and for this doubtful victory France will have paid the price of loss of British support in wringing money out of Germany. If it leads to war, Great Britain fears the entry of Soviet Russia against her and uprisings in her Mohammedan possessions.
The Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, so narrow that you can shoot an ordinary rifle from one continent to the other, so winding that cannon can rake a ship fore and aft as well as shell broadside at many places, afford the only outlet to the outside world for Bulgaria, Rumania, southern Russia, the Caucasus republics, and some of the largest and richest vilayets of Turkey. For all Russia these waterways are the sole ice-free passage. They are the nearest and most practicable outlet for northern Persia and the khanates of central Asia. A considerable portion of the wheat supply of many European countries comes in normal times from southern Russia, while Europe learned to count upon the regular appearance on the market of the vast petroleum output of the Baku region of the Caucasus. The major portion of the trade of a region inhabited by one and a half times the population of the United States is carried through Black Sea ports. So important to the world’s well-being was the free passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean considered before the World War that Italy and the Balkan States, in their wars with Turkey, had to yield to the remonstrances of other nations and forego the advantage of bringing pressure to bear upon Turkey by attacking and blockading the Straits.
Although during the nineteenth century the danger to the British Empire of the control of the Straits by an enemy power in time of war was never given a practical demonstration, it was vividly enough imagined for the British to have fought once (the Crimean War) and to have been ready to fight on two other occasions (Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi, 1833, and Treaty of San Stefano, 1878) to prevent Russia from dominating the Straits.