The U.S.A.'s oldest ally

Who is America’s oldest continuing ally? 

France?  Sorry, Francophiles, the first Franco-American Alliance ended in 1798 when the naval Franco-American War began (it ended in 1800).  The temperature did not warm up until after the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III in 1870 following the collapse of the French intervention in Mexico.  France gifted the Statue of Liberty to the USA in 1884, and in his original draft Francis Bellamy included the French revolutionary values of “liberty, equality, fraternity” in his Pledge of Allegiance.

England?  Sorry, Anglophiles, even though our two countries traded ambassadors as early as 1785 and began trading as early as 1783, relations were still shaky. 

In fact, when England went to war with France in 1793, over King Louis getting his head cut right off and thus having his constitution spoiled (for Edmund Burke, the greater outrage was his wife’s death), the United States and Great Britain almost went to war as well. 

With the War of 1812, numerous border disputes, the actions of the British Empire during the Civil War, the Fenian invasions of Canada from America in 1866 and 1867, things didn’t thaw until the late 19^th century.  There was what might be called a “cold war” until the Great Rapprochement, the period from 1895 through 1914 that coincided with the Progressive Era in the U.S.A. and the Belle Epoque in the U.K.G.B.I. (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) and the rest of Europe.

Israel?  Sorry, the State of Israel didn’t exist until 1948 and the land upon which it was erected that year, Palestine, had been part of the Ottoman Empire since the 16^th century, and other empires before that since about 587 BCE.  Besides, even with the urging of Harry Truman’s best friend, our President did not acknowledge that country until the Soviet Union did so first.  It wasn’t until after the Six Day War in 1967 (which included the attack by Israeli air forces upon the USS Liberty) that US-Israel relations began to thaw.

No, the answer lies at the far western end of North Africa.

The first ruler in the rest of the world to recognize the United States as a legitimate nation in its own right was Mohammad III of the Sultanate of Morocco in 1777.  A decade later, the two countries cemented a formal alliance that has continued unbroken down to the current date in the Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship, signed in 1786 and ratified in July 1787.  The alliance held even while Morocco was a protectorate of France between 1912 and 1956. 

Today our oldest ally, a Muslim majority country, is known as the Kingdom of Morocco, its current ruler being Mohammed VI.  With a population 99.1% Berber and Arab, the former being the clear majority, the country borders both the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea and includes the autonomous region of Western Sahara and the major cities of Casablanca, Marrakesh, Tangier, and several others in addition of the capital at Rabat.  Its king belongs to the Alaouite dynasty, which has been ruling since 1666.