‘No Longer an American Lake’: Depth and Geopolitics in the Mediterranean

Abstract

Shortly after the Second World War, as the Sixth Fleet moved into the Mediterranean in 1950, U.S. hegemony was scarcely contested in this Sea. Twenty years later, the U.S. Navy’s dominance was still undisputed in southern Europe, but the situation was rather different underwater. Between the nationalization and first closing of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Eastern Mediterranean underwent what must have been history’s largest buildup of U.S. and Russian submarines per cubic meter.1 As President John F. Kennedy agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Turkey in 1962, strategic nuclear deterrence demanded a permanent submarine fleet in the Mediterranean Sea. The Soviet response to the stationing of that fleet started right after the Arab-Israeli Six Day War in 1967, when the Suez Canal was closed for a second time, and remained so until 1975. U.S. intelligence estimated that from July 1967, when the...