At the Taşucu port I see the Cyprus boat coming toward the mainland, the island less than eighty kilometers away, and the gas beneath this seabed only a footnote in that whole story. I stayed there once; ten days on both sides of an island needlessly divided. On my last evening, I met with members of Turkish and Greek cycling clubs, both of which would have happily referred to themselves as simply “Cypriot.” The ethnic distinctions belong only to lines that need not be there. Those who love the bicycle often seem able to maintain a love of the world and faith in how it could be.

The island of Cyprus, by square kilometer, is the most militarized rock on earth. It hosts most of the British military in the Mediterranean, and while British-Turkish relations may be historically among the best of all European and Western states, still the Turks have no enthusiasm for being militarily encircled. Cyprus itself was a British colony of largely harmonious Greek-Turkish relations until, determined to cling to power, the British waged a concerted divide and rule strategy of random killings and general brutality. British rule eventually came to an end in 1960, although the British military bases remained, and the Turkish Cypriot self-defense militias always feared that their fellow islanders — the majority Greek Cypriot population — might turn on them when the occupier was gone.

And so it went. But it was not only the Greek Cypriots who were to blame; the extremists of the island would have been far less potent without the military dictatorship back in Athens. Drunk on Hellenist fantasy, its leaders do not want an independent Cyprus; they want Cyprus inside Greece. The junta stages a coup so ferocious in its onslaught that the Cypriot president has to be evacuated to Malta by the British Royal Air Force still on the island. The Greek Cypriot militia, EOKA (National Organization of Cypriot Fighters), which has attacked Turks for decades, is now so emboldened that even Greek Cypriots fear what its fanaticism means for the island. Cyprus will be Greek. For five days this is the state of affairs, with Turkish Cypriots shut terrified inside their houses, until the Turkish government resolves to refuse this remaking of a new normal and the total violation of the 1960 Cypriot constitution. It sends troops.

After intense fighting, the puppet regime installed by the junta falls, and the island is left divided by the intervention. Despite the coup on Cyprus, despite the outcome performing the unalloyed good of bringing down the junta in Athens, Western history somehow sees the whole affair as the fault of the Turks, who are castigated for not acquiescing, for resisting, for having made a scene. Without that resistance ordered by Ankara, it could all have gone off smoothly. By now we’d need only a fifty-minute documentary with archive footage, perfect for the History Channel: a little remorse and sadness before work again tomorrow morning. As it is, thanks to the Turks, we’ve been left with a political impasse.

Many of us have our Cyprus stories. Dad was doing his military service in 1974 when the conflict broke out. He was on the next boat crossing to land troops when the cease-fire was signed. The family home of Rana, a friend from Turkish Cyprus, served as an army radio post. It was felt to be far enough north to be safe, but the attack from Greek forces was so forceful that in the end the family had to flee, their home evacuated.

That the junta in Athens began the war goes unremarked. That the Greeks did terrible things to Turkish Cypriots goes unremarked. That Turks did terrible things having been attacked is undisputed. War is terrible, which is why we must always seek to avoid it.

Still less is known in the West about the attempts to find a resolution. In 2004, there was a referendum on a painstakingly brokered United Nations–backed plan, to reunify the island. Of the Turkish Cypriots, 65 percent vote in favor. Of the Greek Cypriots, 76 percent vote against. Doubtless cultural factors can be complex, but the outcome was not helped by the fact that among Greek Cypriots what can only be described as a stiff culture of bigotry has been developed.

I remember crossing from South Cyprus to North and being asked by a kindly Greek Cypriot woman, amazed anyone would go at all, if we would be taking our own food — because Turkish food could be unclean. Dear Nikoleta, in that favorite of Athenian cafés, on the hill above Exarcheia: a true Cypriot, a true Greek. “Nasılsın?” she said brightly on learning I was Turkish. “How are you?” Nikoleta had begun studying Turkish because, she said, she hated the racism on an island she loved, and toward a population for whom it is also home. The man from the cycling club. I’ll never forget the way he said it, confused and mystified, a Turkish Cypriot to a Greek one: “We know you’re the enemy, our media is not good. But I don’t think they tell us to hate you like your media does.” The Greek Cypriot, a friend from the south of the island, nodded solemnly. “It’s true.”

In South Cyprus exists a supremacist current, not helped by the British military pensioners who stay for its sun, nor by the Russian oligarchs with their own nationalist ways and Christian supremacy.

That all this runs contrary to Greek Cypriot interests is unquestionable, because supremacy is a harmful drug. Supremacists make enemies and, true to their core belief of superiority, underestimate others.

That the Turks will not be dislodged is not the point. The problem is that the North wants resolution, a full peace that South Cyprus will not consider. And why would it? The South has the keys to the state car. Gas from the seabed, they take it. Revenue, they keep it. Passports, recognized worldwide. All the time Turkish Cypriots are left quasi-stateless, their passports recognized only by a Turkish mainland with which Cypriots are kin, but on which they’d sooner not have to rely.

And what of external actors? Some outside mediation perhaps? Could the European Union help? Ha! It was recognized that no part of Cyprus should join the EU until the situation was resolved, for fear of making matters intractable. Fast forward to 2005. Flags flutter, trumpets blare: the European Union would like to welcome as its newest member — “the Republic of Cyprus.” Far be it from me to make so bold a claim, but had the EU actively wanted to scupper resolution on Cyprus, I am not sure what they would have done differently.

Where are we now? Ankara, along with North Cyprus, calls for a formal partition: a two-state solution with agreed borders and seabed. Western politicians bemoan that the Turks, who always wanted reunification but were denied that, now want to divide the island, an outcome none would have sought but for fifty years no one has worked with Ankara or North Cyprus to avert. This is how you operate when you’re a Western state: you deliberately marginalize diplomacy, then howl blue murder when people tire of being marginalized.

The latest is no more heartening. As tensions grow globally, in autumn 2022 the United States lifts a decades-long arms embargo on South Cyprus, designed specifically to avoid escalation. In this act lies maybe the most crucial and tragic thing to understand: a number of states, unlike almost anybody on the island, do not in fact want peace on Cyprus. When you are a distant state, the threat of conflict is not in fact terrible, but only leverage to be leaned on or released at will in achieving your own objectives. When you have peace, this lever breaks. You are left with only peace but no leverage. Cyprus becomes only an island in the sun again, beautiful perhaps, but useless to you.