Young Generation Misses Truth About America’s Military Legacy
Young Americans complaining about endless wars need to recognize the U.S. has engaged in military conflicts since its founding, from the Barbary pirates to modern interventions.
According to David Harsanyi writing in New York Post, American history is inseparable from war. The nation was born through armed revolution, expanded its territory through military conquest, abolished slavery through civil war, and rose to superpower status through global conflict.
Until humanity reaches some imaginary utopia, America will continue to clash with those who challenge its prestige and power, Harsanyi argues. The parallels between current operations against the Iranian terrorist regime and America’s very first foreign conflict illustrate why armed intervention remains necessary.
The Barbary States and America’s First Foreign War
From the earliest days of the republic, Islamic states in Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis captured American vessels, demanded tribute payments, and seized hostages. Without British Royal Navy protection following independence, President George Washington felt forced to pay off the regional emirs.
President John Adams proved even more vulnerable to blackmail, appeasing Islamic rulers with ships, weapons, ammunition and annual payments of gold and silver. The Barbary States accepted the bounty, dragged out negotiations, ignored signed treaties, and continued capturing hostages, murdering Americans and disrupting commerce.
After winning the presidency in 1801, Thomas Jefferson stopped the payoffs entirely. His justifications for fighting the Barbary pirates went beyond narrow trading interests and addressed a broader civilizational conflict.
Islamic Supremacy in Jefferson’s Time
While serving as ambassador in Britain in 1785, Jefferson met with Tripoli’s representative Abdul Rahman Adja and asked why the Barbary States targeted Americans who had shown them no hostility.
In a letter co-written with Adams to John Jay, Jefferson described Adja’s response: the ambassador explained that hostility toward non-Muslim nations was founded on Islamic law and the Koran, which declared all nations refusing to acknowledge Islamic authority as sinners who must be warred upon wherever found, with captives taken as slaves and any Muslim killed in battle guaranteed paradise.
Centuries before modern Israel existed or American military interventions in the Middle East began, Jefferson confronted Islamic supremacy directly. Paying tribute to these aggressors, Jefferson argued, not only rewarded violence and undermined American standing but contradicted the ideals of the new nation.
When Jefferson congratulated the Marines on their victory against the Algerians, it was not merely for battlefield valor but for defeating those who trampled on the sacred faith of treaties and the rights and laws of human nature. President James Madison sent another naval force to Algiers in 1815 to subdue the Islamic corsairs once more.
Constant Warfare Throughout American History
Contrary to the imagination of contemporary isolationists, early American foreign entanglements were not undertaken solely for immediate national interests stripped of idealism. Every subsequent generation experienced war as well.
Initially these were conflicts of westward expansion. Soon America became involved in conflicts worldwide. American history is filled with interventions in Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama, El Salvador and Cuba, among other nations.
Gunboat Diplomacy was not predominantly deployed to uphold the Monroe Doctrine and eject European powers from the Western Hemisphere, but rather to intimidate and crush domestic movements that threatened American influence.
Forcing Open Closed Societies
By 1852, President Millard Fillmore dispatched Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan to end that nation’s isolationist policies and open trade by force if necessary. President Ulysses Grant sent another military expedition to Korea in 1871 for the same purpose.
President Grover Cleveland sent the Navy to Samoa to protect American commercial interests from German and British competition. None of those nations threatened American sovereignty.
Some conflicts proved more moral than others. Some backfired. Some were unnecessary tragedies. Some made the world safer—the United States has kept Europe free of all-encompassing war since 1945.
Neither war nor intervention should ever be undertaken lightly. The notion, however, that Americans are living through some uniquely bellicose or interventionist era is historical ignorance of the highest order.
With information from New York Post
