What did the US gain from war with Iran?
It's a little like the War of 1812.
The announcement of a tentative peace agreement in the U.S. war against Iran sent me looking for the text of another inconclusive peace deal: The Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812 with no measurable gain. The parallels are helpful to consider.
The United States Congress formally declared war on Britain for a variety of causes. Britain’s nonstop wars against Napoleonic France disrupted American trade. British naval vessels in need of sailors routinely stopped American ships and “impressed,” or seized, as many Americans as they needed. Aside from those complaints, Americans had foggy ideas of invading and conquering Britain’s possessions in Canada. As a historian of the period puts it, some Americans felt that attacking Canada was the only way available to strike at the British Empire, while others had longstanding dreams of conquering the provinces to make them “the Scotland of America.”
Whatever the exact war aims—and the cloudiness of those aims was surely part of the problem—the war didn’t achieve them. American troops fought, sometimes well and often badly. The conquest of Canada didn’t work out: One of the invading American armies retreated back into Michigan and actually surrendered Detroit. By 1814, an invading British force burned Washington. The Treaty of Ghent, concluded through negotiations in Belgium in December 1814, explicitly said that everything was to be put back the way it was before: “All territory, places, and possessions whatsoever taken by either party from the other… shall be restored without delay.” The British made no commitment to stop the impressment of American sailors or to allow freedom of the seas, although the end of the Napoleonic wars made both issues moot.
The treaty at least got both sides out of a pointless conflict. The Americans could say they had survived a second war against the world’s greatest empire, and the British could rid themselves of a war that was far less important to them than events in Europe.
The terms of the Treaty of Ghent don’t look any worse, and arguably were better, than the initial reports of the tentative terms
