The ETERNAL TREATY: Moroccan-American Treaty and Two Centuries of Diplomatic Continuity

A treaty renewed in 1836. A relationship tested by empire, colonialism, international law, and independence.In 1786, Morocco and the United States concluded a Treaty of Peace and Friendship that gave formal structure to a relationship begun during the American revolutionary era. Fifty years later, the treaty approached the end of its original term.The two countries could have allowed it to expire. Instead, they renewed it. The Eternal Treaty tells the remarkable story of what happened next. Under Sultan Abd al-Rahman ibn Hisham, Morocco and the United States concluded a renewed agreement at Meknes in 1836. Much of the earlier treaty was preserved, but one important change gave the relationship a new legal future: after another fifty years, the agreement would continue unless one government deliberately chose to terminate it. That decision carried Moroccan-American relations into a century neither side could have imagined.Abdeslem El Idrissi follows the treaty through the expanding system of foreign privilege in nineteenth-century Morocco, the Madrid Conference of 1880, the international struggle surrounding Algeciras in 1906, and the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1912. As Moroccan sovereignty became increasingly constrained, the old treaty acquired new meanings-and new complications.By the twentieth century, rights originally intended to protect merchants, sailors, and consuls had become part of a larger legal struggle over extraterritorial jurisdiction, foreign privilege, and the authority of the Moroccan state. That struggle culminated in 1952, when France and the United States appeared before the International Court of Justice at The Hague and judges were required to interpret legal rights rooted in agreements more than a century old. Then came independence.When Morocco recovered its sovereignty in 1956, the United States faced a defining choice: preserve inherited privileges or adapt the relationship to a new age of diplomatic equality. It chose adaptation.Drawing on treaty texts, diplomatic correspondence, international agreements, legal records, and historical scholarship, The Eternal Treaty reveals that the true durability of Moroccan-American relations did not lie in an agreement frozen in time. It lay in the repeated willingness of successive generations to preserve the relationship while changing the institutions through which it operated.What endured was not every privilege, every clause, or every legal arrangement. What endured was the decision to continue the relationship.The Eternal Treaty is Volume II of Morocco and America: Stories from the Oldest Enduring Friendship in U.S. Foreign Relations, a six-volume series tracing the relationship from the American Revolution to the twenty-first century.