The Turkish Arms Embargo: Drugs, Ethnic Lobbies, and U.S. Domestic Politics. James F. Goode. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2020.
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.
President Gerald Ford with Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and House Speaker Carl Albert during the 1975 State of the Union Address, January 15, 1975 (George W. Bush Presidential Library/Wikimedia)
Goode also highlights the role of Congressional efforts to reassert control over U.S. foreign policy after the disastrous Nixon administration. In the Senate, the Big Four on this issue—Senators John Brademas, Paul Sarbanes, Benjamin Rosenthal, and Thomas Eagleton—as well as the so-called Watergate Freshmen in the House were able to channel some the ethnic lobbyists’ efforts into tangible policy shifts, and to resist efforts to overcome the embargo via the Scott Bill, all despite Turkey’s strategic importance in the Cold War. Goode’s ability to weave together all of these complex threads is a strength in this part of the book as the role of urban Representatives and the Congressional Black Caucus as well as the influence of Israeli and Armenian activists are also covered in this section.
The final two chapters examine the Carter administration efforts that eventually succeeded in overturning the embargo. The mismanaged crisis in Turkey was one of many issues that Carter was able to use in his campaign in 1976 and despite his debt to Greek-American voters in Pennsylvania and in New York for his office, his administration took the initiative to solve the crisis early on with the Clifford Mission. While the mission ultimately failed, Carter continued to chip away at legislative support for the embargo, while reshaping popular opinion by highlighting the strategic importance of Turkey and questioning the narrow, purportedly ethnocentric goals of Greek-American lobbyists in the media. His most successful strategy though was in wooing Congressional Republicans to support the end of the embargo, which finally occurred in 1978.
In the epilogue, Goode argues that his study could perhaps serve as an important lesson for the architects of U.S.-Middle Eastern relationships today. The study examines the role of day-to-day political negotiating in shaping the evolving approach to a significant foreign policy crisis in U.S. diplomatic history. While the author could have paid more attention to Turkish, and perhaps even Turkish-American groups (and sources), and though the heroin policy is overemphasized at the beginning, only to fall away at the end (despite expanded support for increasingly punitive international drug policies during the same period), Goode’s corrective to the history of this incident is an important work in the study of U.S. foreign policy entering its last phase of the Cold War. Goode skillfully places the embargo in a new light, emphasizing the role of ethnic lobbies, the U.S. war on drugs, and the political negotiations on Capitol Hill. Long considered a failure of U.S. foreign policy in a time of executive turmoil and legislative assertiveness, Goode suggests the episode was a demonstration of the dynamics of political processes in a functioning representative society.
Bob Beach is a cultural historian interested in the history of cannabis in the United States before the 1960s. His major focus of research is the economic, social, and cultural lives of cannabis users in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, but is also interested in how domestic drug issues influence other realms of society, culture, and policy. He’s written on marijuana history and folklore, drug war activism, and recently, marijuana legalization in New York State. He is a doctoral candidate in the history department at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is an adjunct at Utica University, teaching courses in U.S. and drug history. When not working on cannabis history, he’s a standup comedian, improv actor, and sketch writer at the Uptown Theater for Creative Arts in Utica, NY.
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