Applying 18th Century Foreign Policy
Has anything changed in Geopolitics since 1776?
With it being July 4th and my commitment to seeing how things, like history, relate to the present I wonder if the US foreign policy echoes that of the 18th century.
So why do I try to look at it that way?
History is a map if used wisely but do most use it as such?
On one side, historians like to play should have, would have could have…
Arm chair historians like to imagine themselves front and center of geopolitics as Luke Skywalker waving his lightsaber
And, for others, they want to document everything with annotations and create a tomb that thanks to AI you can summarize in a sentence
(all that work so a 16 year old can sum up in one sentence on Google Notebook LLM)
There are also the media and pop-historians who just extrapolate from the past — cut and paste…
I’m under the working theory that there is nothing new under the sun, even BS. If that theory holds up, and 3 of the most influential religions deem it canon, so why not apply those metrics?
Also, I’m under the influence that I don’t know anything, and our leaders don’t either, just the successful ones show up and play it by ear
after years of experience and practice, of course, and apply it to the matters at hand.
So let’s test the theory.
What I’m seeing is: The Incentive Map
Again, the working theory is that the tools change but the incentives don’t so therefore the current standoff over Iran should decompose into the same handful of positions eighteenth century diplomacy already mapped out.
Start with the role Britain played for most of the 1700s.
Britain rarely wanted a land war on the continent. Too expensive, too exposed, too easy to lose an army you couldn’t quickly replace across open water. So Britain ran what historians later called a blue-water policy: control the sea lanes directly, and pay someone else’s army to hold the line on land. Subsidize Prussia. Subsidize the Dutch. Keep the navy dominant and the coalition large, and let the subsidized allies absorb the casualties.
That’s a strangely precise description of how the United States has been operating in the Gulf. Control the strait. Build the coalition. Expand the Abraham Accords rather than the troop deployments. Let reconstruction money and security guarantees do the work that legions used to do. The instrument changed from a subsidy paid in gold to a subsidy paid in reconstruction funding and market access. The role didn’t move at all.
Now take the role of the power fighting for survival, not conquest.
Frederick the Great’s Prussia spent the Seven Years’ War (1756) surrounded, outnumbered, and one bad campaign season from being partitioned off the map entirely. He needed to survive long enough that his enemies found it cheaper to negotiate than to finish the job. Prussia walked away from a war it had no business surviving, intact, because exhaustion beat ambition on the other side of the table.
Just like George Washington.
Iran’s incentive right now reads the same way. Not “how do we win.” How do we survive this intact enough to claim we didn’t lose. A negotiated ceasefire, a reconstruction fund, sanctions relief, an IAEA process that lets the regime say it chose transparency rather than had it imposed. That’s a Frederick outcome. Damaged, diminished, still standing, still at the table.
That’s one viewpoint and definitely a parallel.
[Wait, what did Eric write? Iran is winning? Nope, AI took my thoughts and turned the tables on me.]
After writing to my editor AI, that I wanted to edit the above statement…
“That’s one viewpoint and definitely a parallel. But I don’t see it as such and I don’t see it written how the USA is trying to create an environment for oppressed people to rise up but only with assistance from USA after they make the first move and sacrifice. If they love the American way then that’s what they'll do. So how do we reframe it like this? I mean that’s what France did in 1776”
But Iran is not a country but controlled by an oppressive brutal regime that reigns by fear. It’s the people underneath it that is slowly stirring and not caring about victory against the USA but against its own leaders.
France helped the USA with its war, but France didn’t show up in 1775. There was no Rochambeau at Lexington and Concord, no French fleet in Boston Harbor when the shooting started.
The colonists declared independence, fought a brutal string of losses through 1776, and had to prove, at Saratoga, in October 1777, that they could actually win before France put a signature on a formal alliance in February 1778.
The first move, and the first blood, belonged to the colonists. France’s role only opened up after that.
That's the role I don't see written into most readings of the Iran situation, and it's the one I think is actually operating. Not: does the regime survive intact enough to claim it didn't lose.
The real question is whether a population willing to do what the colonists did in 1775 shows up first.
Iran's 2025–2026 protests, and the regime's massacre of its own civilians in putting them down, is the Lexington-and-Concord moment in this reading and not a finished revolution, but the first move that has to happen before anything resembling a Saratoga-to-alliance sequence becomes possible.
Nobody signs a treaty of alliance with a population that hasn't already bled for it first. France didn't in 1776. There's no reason to expect 2026 to run differently.
Then there’s the role of the power with no margin for error.
Let’s revisit Freddy from the 7 year war (he loved a good battle). He invaded Silesia in 1740 as he felt waiting cost more than moving. A narrow window to attack a weakened rival to gain concessions.
Israel’s posture through this conflict reads from the same page: a security margin too thin to outsource to slower processes, a preference for resolving the threat now rather than managing it indefinitely.
Then have the superpowers step in clean this up.
Eighteenth-century diplomacy always had a Dutch Republic or a Sweden in the room, a few states without the size to dictate an outcome, but with enough leverage as neutral ground to host the actual negotiation. Qatar and Pakistan are playing exactly that position now, brokering the talks rather than fighting in them. The Gulf Cooperation Council states are playing the role smaller German principalities played against a dominant neighbor for three hundred years: nobody wants to be conquered by the strong power next door, so everyone quietly organizes a coalition and a security guarantee against the day it tries.
Then the outside powers who profit from everyone else’s war without fighting it.
Makes common sense.
That’s why we see China not really taking a stance as it doesn’t pay to go to war as you can pick away at your competitors advantage.
The same occurred in 1783 as no additional military force chose to attack a weakened US. After UK lost the war in 1783 and left the field entirely, and left its former colony with no navy, no standing army, a bankrupt treasury, and no guarantee it would survive the decade as an independent nation. France the friend could have turned into an exploiter.
That restraint is easy to underrate because nothing happened. But nothing happening was the choice.
Let the fates determine the outcome of a countries destiny not arms. The current posture toward Iran, reconstruction money instead of occupation, an accord system instead of a protectorate, sanctions relief instead of a puppet government, isn’t just eighteenth-century in general shape. It’s the fact the West has tried every other strategy to no avail. So why not return to what works?
None of this required anyone in 2026 to have read a word of eighteenth-century diplomatic history. That’s the actual point. Nobody needs to have studied the Treaty of Utrecht to end up playing Utrecht’s roles.
The incentives assign the parts on their own.
Of course, if you are a student of history you can observe in real time what roles our leaders are playing.
Speaking of Treaties of Utrecht which happened in 1713. It does appear that this is where the Middle East is heading.
These treaties between France and other European powers and another series between Spain and other powers the war of who will be King of Spain.
World War II shaped the map of the Middle East but not the ideology.
Utrecht was created sweeping geopolitical and territorial shifts favored Great Britain and shaped European and colonial relations for a century:
British Ascendancy
Monopolies & Trade
Dynastic Resolution
Disintegration of the Spanish Empire
Countries since time immemorial act in their interest and never want a strong neighbor. Or a nasty and rabid pitbull.
So diplomacy adapts but not the principles. The diplomatic pouch became encrypted email. The royal envoy became the special envoy. The subsidy became reconstruction aid. The peace congress became the international summit.
Lets celebrate this 250 year of Independence by working hard to have another 250 years of growth, harmony and peace
Eric