Political leader treatment in conflict and crisis management: A. Menderes case

In this study, foreign policy crises are examined by taking personality of a decision maker who is number one conductor of managing foreign policy crises and also his or her insights toward counterpart and the nature of political universe. When a crisis takes place between two states or more, the decision to go on war or to settle peacefully is made by the political leader or at least the leader is the most powerful actor to affect the decision. To determine visible and invisible reasons of the decisions made by political leader, Alexander George's belief system is chosen as a method. In George's system there have been five philosophical and five instrumental questions asked and those questions are answered by looking at leader's words and deeds against his/her counterpart(s). As decision maker, Adnan Menderes who stayed in the office of Prime Minister for 10 years between 1950-1960 in Turkey and as case study, six foreign policy crises took place in his tenure are picked. These crises are Korean War Crisis, September 6-7 Incidents Crisis (1955), Suez Canal Crisis (1956), 1957 Syrian Crisis, 1958 Iraqi Crisis and 1958 Lebanon Crisis in the chronological order. Menderes's political attitude is clarified after describing the situation in Turkey until him and his predecessor's way of managing crises. The outcome reached after examining six foreign policy crises is that Menderes' manner toward crisis is -as presented in the relevant section of the work mostly conflictual. It is highly accepted as a consensus that when a leader holds conflictual manner in a foreign policy crisis, it may cause full scale war and does most of the time but that is not the case desired. Although Menderes's conflictual outlook during the crises of Syria and Iraq, as United States and England has opposed the idea of military intervention to these countries, major conflict has not happened.