“Returned? They hadn’t lost it in the war.”
Constantinople was occupied by Western forces from November 12, 1918 until September 1923, during which time the Ottoman Empire was partitioned off. The Western Powers were terrified that Russia would have ready access to the pashaliks the West had established along the Mediterranean littoral in former Ottoman territories virtually all the way to the Atlantic. They made a pact with the Mohammedan Turkish devils. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Armenians died was neither here nor there.
As for communism, the Greeks, with help from the Truman administration, crushed the communists in the 1940s and again in the 1970s. Greece has had a center right government for some years now. They also have a political party called Golden Dawn which many Freepers might find attractive.
OK; so what has Greece done for America?
Unlike Germany and Austria-Hungary, Turkey was in a position to continue fighting (regardless of how hopeless it may have been). Russia’s surrender had left plenty of troops for Turkey to use elsewhere; the Allies’ treatment of Turkey after WWI probably saved them from having to fight Turkey again in WWII. We didn’t take Hamburg or Munich from Germany; no reason to take Istanbul from Turkey. Who would they have awarded it to? Greece, who fought at the very end of the war? Over the centuries it had become part of Turkey; there was no way to undo that.