Turkey's two Cyprus invasions

Monday, July 21, 2025

The Türkiyeish Daily News posted the article yesterday: Erdoğan marks 51st anniversary of Cyprus operation. 

Actually, in the summer of 1974 there were two Turkish invasions of Cyprus. The first occurred on July 20. Within two days, Turkey had achieved most of its stated goals in preventing Greek annexation of the island (legitimate fears of which had prompted Turkey's invasion in the first place). 

Since Cyprus' independence from the UK in 1960, Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom were all supposed to be guarantors of the country's new status. According to the treaty they all signed, none of the three countries had the right to divide the island, and all three had the right to intervene militarily to prevent its division or annexation by another country. 

So, when an Athens-supported military junta seized power in Cyprus on July 15 and appeared to be heading toward unification with Greece, Turkey was well within its treaty rights to intervene, which it did five days later. 

However: As I noted in a paper I wrote about this when I was doing my MA at Princeton, Ankara had largely achieved its policy goals within just a couple of days after intervening. 

[B]oth the Greek junta ruling in Athens and the putschist regime of Nicos Sampson had fallen. In Athens, Constantine Karamanlis, the former conservative prime minister that had governed from 1955 to 1963, returned from self-imposed exile in Paris. In Cyprus, President of the House of Representatives Glavkos Clerides assumed presidential responsibilities following Sampson’s resignation. Clerides’ assumption of the post of acting president was in line with the Constitution of Cyprus, which called for the President of the House of Representatives to fill the position of president should the position be vacated.

Instead of allowing this process continue and returning to the antebellum status quo, Ankara re-started the invasion on August 8, declaring that "there will be no point in continuing" negotiations with Greece. Turkish forces would go on to extend their reach into the island, with Ankara later recognizing the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus as an independent country. 

Do you know what else happened on August 8? That was the day Richard Nixon resigned. 

I doubt it was a coincidence: Nixon was in the process of being replaced by an untested successor. The Turkish government, which had long been unhappy with the 1960 treaty it had signed, took advantage of the distractions taking place in Washington and "solved" the Cyprus problem in a manner that suited its own interests. Just like Athens had sought to "solve" the Cyprus issue by supporting the coup in the first place. 

The lesson? When the United States is distracted, even its closest friends and allies will start trying to live by their own rules, in the manner of both Greece and Turkey in 1974. 

That's one reason (the other being Russia, duh) why NATO is an important institution: it locks traditional rivals like Greece and Turkey (or Hungary and Romania) into a common alliance and reduces the risk of direct conflict between them. Indeed, as bad as 1974 was for Greek-Turkish relations, things could have been a lot worse had the two countries not both been members of NATO. 

These days, the US appears to be very distracted indeed, and the NATO alliance is suffering as a result. I guess we'll see going forward where all this leads us.  

*

For older posts on Turkish history and politics, look here.