Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates

Strictly speaking, the pirates' objective was economic more than political. The Barbary ships, in the service of dictatorial strongmen, had the job of holding to ransom foreign vessels plying the Mediterranean. The techniques were those of terror: the pirates perpetrated massacres and took the passengers of some ships hostage so that others would submit and pay tribute in order to travel in peace.

As the nineteenth century began, the young United States had already been the victim of hundreds of attacks against its merchant ships, and it decided to respond, in what would be its first large- scale foreign intervention. It was at this time that Washington assembled a naval force and that the United States, spurred by Thomas Jefferson, committed all available means to ridding itself of this scourge. After several unsuccessful attempts, the U.S. Navy helped free the Mediterranean of a peril that had tormented mariners for centuries.

At the time of its Mediterranean intervention, the United States was an insignificant nation absent from a geopolitical chessboard dominated by Europe: it is no coincidence that during the same period Napoleon Bonaparte sold off territory amounting to one- third of the present lower forty-eight American states to help finance his European campaigns. For its part, the American government decided to fully commit itself to a costly military campaign, whereas the Europeans had preferred to negotiate [my emphasis] with the Barbary dictators, incident by incident. But Jefferson had already understood what his successors would take more than a century to grasp: that America's interests were not confined to its national territory.

Source: The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Qaeda (2007)  by Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin (editors)

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Negotiating with or appeasing evil (yes, I am calling these pirates evil) encourages more evil. It doesn’t ever make it go away. That’s what the Europeans back then and even before WWII never understood. Winston Churchill’s predecessor negotiated with Hitler. Hitler just laughed at the guy. Heck Hitler even broke his pact with the Soviet Union. I guess those appeasers can’t recognize evil for what it is. This is still a problem today.

I wonder what got the Muslim Barbary Pirates back then ticked off at America and the West back then. We didn’t occupy any of their lands back then. We were just minding our own business. And President George W. Bush wasn’t president back then.

One last thought. The editors makes an interest point about Jefferson. He wasn’t an isolationist. A good hypothetical question to presidential candidates: If you were Jefferson giving his situation what actions would you have take? I can take a good guess what Bush would have done.