Cairo purveyed a graceless joke: when Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Ismet Inönü met after Teheran, they dined on warmed-up Turkey. President Inönü and his agile Foreign Minister, Numan Menemencioglu, deserved a better commentaryfor, to all intents, Turkey had joined the Allies. She might at any moment be faced with war, either by her own declaration or by German attack.
Thus ended a shrewd and careful game of balance-of-power politics. For four years, Turkey had perched inviolate between the warring powers. The game ended because first Russia and then the U.S. and Britain...