Eamonn Bellin
The 1840s were a watershed decade in U.S. foreign policy marked by naval expansion, intervention in Cuba, annexation of Texas, and war with Mexico, constituting a smaller nation’s strategy to counter the enmity of a great power, the British empire. American statesmen feared that Britain, having taken the revolutionary step of abolishing slavery in 1833, would, in the words of an American diplomat, “form around our southern shores a cordon of free negroes” to destroy American slavery. Motivated “by a spirit of conquest and domination” cloaked “in the cause of humanity and liberty,” Britain would, according to South Carolina Senator and Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, destroy slavery in America to impose its economic domination on the world. Although separated by centuries, antebellum America’s strategic positioning against Britain resembles the causes and conditions which shape the strategy of another second rate power, today’s Iran, in resisting another hostile great power, today’s United States. Iran, like antebellum America, has made its strategic choices based on its proximate past and geopolitical position. Understanding Iran’s behavior in these terms is the first step in constraining it.
Antebellum America could not conventionally compete with Victorian Britain. Instead, Washington protected its interests by making local waters like the Gulf of Mexico unsafe for British naval power and supporting fellow slaveholding regimes in Cuba, Brazil, and Texas to prevent encirclement. Iran has likewise destabilized American security in the Persian Gulf and, until recently, projected strategic depth across a regional “axis of resistance.” This cursory comparison indicates how insurgent states with limited resources have defended their interests by adapting to their great power rivals’ weaknesses, investing in local superiority, and defending regional partners. Moreover, American strategy in the 1840s does not reflect a static “American way of war” but elicits proximate historical forces like American commitments to slavery, fear of Britain, and hemispheric relationships with other slave societies. Likewise, the bases of Iranian strategy today do not hinge on shibboleths of Persian culture or the teachings of Ruhollah Khomeini, but turn on recent events, apprehension of American power, and assessments of regional context.
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