The Moroccan–American Treaty of 1786

By Emeka Obi

The longest unbroken treaty in American history was signed with Morocco. The Moroccan–American Treaty of Peace and Friendship — first recognized in 1777, formalized in 1786 — has been in continuous force for nearly two and a half centuries: older than the American Constitution, and a monument to Moroccan diplomacy.

The story begins with the American Revolution. In December 1777, Sultan Mohammed III — Mohammed ben Abdallah, the Alaouite reformer — issued a declaration opening Moroccan ports to American ships, making Morocco the first country in the world to recognize the independence of the United States. The Sultan's motives were practical as well as generous: American privateers and merchantmen needed safe harbors, and Morocco's corsair tradition gave it leverage over Atlantic shipping. But the gesture was real, and the Americans never forgot it.

The formal treaty followed. In 1786, in Marrakech, the Moroccan envoy and the American commissioners signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship: twenty-five articles guaranteeing American ships free passage, protecting shipwrecked sailors, and establishing consular relations. The treaty was negotiated on the American side with the involvement of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — the future second and third presidents — and it remains, with its 1836 renewal, the longest unbroken treaty relationship in the United States' diplomatic history. Article 6 is still cited in American courts.

The treaty's deeper meaning is Moroccan. Mohammed III was practicing the oldest art of the Moroccan state: diplomacy as survival and prestige. By recognizing the upstart American republic, the Sultan positioned Morocco as a sovereign equal dealing with the great powers on its own terms — the same diplomacy that had managed Ottomans, Spaniards, and Portuguese for centuries. The treaty inaugurated a Moroccan-American relationship that runs unbroken to the present: the Tangier American Legation, established 1821, is the oldest American diplomatic property in the world and now a museum; the two countries are linked by a free-trade agreement and a strategic partnership.

In 1777 Morocco recognized a revolution; in 1786 it signed a friendship. Two hundred and forty years later, the treaty still stands — the oldest thread in the fabric of American diplomacy, and the proof that Moroccan statecraft was playing the great game while the United States was still learning the rules.

The treaty's American afterlife is a story in itself. Article 6 — protecting shipwrecked sailors — was invoked in the nineteenth century when American ships wrecked on the Moroccan coast, and the Sultan's governors honored it; the treaty's promise of "most favored nation" treatment made Morocco the template for the Barbary treaties with Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli — though only the Moroccan treaty never lapsed into war. Thomas Barclay, the American negotiator who carried the treaty to Marrakech, wrote home that the Sultan received him "with great politeness," and the treaty's Arabic and English texts — the Arabic taking precedence in disputes — remain a model of early modern treaty drafting. In 1836, when the treaty came up for renewal, the Americans sent the diplomat James Leib as consul to Tangier; the renewal was signed without friction, the friendship now a habit. Two hundred and forty years of unbroken force: no other American treaty comes close, and it began because a Sultan in Marrakech decided, in 1777, that a distant republic of rebels deserved a port.

Impact on civilization