United States foreign policy and Cyprus: between Cold War and historical legacies.

International historiography broadly recognises summer 1974 as the peak in the contemporary Cypriot issue and the most criticised U.S. engagement in that crisis. However, it is only by evaluating the entire course of U.S. foreign policy since Cypriot independence that the flaws of a Cold War approach fully emerge, as well as U.S. difficulties in dealing with typical identity overlaps. As the 1974 partition finally removed Cyprus from the Cold War scene, it marked a new era in the island’s history, shaped by coexistence through political division after centuries of unity. Continuities and discontinuities in U.S. foreign policy also require a long-term analysis mainly based on primary sources. On the one hand, the Nixon administration allowed the Cypriot partition to proceed, culminating in a decade in which the U.S. favoured partition as the only sustainable solution to exclude the Soviets from the Cypriot dilemma. On the other hand, Nixon did not deter the Turks from invading Cyprus, as Johnson did twice, pursuing through Kissinger’s hyperrealism the logic of the Cold War and the strategic preference for Turkey as a privileged NATO ally, on the assumption that Greece could not afford a war. Perceiving the Cypriot issue as a ‘litigation family’ to be led by Western diplomacy and opposing the process of full internationalisation of the crisis led by the UN, as well as Soviet influence, the U.S. failed to address the cultural challenge posed by Cyprus, as troubles with Makarios’ political complexity clearly showed. To some extent, Cypriots’ long-term resilience to partition was an aftermath of historical legacy, rather than Cold War stability.