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.
Iranian military strategy is a strange beast, more reliant on unconventional capabilities like ballistic missiles, a guerilla navy, and proxy warfare than conventional ground, air, and naval forces. While the Iranian air force depends on a dwindling cohort of antiquated planes, its ballistic missile arsenal causes disquiet across Western capitals. Antebellum America would also baffle contemporary military analysts. Its army was modestly sized and mostly used to garrison frontier outposts. The same was not true of the navy. Calhoun may have stoutly resisted the federal government’s right to levy a tariff, but he aggressively advocated its right to build a war fleet. He admonished “we must look to the ocean. That is the exposed side.” Agreeing with Calhoun that a blue water navy “was at once our sword and shield,” President John Tyler and his Secretary of the Navy (later Secretary of State) Abel Upshur modernized naval administration, expanded the Home Squadron, and redeployed it to patrol regularly in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean. The antebellum army was inferior to its British counterparts, yet its navy ranked among the world’s finest.
Iran’s force structure stems from relatively recent major events and persistent trends, the most important of these being the Iran-Iraq War. This protracted conflict degraded Iran’s already depleted conventional weapons and discouraged it from fighting future wars on similar terms. Intensive wars of attrition with mass armies gave way to flexible applications of foreign proxies. Likewise, following the checkered performance of its regular and militia forces in the War of the 1812, U.S. strategic thinking migrated towards a forward defense hinging on naval power. Persistent developments following the Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq War, above all restricted access to Western weapons and expertise, have encouraged Iran to invest in forces which it can effectively equip. Had Iran successfully acquired tranches of Eastern Bloc weapons in the 1990s, it may have bolstered its conventional forces. Similarly, the United States was encouraged in its navalist direction after the War of 1812 by the brutal eradication of indigenous, Black, and Spanish military power in the Southeast, transforming a multinational military frontier into the cotton kingdom of the Deep South. Had Washington failed in this, it could not have neglected the army to favor the navy. Wartime experience and subsequent trends encouraged both antebellum America and Iran to develop imbalanced military capabilities.
In many ways Iranian strategy reflects contemporary American power. Khamenei habitually denounces “The Front of Arrogance – headed by the oppressive and cruel United States.” He alleges that Washington is committed to “preventing an Islamic power in the region from emerging and rising.” Khamenei cites the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 2009 “Green Revolution” protests in Iran and the 2011 Syrian uprising against the Assad regime as evidence of American conspiracies to undermine the Islamic Republic. Antebellum America also made strategy in Britain’s shadow. Calhoun fulminated that British arrogance was “not surpassed by Rome in the haughtiest days of the republic” and his advisor Duff Green accused Britain of thwarting American economic progress to protect its colonies. Calhoun’s denunciations evoked the bitterness of betrayal. Like other Southern slaveholders, he had earlier assumed that Britain would bolster American security. “With the British fleets and fiscal resources associated with our own,” former President Madison declared in 1823, “we should be safe against the rest of the World.” That year, Calhoun endorsed British Foreign Secretary George Canning’s proposal of a united declaration against European interference in Latin America. A decade later, Britain abolished slavery, remaking it overnight from ally to adversary, and similarly remaking American foreign policy. Perhaps only Iran’s transition from the reasonably compliant Shah to the implacably combative Khomeini offers a comparably dramatic volte face.
In both instances, hostility expressed not only ideology, but anxiety. The latter encourages predicating basic strategic choices on resistance to an overpowering adversary. For antebellum America, protection from Britain required a defensive perimeter. “SLAVERY is one of ours — UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION is one of theirs,” the Madisonian declared in 1842. Since “each is right within the limits only of their respective dominions,” the United States would need to guard the perimeter of its dominion vigilantly. Hence Andrew Jackson’s apprehension of a British armed and trained Black garrison at Fort Negro in Spanish Florida, Calhoun’s worry that Britain’s self-proclaimed “Mighty Experiment” with free Black labor in the West Indies would undermine slavery in the nearby U.S. South, and Tyler’s outrage over British meddling in the slaveholding republic of Texas. In all these cases, the United States reacted to perceived British threats: destroying the Black garrison at Fort Negro, publicizing Britain’s post-emancipation setbacks in the West Indies, and making Texas the twenty-eighth state.
Iran’s military prioritization of regional ballistic missiles, littoral naval forces, and unconventional foreign proxies all confirm its acceptance of and reaction to American military superiority. These priorities reflect how Iran has built capabilities which indirectly exert pressure but mitigate the risk of direct confrontation. They threaten economically sensitive zones like the Persian Gulf or distract the United States with distant proxies like the Houthis. Iranian strategic choices mirror American policies. Iran developed a doctrine of “passive defense” to protect critical assets from U.S. attacks after the First Gulf War. It deployed a “Mosaic Defense” to withstand American intervention during the Second Gulf War and indirectly intervened in Iraq by arming Shia militias fighting the United States. The announcement of a U.S. “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran in 2019 prompted Iran to intensify unconventional attacks and accelerate its nuclear program
Occasionally, Washington could only defuse or redirect the threat of British power by negotiating with Whitehall. In agreements like the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, Washington maneuvered to make marginal concessions, in this case surrendering acres of Maine wilderness, in exchange for narrow but vital advantages, like Britain’s renunciation of its claim to search ships (usually illegal slave traffickers) flying U.S. colors. Such diplomacy acknowledged British might while working to check it. Iran has also attempted to attenuate the American threat with diplomacy. Under the JCPOA of 2015-2018, Iran made tactical concessions, some quite significant, to its nuclear program. Yet in receiving U.S. sanctions relief, it was able to invest in critical components of its strategy to check American power like missile defense and regional proxies. Presently, with its favorite proxies destroyed or diminished and its ballistic capabilities exposed as ineffectual, Tehran has again made diplomatic overtures to Washington. When selective force does not suffice, tactical diplomacy supplements the countering strategies of lesser powers.
Antebellum America acted in what it felt was a hostile regional environment. Foreboding the dangers of abolitionism in the Caribbean and South America, Georgia Senator John Berrien asked whether the United States could “suffer these Islands to pass into the hands of buccaneers, drunk with their newborn liberty?” Diplomat Hugh Swinton Legáre likewise deplored “the Caribbean was now home to a black population of some 2,000,000, free from all restraint and ready for any mischief.” Consequently, what few friends America had in the hemisphere, Texas, Cuba, Brazil, required fierce protection. In 1840, Secretary of State John Forsyth pledged to Madrid it was the United States’ “fixed resolution” that Cuba remain under Spanish rule. In 1844, the Tyler administration deployed three warships to Cuba to show its support for the colonial government’s suppression of the Matanzas slave revolt.
Analogously to antebellum American fears of encirclement, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Robert Ashley’s believes Iran’s “ambitions and identity as a largely Persian Shia power in a region composed of primarily Arab Sunni states” underlays discord with its neighbors who seek security from the United States and prompts Iran to proactively support its few regional partners in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. This regional outlook first emerged during the war with Iraq in the 1980s, when Iran, otherwise isolated, found support from Shia paramilitaries like Hezbollah and the Badr Corps. This outlook was reinforced by the Arab Spring. Iran suspected the United States of underwriting rebellion against Assad in Syria, obligating a strong response in what Khamenei branded an “imposed war.” Likewise, the downfall of Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2012 and rise of the Zaydi Shia Houthi movement in 2014 created another node in Iran’s regional network. The weakening or loss of regional partners like Hezbollah and Syria over the past year is a grave threat to Iran, but likely only strengthens its commitment to finding and supporting allies in a region it views as hostile.
Antebellum American statecraft was largely successful in defending its interests despite the enmity of the world’s strongest power. The domestic revolution of the Civil War, not foreign intervention, ended the grip of slaveholding elites on national power. It may require a domestic revolution to terminate the Islamic Republic’s reign in Iran. Yet unlike antebellum America, the results of Iranian statecraft have been mixed. Recent reversals in Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria betray the limits of its ability to project power. Continuous eruptions of discontent against the regime, restless ethnic minorities, and the liabilities of its imbalanced military are weaknesses which Iranian strategy cannot conceal. Most significantly, the weight of American actions in Iranian strategic calculations gives Washington outsized influence over Iranian behavior. The United States can encourage Iran to excessively invest in capabilities which Washington is prepared to defend against, compel it to prioritize internal security over regional adventurism, and mirror Iranian strategy by developing “gray zone” tactics which reduce the advantages of asymmetric capabilities. Calhoun and Khamenei’s strategies can be understood using a similar analytical matrix. There is no reason, however, that the latter’s “successes” need rival the former.
