attacks on the Suez Canal. All in all, Sir Mark Sykes had driven a satisfactory bargain.[27]
Italian ambitions now had to be propitiated. For a whole year before the United States entered the war—while the Allied governments were professing unselfish war aims—secret negotiations were being conducted by representatives of France, Great Britain and Italy to determine what advantages and territories, equivalent to those gained by the other Allies, might be awarded Italy. In April, 1917, by the so-called St. Jean de Maurienne Agreement, Italy was granted complete possession of almost the entire southern half of Anatolia—including the important cities of Adalia, Konia, and Smyrna—together with an extensive "zone of influence" northeast of Smyrna. With such a hold on the coast of Asia Minor, Italian imperialists might realize their dream of dominating the trade of the Ægean and of reëstablishing the ancient power of Venice in the commerce of the Near East.[28]
These inter-Allied agreements for the disposal of Asiatic Turkey were instructive instances of the "old diplomacy" in coöperation with the "new imperialism." The treaties were secret covenants, secretly arrived at; they bartered territories and peoples in the most approved manner of Metternich and Richelieu. But they were less concerned with narrowly political claims than with the exclusive economic privileges which sovereignty carried with it; they determined boundaries with recognition of their strategic importance, but with greater regard for the location of oilfields, mineral deposits, railways and ports of commercial importance. They left no doubt as to what were the real stakes of the war in the Near East.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the secret treaties with the pronouncements of Allied statesmen regarding the origins and purposes of the Great War.
