Why Didn’t Turkey Join the Axis?

While Kemal and his associates might have "antipathy" towards the British, the Russians are right next door and want and have wanted control of Constantinople/Istanbul and the Straits forever. Having good relations with a large neighbor who covets what you have, even if they are distasteful (communists) is smart policy. Giving said neighbor an excuse to roll over you and take what they covet is bad policy. Had the USSR collapsed and an armistice in the works in the west, Turkey might have decided to bite off a part of the Caucasus, then again maybe not.
 
Turkey fundamentally has the same problem as Italy; its commerce is controlled by Britain. With British control of the Suez Canal and Gibraltar, any entry on the Axis side immediately cuts off access to the world economy. While it can trade with German occupied and allied (including the Soviet Union) Europe, anything from the rest of the world will have to come through (neutral) Soviet territory. And once Germany goes to war in the East, that access will be lost as well.


When Mussolini jumped into the war, he cost Italy a lot of much-needed merchant tonnage by allowing it to be trapped outside the Mediterranean as well as cutting Italy off from the world. Mustafa Ismet Inonu was wise enough not to make that same mistake.

My additional thoughts,
 
... the Russians are right next door and want and have wanted control of Constantinople/Istanbul and the Straits forever... Had the USSR collapsed and an armistice in the works in the west, Turkey might have decided to bite off a part of the Caucasus, then again maybe not.

the Med Strategy, or one version of Med Strategy, was that Germany would arrive at Turkish border

"An advance from Suez through Palestine and Syria as far as Turkey is necessary. If we reach that point, Turkey will be in our power. The Russian problem will then appear in a different light ... It is doubtful whether an advance against Russia from the north will be necessary" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Raeder_during_World_War_II#Sea_Lion_and_the_"Mediterranean_plan"

not certain my agreement with that analysis but it seems the only likely way Turkey joins the Axis?
 
Hungary also lost a lot in WW1 and still joined Hitler.

And acquiring Afghanistan and Turkestan should be interesting for them. They were a nationalist state now, but these people speak Turkic languages.

And the consequence suffered by Hungary proved how bad that idea was.
 
The lead-up to WW2 was probably one of the rare times when the Balkans and the Middle East were more stable than the rest of Eurasia. Turkey was fundamentally a status-quo power, they had held off the Western powers' attempt to impose a draconian peace on them and bottle up Turkey in a western Anatolian rump state along the frontiers of the Treaty of Sevres. Turkey already had problems with the Kurdish minority "mountain turks" in the southeast, I don't know why Ankara would want to make that problem worse by annexing vast swathes of Iraq and Syria.

Bulgaria and Hungary were the only two revisionist powers in the region, and they were more than contained by a coalition of Yugoslavia, Romania, Greece, Turkey, and the Czechoslovaks.
 

elkarlo

Banned
Terrible infrastructure, almost no territory to gain, huge exposed coastline, Allied Powers on almost every side, risk of going Communist or becoming a colony if you lose, have to deal with Arabs and Christians Post War if you win...

It sounds like they lose even if they win. And if they lose it’s even worse.

If they allow German forces into the Middle East during the Iraq Rebellion that could be interesting though.

It’s pretty much requiring a neutral country to suicide itself to help Hitler.
They are also proportionality weaker than at the start of WWI. Everyone else was growing their industry while turkey was kinda stagnat. They knew they would be dependent and would be like what we think of Spain joining the axis.
 
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