The Historical Geopolitics of Middle Powers

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.