America's Forgotten War: What Thomas Jefferson Understood About Radical Islam

There's a reason you've never heard much about the Barbary Wars. I think it's probably because it’s politically inconvenient to talk about them. But they're near and dear to our history, and what happened in those years could have literally cut the United States off before we even found our feet as a nation.

Around 1800, America was brand new, and we were extremely broke. We'd just finished the Revolutionary War, just elected our first president, and we were buried in war debt. The federal government was tiny and poor. We didn't have a navy. We didn't have the money to build one.

What we did have was a desperate need to trade. Transatlantic voyages were how we were going to climb out of debt, stimulate the economy, and survive as a nation. So, we put ships on the water.

And every time we did, radical Islamic pirates from the Barbary States—Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis—raided them. They captured our ships, employed them as warships against us, and enslaved the Americans on board. Some of those people were in chains for over a decade doing backbreaking slave labor.

The European powers all had the same answer: pay them off. Except the bribes these Islamic pirates were demanding were astronomical—ransom payments that rivaled the entire annual GDP of our country. We couldn't pay because we simply didn’t have the money. And European powers who did pay kept finding that the pirates’ demands only got bigger and the pirates’ forces only got stronger. They paid them off, they got broker, while the Islamic pirates got more powerful.

What came out of those early years is a policy that still defines us: we do not negotiate with terrorists. We couldn't afford to then, and we learned fast that it wouldn't work anyway.

Thomas Jefferson was president. A lot of people call him the pacifist president because of his reluctance to go to war. He didn't want to fight. But in a letter to James Madison, he wrote this:

"I know that nothing will stop the eternal increase of demand from these pirates but the presence of an armed force."

That's coming from Jefferson, a man who'd exhausted every other option and arrived at only one solution. So, we went to war for the first time as a true nation.

The Marine Corps was fledgling at this point. We were fledgling at everything. But a small group of Marines led by William Eaton and the naval courage of Stephen Decatur answered the call of duty. There's a reason the Marine Corps hymn starts with "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli." This is where that line was earned.

Decatur was the kind of man whose bravery people said bordered on absolute recklessness. When one of our few frigates, the USS Philadelphia, was captured by Tripoli, Decatur led a nighttime raid—a Special Operations-type mission before we had any such force—into the harbor to destroy it before the enemy could use it against us.

Decatur led naval battles from up front. He boarded an enemy vessel, took on a force of comparable size, cut them to ribbons, and ended up in a hand-to-hand fight with a massive Islamic pirate who he defeated in single combat.

Then there's William Eaton, who was educated, self-made, and smart. He decided that a naval assault isn't going to be enough, so he took his force of Marines on a land-based infiltration and marched them across the desert toward the city of Derna to take it by force. It was an outrageous plan. A total Hail Mary, but they pulled it off. When the smoke cleared, Eaton had five bullet holes in his uniform but hadn't been touched.

The only thing that changed the calculus was force. Not diplomacy. Not tribute. Not goodwill missions. Force. When the Barbary powers saw that Americans could and were willing to do serious damage, their demands ceased. Decatur even went back later and demanded all the ransoms returned, and the Islamic pirates paid.

I want diplomacy to work. I'd far rather solve things without war. Nobody who's seen combat up close is romantic about it. But I'm also a student of history, and from the seventh century forward, the diplomatic track with radical Islamic powers has an unbroken record. And it isn't good.

History isn't politically correct. Neither am I. Study it anyway.

The good news is there's a fantastic book on all of this: Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger. I picked it up for a few bucks on a date with my wife and read it front to back. Good footnotes, good sourcing. And you can always tell you're reading real history when the book puts your side in a bad light too—embarrassing defeats, stupid and avoidable setbacks alongside the daring stuff. That's what this book does, and it makes it trustworthy.

Go find it. Read it. And share this one with a Marine you know. They've earned a shoutout.

Remember, Train Hard. Train Smart. And without a knowledge of history, we're doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.