Montreux Convention

The Montreux Convention enters the narrative as a concrete legal constraint on naval movement: the 1936 treaty specifically prohibited foreign aircraft carriers from passing through the Dardanelles and Bosporus Strait. That restriction makes Jefferson’s planned transit into the Black Sea more than a routine deployment; its passage requires an explanation the treaty itself does not provide.

The treaty restriction

The account identifies the Convention’s relevant provision narrowly and directly: foreign aircraft carriers could not transit either strait. It does not describe the treaty’s broader terms or enforcement mechanisms. Instead, the prohibition functions as the immediate obstacle against which the movement of a U.S. carrier group is measured.

The Soviet precedent

The narrative recalls that the Soviets had previously navigated the restriction by identifying their light carrier Kiev as an antisubmarine cruiser. The classification allowed the ship to be presented under a different designation, rather than as an aircraft carrier barred by the treaty. For larger, more recently built Soviet carriers, the account says only that other arrangements had presumably been made; it leaves those arrangements unspecified.

Jefferson’s passage

Jefferson’s planned transit exposes the political uncertainty behind the legal obstacle. The narrator imagines that the promises securing Turkish permission had been considerable, perhaps even extortionate, but does not establish what Washington offered or whether the pressure ran in the opposite direction. The passage therefore remains both a practical exception to the treaty’s stated restriction and an unresolved diplomatic bargain. By juxtaposing the Soviet reclassification of Kiev with Jefferson’s negotiated access, the narrative shows two different ways the prohibition could be negotiated around without explaining the precise terms of either arrangement.