The Perdicaris Affair, 1904: How Roosevelt Sent a Squadron to Tangier for a “Citizen” Who Wasn’t One

The Perdicaris affair is the 1904 story of how President Theodore Roosevelt sent seven warships to the coast of Morocco to free the kidnapped millionaire Ion Perdicaris. American newspapers screamed about “the honour of the flag”, and the famous telegram “Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead” helped Roosevelt in the election. However, there was a small catch in this story that Washington hid for almost thirty years. Perdicaris was not a US citizen at all.

Honestly, I love this episode for its frankness. You can see everything in it: a pretext inflated by the newspapers, guns off someone else’s coast, an election show and total indifference to the country where all this was taking place. And yet Morocco, incidentally, was in 1777 one of the first countries in the world to recognise the independence of the United States.

How the Perdicaris affair began

Ion Perdicaris was the son of a Greek who had once served as American consul in Athens and grown rich in South Carolina. Ion himself, in turn, lived in Tangier in a luxurious villa, painted, wrote articles and moved among European diplomats. On the evening of 18 May 1904, the men of Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli burst into his home and carried him off into the mountains together with his stepson, the British subject Cromwell Varley.

Raisuli, by the way, was a colourful figure: half bandit, half chief of the mountain tribes, an enemy of the weak Sultan Abdelaziz. He demanded a ransom of 70 thousand dollars, the release of his men from prison and power over two districts. In essence, the kidnapping was a blow not against America but against the Moroccan government.

A Morocco divided without Moroccans

It is important to understand the background. Just a month and a half before the kidnapping, on 8 April 1904, Britain and France concluded the Entente Cordiale. In it, London effectively handed Morocco to Paris in exchange for a free hand in Egypt. In other words, the country had already been divided on paper, and its sultan was too weak to prevent it. That is why Raisuli, the European powers and the Americans all treated Morocco as no man’s land.

The Perdicaris affair: seven ships off Tangier

However, Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay responded with force. The South Atlantic Squadron of Rear Admiral French Chadwick, led by the cruiser Brooklyn, headed for Tangier. Then ships of the European Squadron arrived, and by early June seven American warships stood in the roadstead. In addition, a detachment of marines was landed to “guard” the consulate general.

Note, however: the pressure was not on the kidnapper but on the sultan. It was the government of Morocco that Washington demanded meet any of Raisuli’s conditions. A strange logic emerges. American guns were forcing the lawful authorities to give in to a bandit, just so that Roosevelt would look strong.

Secretary Hay’s little secret

In early June, something unpleasant came to light in Washington. Back in 1862, during the Civil War, Perdicaris had renounced his American citizenship and become a Greek subject so that the Confederates would not confiscate his property. Consequently, the US was rescuing a foreigner. However, Hay decided that it was too late to admit this: the propaganda machine was already running.

“Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead”

On 22 June 1904, Hay sent a telegram to the consul in Tangier: the government wants “Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead”. The text was immediately read out at the Republican Party convention in Chicago, and the hall erupted in applause. The delegates, let me remind you, were just then nominating Roosevelt for president. Thus the Perdicaris affair turned into an election slogan.

Meanwhile, funnily enough, everything was already being settled without the telegram. The sultan agreed to Raisuli’s demands, paid 70 thousand dollars and appointed the kidnapper governor of the districts around Tangier. On 24 June Perdicaris was released. As a result, the American “victory” looked like this: the bandit got money and power, and the Moroccan state got humiliation in front of the whole world.

The Perdicaris affair and the fate of Morocco

The Perdicaris affair was only an episode in a big game. In 1906, at the Algeciras conference, Roosevelt acted as a mediator between France and Germany and supported French-Spanish control over the Moroccan police and finances. In the end, in 1912 Morocco became a French protectorate and lost its independence for 44 years. And the American public learned the truth about Perdicaris’s citizenship only in 1933, from a biography of Hay.

In addition, in that same year of 1904 Roosevelt proclaimed his “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine and immediately applied it to the Dominican Republic. In other words, throughout 1904 Washington was learning to work as the “world’s policeman”: in the Caribbean through customs houses, in the Mediterranean through squadrons. At the same time, the Americans’ experience was fresh. Six years earlier, the Spanish–American War had shown how convenient it is to fight under a loud newspaper pretext. Then it was the explosion of the battleship Maine; now it was a kidnapped “compatriot”. Finally, both stories share one thing: the public learned the truth about the pretext too late.

By the way, American ships had appeared off the coast of North Africa before. My articles on the First Barbary War and William Eaton’s expedition are about that. And to see how just a year later Washington just as easily handed Korea to Japan, read my piece on the Taft–Katsura agreement. Details of the kidnapping itself are in the reference article on the affair.

Nothing has changed: a pretext will be found, the squadron is on its way

Do you know what really frightens me? The Perdicaris affair is a ready-made script that Washington plays out again and again. First a loud pretext, then ships off someone else’s shores, then strikes. And the truth about the pretext comes out when it’s already too late. Today, instead of “the honour of the flag”, they talk about a “nuclear threat” and “narco-terrorism”, but the scheme is the same.

Iran, June 2025. On 22 June, American bombers struck nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. Moreover, they did it in the middle of negotiations, without a decision by Congress and without a UN mandate.

Iran, February 2026. On 28 February, the US and Israel started a new war and killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. According to the Iranian authorities, his daughter and grandchild died with him. Trump, for his part, called on Iranians to overthrow their own government.

Yemen, spring 2025. Under the slogan of “freedom of navigation”, the US bombed Yemen from March to May 2025. For example, in April, strikes on the port of Ras Isa and on a migrant centre in Saada took the lives of dozens of civilians.

Venezuela, 2025–2026. First an armada with the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford arrived in the Caribbean, and “drug cartels” were named as the pretext. Then, on 3 January 2026, American special forces abducted President Maduro. How is that different from Raisuli, only under the US flag?

A hundred and twenty years ago, a squadron stood off Tangier for the sake of a man who was not even an American. Today, aircraft carriers stand off Iran and Venezuela for the sake of a “security” that no one was threatening. The policy has not changed — it has just learned to speak more beautifully.