The Stream

In a recent interview, political commentator Dinesh Dsouza made the following, rather remarkable, assertion:

Seems to me we have a big disagreement here about what America First means…. When we talk about making America great again, it’s important to think about what made America great in the first place. And one obvious answer to that is that America became great by kind of looking inward and attending to its own problems, going back to the founders. But that is not only not entirely true, it’s not true at all. Right after the American founding, Thomas Jefferson found out that there were these Barbary pirates in the Middle East; now they weren’t attacking America, they weren’t starting a war over here. But Jefferson basically dispatched an armed force to clobber them, to beat the heck out of them. Why? Because they were disrupting our interest, they were disrupting our trade, they were hurting our position in the world. So even though we had this infant democracy, clobbering bad guys is something we started doing from the very beginning.

Now, whether one believes the United States ought to pursue an isolationist or interventionist foreign policy is a separate and debatable matter. My concern here is strictly historical — and the assertion above concerning the Barbary States (which, for the record, were located in northwest Africa, not the Middle East) is the precise opposite of what actually transpired.

Attacking Amercans, Not Just American Interests

First, some context: the Barbary corsairs were state-sponsored pirates operating under the authority of Muslim rulers in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco who reaped vast wealth from their maritime predations. Their targets were overwhelmingly Christian, and their practices — raiding European ships and coastal settlements, enslaving captives, and ransoming or selling them — were all justified by Islamic legal and religious doctrine. These raids reached as far afield as Iceland in search of human cargo. Although they operated for centuries, during their heyday in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they had enslaved at least 1.25 million Europeans.

As for the claim that the Barbary pirates “weren’t attacking America,” it is patently false. Following the Revolutionary War, the newly independent United States lost the protection of the British Royal Navy. American merchant vessels, suddenly exposed, quickly became prime targets for the Barbary corsairs.

In 1785, only two years after the Treaty of Paris, the pirates seized two American ships — the Maria and the Dauphin — and enslaved their crews. The captives’ ordeal was severe. As Captain Richard O’Brien, one of the enslaved, wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: “Our sufferings are beyond our expression or your conception.”

(Those seeking more graphic details concerning the treatment of captives — including the mutilation and sexual abuse of both American and European slaves — may consult Sword and Scimitar, Chapter 8.)

Initially, the U.S. government sought to avoid conflict by following the European precedent: paying tribute. These payments, functionally akin to the jizya mandated under Islamic law for non-Muslim subjects, consumed a staggering 16% of the fledgling federal budget at their peak.

Peace through Strength

But diplomacy failed to yield long-term results. In 1786, Jefferson and John Adams — then ambassadors to France and Britain — met with a Barbary representative in London. Their report to Congress is deeply revealing:

We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their [Barbary’s] pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Muslim who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Even after this exchange, the United States remained reluctant to resort to war in keeping with John Adams’s logic: “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.”

Thus, Jefferson’s eventual decision to dispatch the U.S. Navy in 1801, launching what came to be known as the First Barbary War, was not an aggressive maneuver to “clobber” anyone, as Dsouza claimed. It came after 16 years of piracy, kidnapping, failed diplomacy, escalating ransom demands, and finally, an official declaration of war (jihad) from the Pasha of Tripoli against the United States.

In sum, the First Barbary War was not a product of Jeffersonian assertiveness for the sake of projecting power. It was a reluctant, defensive campaign born of necessity, aimed at protecting American citizens and ending an intolerable extortion racket.

Moreover, it was by no means an easy victory. The war dragged on for five years, marked by setbacks — including the humiliating capture of the USS Philadelphia and its crew in 1803 —and ultimately required sustained diplomatic and military engagement.

Far from being a tale of an infant democracy flexing its muscles abroad, the Barbary Wars underscore the U.S. government’s early efforts to avoid conflict through negotiation, and its eventual use of force only as a last resort in defense of its people.

That is the historical record — unembellished and inconvenient as it may be.