The Straits: The Geostrategic Dispute in the Balance of the Great Powers
The Straits: The Geostrategic Dispute in the Balance of the Great Powers

Summary/Abstract: Situated in a zone of great strategic interest, the Straits have represented in the course of time an important asset for those who possessed them and a permanent object of the Great Powers’ desire to control them. The Turkish Republic sought, as was only natural, to consolidate her control of the Straits at the Lausanne Conference. As to the Straits, the treaty stipulates that: “its purpose is to ensure the opening and to grant the passage liberty through the Straits of all peoples’ commercial transactions.” Turkey and implicitly the ussr, as main powers at the Black Sea, alongside with the neighboring states, agreed to assign the preparation of the final statute of the Black Sea and of the Straits to a subsequent conference of delegates of the neighboring states, “excluding the possibility that the ensuing decisions jeopardize Turkey’s absolute sovereignty and security.”

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