The 1932 treaty: Türkiye and Iran's quiet bilateral spine

In the spring of 2026, with the Israel-Iran armed exchange unresolved and Ankara visibly engaged in mediation, the Turkish historian Murat Bardakçı reminded his readers in a Habertürk column that the bilateral architecture for Türkiye's neutral posture toward Iran was put in place ninety-four years ago. The instrument is the Emniyet, Bîtaraflık ve İktisadi Emek Beraberliği Muahedenamesi, the Treaty of Security, Neutrality and Economic Cooperation, signed in Ankara by the foreign ministers of the two countries, ratified by the Grand National Assembly on 10 June 1935, and published in the Resmî Gazete five days later. Bardakçı's contribution was bibliographic. The eight-article text and the surrounding bilateral framework are matters of record, traceable through the Türk Tarih Kurumu's standard reference work on Türkiye's political treaties, through TBMM proceedings, and through the Encyclopædia Iranica's authoritative entry on the Türkiye-Iran frontier. The instrument has had a quiet institutional life. It has not been replaced.

The dispatch below sets out what the bilateral 1932 record actually contains, how the treaty was constructed, and why it has continued to govern the language Ankara uses about its eastern neighbor, even when no one is naming it.

The eastern frontier, 1925 to 1932

The treaty did not appear out of nowhere. Through the second half of the 1920s, Ankara and Tehran were working through a succession of overlapping instruments designed to do three things at once: settle the line of the eastern frontier (which the two states had inherited as a contested inheritance from the Ottoman-Qajar nineteenth century), suppress cross-border tribal raiding, and lock in a posture of mutual non-interference. The starting point was the Treaty of Friendship and Security signed in Tehran on 22 April 1926. The 1926 instrument was supplemented by an additional protocol on 15 June 1928 and by two frontier agreements signed at Ankara on 9 April 1929, the second of which was titled the Convention for the Establishment of Order and Security in the Frontier Regions.

These agreements absorbed most of the energy of Türkiye's eastern diplomacy in the period that the foreign minister, Dr. Tevfik Rüştü Aras, served under President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. According to the Encyclopædia Iranica's entry by Richard Schofield, the 1929 agreements left the precise alignment of the boundary to be settled by a mixed commission, and the work of that commission ran through the early 1930s while a parallel series of conventions narrowed the diplomatic surface area between the two governments.

The first definitive frontier treaty was signed in Tehran on 23 January 1932. It embodied limited but consequential adjustments to the 1914 Constantinople Protocol line, generally in Türkiye's favor in the north (Türkiye gained complete control over Lesser Ararat and the Ağrı massif) and in Iran's favor at one or two southern points. Schofield notes that the same delegation also signed a new Treaty of Friendship and a Treaty of Conciliation, Judicial Settlement and Arbitration in Tehran that day. The bilateral relationship had, in effect, been disaggregated into a small portfolio of mutually reinforcing instruments, each addressing a single concrete problem.

Nine months later, the portfolio was extended again. Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Ali Foroughi, came to Ankara, and Aras and Foroughi signed two further instruments in the Turkish capital. One was a renewed Friendship Treaty, four articles in length, which reproduced and reaffirmed the principles of the 1926 instrument and was published in the Resmî Gazete after parliamentary ratification on 28 December 1933. The other, the one this dispatch concerns, was the Treaty of Security, Neutrality and Economic Cooperation: longer, more concrete, and considerably more operationally consequential.

The signatories

The two ministers who signed the 1932 instrument were career foreign-policy figures with long terms in office.

Tevfik Rüştü Aras (1883-1972), the Turkish foreign minister, was a physician by training who came to the Ankara government from the national resistance years and served as foreign minister from 4 March 1925 until the cabinet's resignation on 11 November 1938. His thirteen-year tenure spans almost the entire active Atatürk-era foreign policy, including the Lausanne follow-on settlements, accession to the League of Nations, the Balkan Pact, and the eastern instruments described above. The Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Dışişleri Bakanlığı's biographical entry records the dates.

Mohammad Ali Foroughi (1877-1942), the Iranian foreign minister, was a Persian intellectual, lawyer and three-time prime minister. He became foreign minister of Iran under Reza Shah Pahlavi on 12 May 1930 and represented Tehran in the 1932 Ankara round. He would later, in the autumn of 1941, sign the agreement that allowed Reza Shah to abdicate to his son Mohammad Reza after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran. The Iranian Revolution Documentation Centre records the chronology.

Aras and Foroughi knew each other well. They had been the principal counterparties on the Tehran instruments of January 1932, and Foroughi had hosted Aras in the Iranian capital that winter. The Ankara round in October was the second of the two and was understood at the time, in the press of the day, as the consolidation of the bilateral architecture that the January round had begun.

What the treaty says

The 1932 treaty has eight articles. Türk Tarih Kurumu reissued the text in 1989 as part of the Ambassador İsmail Soysal's Türkiye'nin Siyasal Andlaşmaları, Cilt I (1920-1945), the standard reference work for early-Republican Turkish treaty practice. Soysal's edition is the one almost every Turkish foreign-affairs commentator returns to, including Bardakçı. The text appears in a modernized Turkish, with the original 1932 Turkish noted, and the volume confirms that the instrument remained in force at the date of compilation.

Bardakçı's column summarizes articles 1, 2, 4 and 5 in modern Turkish, working from Soysal. He does not paraphrase the other four. What follows is a close reading of the four that are in the public summary, with the source for each cited inline.

Read together, the four articles describe a bilateral neutrality regime with anti-subversion safeguards. Article 1 supplies the negative undertaking: the non-attacked party will not align with the aggressor. Article 2 supplies the positive undertaking: if the aggressor tries to compromise that neutrality, the neutral state will respond with force. Article 4 commits each side to active diplomatic and political effort on behalf of the other when a third state turns hostile. Article 5 closes the back door: the parties will not allow their territory to be used as a base for subversion, propaganda or regime-change activity against the other.

The four articles not summarized in Bardakçı's column would, on the basis of the treaty's title (security, neutrality, and economic cooperation), be expected to address the economic-cooperation half of the instrument as well as the technical clauses governing ratification, duration and conditions for renewal or denunciation. Soysal's full 1989 reproduction is the reference for the remaining text.

What the treaty was for

The instrument's drafters were working two problems at once. The first problem was the immediate post-Ağrı one. The Ağrı uprisings of 1926, 1927 and 1930 had been the dominant fact of the eastern frontier zone for half a decade, and the protocols of 1928, 1929 and January 1932 had been designed to deny insurgents the use of the Iranian side of the line. Article 5 of the 1932 Ankara treaty extends the same logic from tribal insurgency to political subversion. The drafters used capacious language, and they did not restrict the article to the Ağrı problem of the moment. Anyone seeking to disturb the peace of the other country, change its government, or fight it by propaganda or other means was covered.

The second problem was the European one. By the autumn of 1932, the Wilhelmstrasse was being remade for what the Atatürk-era foreign ministry expected to be a deteriorating European decade. Articles 1, 2 and 4 are the war-time clauses. They speak in the abstract language of a state at war with a third state, and they spell out what the non-warring party undertakes to do and not to do. In the academic literature on the period, including the Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi study by Yüksel Kaştan, this is the standard reading: the 1932 Ankara instrument was built to last beyond the immediate border situation, and the bilateral neutrality clauses were written with one eye on Europe and one eye on the eastern frontier.

The parliamentary path

The instrument was signed in Ankara in October 1932. It came into force for Türkiye only on 15 June 1935, when the ratification law, accepted by the Grand National Assembly on 10 June, was published in the Resmî Gazete. The thirty-two-month delay is unusual by modern standards but was unremarkable for the period. Three of the related instruments (the 23 January 1932 Tehran frontier treaty, the November 1932 Ankara Friendship Treaty, and the 14 March 1937 Tehran border-zone security convention) had similar gaps between signature, ratification and publication, with the latter instrument's instruments of ratification not exchanged until 11 July 1939.

The TBMM proceedings of the V. Devre (Fifth Term), Cilt 4, record the bill of ratification of the Treaty of Security, Neutrality and Economic Cooperation under the standard parliamentary heading: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti ile İran Devleti arasında akdolunan emniyet, bitaraflık ve iktisadî emek beraberliği muahedenamesinin tasdikına dair kanun lâyihası. The bill was reviewed by the Foreign Affairs and Economy committees and was carried.

One technical point. The phrase iktisadî emek beraberliği, literally something close to "economic labor partnership," is an early-Republican coinage that does not survive into modern Turkish usage. The Soysal 1989 modernization renders it as ekonomik işbirliği, "economic cooperation," and that is the rendering this dispatch has used in the headline and text. The original Turkish remains in the formal treaty title.

The Saadabad Pact and what it did not do

The most consequential later development in the same diplomatic neighborhood was the four-state Saadabad Pact, signed at the Saadabad Palace in Tehran on 8 July 1937 by Türkiye, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Britannica describes it as a non-aggression instrument, and the standard Western reference work, J. C. Hurewitz's The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, reproduces the text. The Saadabad Pact's Second Article stipulated, in the Iranica formulation, that the inviolability of Persian frontiers must be respected.

The pact has often been read, in compressed summaries of the period, as having succeeded or absorbed the bilateral instruments that preceded it. It did not. The Saadabad Pact and the bilateral 1932 Ankara Treaty of Security, Neutrality and Economic Cooperation cover overlapping but distinct ground. The Saadabad Pact is a regional non-aggression instrument that binds four parties to abstain from any act of aggression against each other, to respect each other's frontiers and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interference in each other's internal affairs. The 1932 bilateral instrument is a deeper, two-party document that goes further on neutrality (it addresses the case where a third state attacks one of the parties), on mutual diplomatic effort, and on anti-subversion. Schofield's Encyclopædia Iranica entry is explicit that the legal basis of the bilateral frontier and security architecture was not disturbed by the 1937 instrument, and Bardakçı's column makes the same point in different words. The four-state pact sat alongside the bilateral one rather than replacing it.

The same is true of the Türkiye-Iran-Iraq trilateral Misak-ı Saldırmazlık (non-aggression pact) signed at Geneva on 2 October 1935, which is documented in the same period and which had a small operational footprint.

The long silence

Bardakçı's most striking observation is the bibliographic one. After the press coverage of Foroughi's Ankara visit in the autumn of 1932 and the perfunctory ratification press of June 1935, the eight-article treaty almost disappears from the public record. The Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi study by Kaştan, which surveys Türkiye-Iran political and economic relations for the entire Atatürk period, cites the Soysal volumes for the bilateral treaty text but does not analyze the eight articles separately. The Atatürk Ansiklopedisi article on the Atatürk-era Türkiye-Iran relationship treats the 1932 Ankara round, like the 1926 instrument, as one entry in a chronology rather than as a treaty in its own right. International historiography of the bilateral relationship has largely been organized around the Saadabad Pact, and the bilateral instrument has not been used as the analytical anchor.

The silence is not surprising in retrospect. From 1937 onward, the four-state pact provided a cleaner regional framing. After 1945 the bilateral relationship was reorganized around the Baghdad Pact (1955) and the Central Treaty Organization, both of which the 1932 instrument quietly survived. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the regional architecture was reorganized again, and most pre-1979 instruments slipped out of common reference, though they remained on the legal books. According to Schofield's authoritative summary, "no developments have occurred affecting the juridical basis of the frontier since 1937," and the bilateral relationship between Tehran and Ankara has rested on a paper foundation that simply has not been touched.

The Türk Tarih Kurumu reissue of Soysal's compilation in 1989 was therefore the single most important piece of work that kept the 1932 instrument in active reference. Anyone working on Türkiye-Iran bilateral diplomacy in the years since has reached for Soysal.

The 2026 frame

The proximate cause of Bardakçı's column is the spring 2026 phase of the Israel-Iran armed exchange and the wider American posture toward Tehran. Türkiye's foreign minister Hakan Fidan and the presidency in Ankara have been visible as mediators, in line with the broader posture the Turkish government has held throughout the recent regional conflict cycle. The Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi adopted a resolution condemning the Israeli strikes on Iran and other acts threatening regional peace, published in the Resmî Gazete through the relevant administrative channel.

Bardakçı's framing is that this neutral, mediating posture is not improvised. It is the contemporary execution of an old bilateral undertaking. Articles 1, 2 and 4 of the 1932 treaty describe more or less exactly the posture Ankara has been holding: neutrality on the bilateral side, a willingness to absorb costs to defend that neutrality, and a continued diplomatic effort to remedy the situation on behalf of the party that is under attack. Article 5 describes the longer institutional fact, that Türkiye has not allowed its territory to be used as a base for the regime-change operations that have been openly discussed in some Western and Israeli capitals over the past year. The dispatch presents the observation as Bardakçı does, as a historical observation rather than as a polemical claim about contemporary policy. The 1932 instrument is one of several reasons Ankara has acted as it has. It is not, on its own, a sufficient explanation.

The deeper point, the one that is most likely to age well, is the institutional one. Türkiye and Iran have a written bilateral architecture, neither party has denounced it, and Soysal's 1989 reissue states explicitly that the instrument was still in force. When Ankara speaks the language of neutrality, mediation, anti-subversion and respect for the territorial integrity of its eastern neighbor, it is speaking the language that Tevfik Rüştü Aras and Mohammad Ali Foroughi committed to paper in October 1932. The continuity is administrative rather than rhetorical, and it explains a portion of the consistency that observers of the Türkiye-Iran relationship have noted across very different Turkish and Iranian governments.

The other portion of that consistency, of course, is the frontier line itself. As Schofield observes, neither party has seriously disputed the 1932 line and its 1937 micro-rectification, and the long Türkiye-Iran border has been one of the world's quieter international boundaries for almost a hundred years. The bilateral neutrality treaty and the bilateral frontier treaty are the two halves of the same institutional fact.

What is, and is not, on the public record

This dispatch has worked from sources at the highest tiers of the Turkish citation hierarchy: the Türk Tarih Kurumu (Soysal 1989), the TBMM kanunlar archive, the Resmî Gazete as published on 15 June 1935, the Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Dışişleri Bakanlığı for the biography of Tevfik Rüştü Aras, the Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi for the academic survey of the period, and the Encyclopædia Iranica for the cross-frontier legal history. Murat Bardakçı's column, where he reads the treaty closely from a photographic reproduction in his archive, is the proximate occasion for the present writing. He has been credited as such.

What is not on the public record, at the moment, is the full Turkish text of the four articles Bardakçı does not paraphrase. The Soysal 1989 volume is held by the major Turkish research libraries and by the Türk Tarih Kurumu's own collections, and the full eight-article text is reproduced there. A subsequent dispatch from this desk will work directly from the Soysal volume to reproduce the remaining articles and to set out the technical clauses (duration, denunciation, exchange of instruments of ratification) that the 1932 drafters wrote into the document.

The institutional fact, however, does not require the full text to be visible. The instrument was signed. It was ratified. It was published. It has not been denounced. The four articles that are in the public summary are exactly the articles that contemporary observers, looking at Türkiye's posture toward Iran in the spring and summer of 2026, would reach for to describe what they are seeing. That is the historical observation, and it is sufficient.