In 1815, with Commodore Stephen Decatur’s guns trained on his harbor, the Dey of Algiers signed a treaty with the United States, then told the Americans what he thought of it: My power has been wrested from my hands. Draw the treaty at your pleasure, and I will sign it. But beware the moment I recover my power — for with that moment, your treaty shall be waste paper.
No adversary has explained himself more honestly, and no lesson from America’s first war has been more expensively relearned: an agreement is a snapshot of a power relationship, not a substitute for one. It binds exactly as long as the leverage that produced it. We are relearning it now with Iran, and we have seen this movie before — in fact, we premiered it.
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In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams asked the ambassador from Tripoli what America — a new nation with no navy and no quarrel in the Mediterranean — had done to deserve the seizure and enslavement of its sailors. Jefferson recorded the answer in his report to John Jay: the hostility rested not on anything America had done, but on what America was — unsubmitted, unprotected, profitable to raid.
It is worth remembering what “seizure” meant: captives stripped, chained, and auctioned — examined by buyers, one historian wrote, as they would any domestic animal. The Irish village of Baltimore was carried off in a single night; of more than a hundred taken, only two ever saw Ireland again. The tribute America paid was the price of keeping American sailors off that auction block. It was ransom.
For two decades, America paid. Treaty after treaty was broken or repriced within a few years, while the seizures continued — some 35 American ships and roughly 700 Americans taken between 1784 and 1815. At its peak, tribute approached a fifth of federal spending, and every payment financed the fleet that would seize more. The demands grew with our generosity until 1801, when Tripoli declared war to raise the price. Jefferson refused and sent the squadron — the style of the demand, he told Congress, “admitted but one answer.” Four years of naval war, and Decatur’s 1815 campaign, ended what 30 years of payments had perpetuated. Force converted no one and changed no beliefs in Algiers — it changed the price list. Raiding Americans stopped paying, and so it stopped.
Now consider the last eleven years. A 2015 agreement traded sanctions relief — modern tribute, paid in market access and unfrozen assets — for promised restraint, followed by talks Tehran used to buy time while enrichment advanced, then collapse and strikes. New talks this February failed within weeks, giving way to war, a ceasefire, and a June 17 memorandum of understanding — followed, within a month, by disputes over what was agreed, satellite imagery showing repairs at the bombed nuclear sites, and an American president declaring the deal over even as indirect talks continue through mediators.
Here, too, the ledger is not merely monetary. This is the regime that held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days and has practiced hostage diplomacy ever since; whose proxies blew up 241 Americans in their barracks in Beirut; that executes more of its own people than any government on earth save China, and shoots its daughters in the street for showing their hair. If the public and press waffle on Iran, part of the reason is simple unawareness of this record — you cannot weigh a negotiation honestly if you do not know who is across the table.
The choreography is identical: an agreement signed under pressure, eroded at the rate we will tolerate, voided when the balance shifts. This is not erratic behavior; it is consistency — a doctrine in which an agreement with a stronger adversary is a purchased pause, revocable when power returns.
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The current administration appears to grasp the arithmetic — it is negotiating from restored leverage, not promised leverage. But a president cannot hold that position alone. Jefferson could send the squadron only because Congress had funded the frigates in 1794 and the public finally demanded action instead of ransom. Deterrence in a democracy is a national act. It requires a Congress that funds deterrence before the crisis, a press that reports the adversary’s conduct rather than scoring each week’s talks as a horse race, and a public that accepts that the cheap option is the expensive one. Division is a discount, and our adversaries have always been careful shoppers.
Jefferson’s generation needed 30 years, a fifth of the budget, and two wars to act on what it was told plainly in 1786 — the adversary was honest; it was the receiving side that could not afford to believe him. The corsairs were consistent. Tehran is consistent. The question is not whether the adversary will honor the paper — he has already told us. The question is whether Congress, the press, and the American people will believe him quickly enough to stand behind one settled American answer, spoken with one voice.
Dory Wiley is president and CEO of Commerce Street Holdings, LLC, a Dallas-based investment bank. He is also writes on the lessons of American history for present-day policy.
