Robert Kagan has an excellent and much-discussed essay in World Affairs on what he sees as the intrinsic neoconservative strain in American politics. Putting paid to so much conspiracy-mongering about a tenebrous “cabal” of executive whisperers, Kagan takes us through a short tour of U.S. history and finds that at every point along the timeline interventionism for the sake of human rights, democracy promotion, and national self-interest, was always, as it were, part of the plan. So too was a fundamentally conservative opposition to foreign entanglements:
To understand where the idea of promoting American principles by force comes from, it is not really necessary to parse the writings of Jewish émigrés. One could begin with less obscure writings, like the Republican Party’s campaign platform of 1900. In that long-forgotten document, the party leaders, setting the stage for what would be William McKinley’s crushing electoral victory over William Jennings Bryan, congratulated themselves and the country for their recently concluded war with Spain. It was, they declared, a war fought for “high purpose,” a “war for liberty and human rights†that had given “ten millions of the human race” a “new birth of freedom” and the American people “a new and noble responsibility . . . to confer the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples.â€
Or one could go back further, for the Republican Party’s moralism was not “neo†even in 1900. In the 1850s, William Henry Seward, the party’s founder, New York’s governor, and, later, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, declared it America’s duty “to renovate the condition of mankind” and lead the way “to the universal restoration of power to the governed.†Seward himself was only expanding on the beliefs of earlier American statesmen, such as Henry Clay, who had spoken of America’s “duty to share with the rest of mankind this most precious gift,” who pushed for war against Britain in 1812 to defend America’s republican “honour,” who was willing to go to war with Europe over the fate of Latin American “republics,” and who sought to place the United States at the “centre of a system which would constitute the rallying point of human freedom against all the despotism of the Old World.â€
The Monroe Doctrine, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and then three (1991, 1998, 2003) wars against Saddam Hussein. The arguments for and against are all were uncannily similar, writes Kagan, implicitly rebuking those commentators on the left and right who seem to have a historical memory that extends as far back as President Bush’s perusal of My Pet Goat.
Trotsky and Strauss may be on the reading lists of some enterprising members of the American Enterprise Institute, but it is the height of absurdity to deduce “permanent revolution” or the “noble lie” from our current efforts in Mesopotamia. (For Trotsky’s theory to work, neighboring Arab proletariats would have to join with Iraq’s in order to liberate its peasantry — a contingency remote from the minds of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, we can be sure. As for Strauss, who in Pentagon do you suppose would encourage religion as an emollient for the masses in Baghdad?)
One point of history absent in Kagan’s survey relates to the very creation of the American navy to defeat despotism and thuggery in the Middle East. In the late 18th century, the greatest threat to our commercial interests abroad was posed by the Barbary states along the shores of Northern Africa. (The Marines’ Hymn begins “From the halls of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli” in reference to the fact.) Ruled by Islamic potentates as semi-autonomous fiefs of the Ottoman Empire, these states routinely captured American merchant vessels, took their personnel in bondage, then extorted huge ransoms out of the U.S. government. I quote from Michael Oren’s fine history, Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present:
The North Africans’ impunity on raiding American ships was illustrated in October 1784 by the attack on the Betsy. The 300-ton brig was sailing from Boston to Tenerife Island, one hundred miles from North Africa’s coast, when it encountered an unidentified vessel. With the aid of a double bank of oars, the supple craft swiftly closed in and aligned its gunwales with those of the cumbrous Betsy. Then, with “sabers grasped between their teeth and their loaded pistols in their belts,” as one American sailor remembered them, bare-chested pirates in turbans and pantaloons swarmed onto the merchantman’s deck. “They made signs for us to all go forward,” another eyewitness recounted, “assuring us in several languages that if we did not obey their demands, they would massacre us all.” Surrendering crew members were stripped of all valuables and most of their clothing before being locked in the hold as human cargo, headed for the slave markets of Morocco.
Someone should have warned Thomas Jefferson to not lose his cool over so flagrantly “Orientalist” a depiction of the enemy, much less resort to cowboy diplomacy. While serving as American minister to France in 1784, the author of the Declaration of Independence promulgated an international alliance, consisting of the U.S., Spain, Portugal, Naples, Denmark, Sweden and France, that would combat the threat of Mediterranean piracy. Multilateralism on the high seas sank, however, as those nations which were interested in such a coalition refused to contribute any ships to it, finding it cheaper to continue to bribe the Barbary corsairs. The French rejected idea outright. Plus ça change…
Perhaps the only noticeable failure of HBO’s brilliant miniseries “John Adams” is the neglect of its subject’s dealings with this recalcitrant matter of foreign policy. (And why do I think the screenwriters and Tom Hanks’ production company were motivated by something other than plot constraints or budget in skipping these chapters?) Count it a further humiliation visited upon Adams’ tenure as envoy in the prickly court of King George III that in 1785 he was forced to host ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Ajar, the arrogant pasha of Tripoli. After superficially flattering the American host about the “very great” stature of his new country, the pasha unflinchingly demanded the United States pay a tribute of 30,000 guineas, plus a 3,000 gratuity for himself. He further added that the other Barbary states — Algiers, Tunis, Morocco — would seek a combined total of $1 million for their forbearance in not plundering and stealing American trade ships and taking their crews hostage. Adams was appalled. Though reluctant to commit the nascent republic to war (“We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever”), he could not flatter such an enormous sum, especially in light of the still-unpaid American war debts he was integral in accruing prior to the Revolution. Instead, he offered the Tripolitan tyrant a more modest “Gift” of 200,000 pounds rather than jeopardize “a Million [in trade] annually.”
Jefferson, however, thought Americans were made of sterner stuff and would gladly support a war overseas to eliminate piracy and the enslavement of their compatriots. He remained willing to play the pasha’s game until it proved too ugly to domestic opinion, which he thought it inevitably would do. In March 1785, Jefferson traveled to London and with Adams endeavored to strike a treaty with Tripoli. ‘Abd al-Rahman once more paid oleaginous homage to the proud new experiment in enlightened democracy undertaken by his interlocutors, and listened attentively as the two sued for peace. When it came time for ‘Abd al-Rahman’s turn to speak, this is how he reaffirmed his insistence on ransoming America’s freedom of commerce and the sanctity of its human lives abroad:
It was… written in the Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their [the Muslims’] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
So much for appeasement. Jefferson concluded that “an angel sent on this business… could have done nothing” to favor the Tripolitans. Though the U.S. would sign a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Ship-Signals with Morocco, its military impotence matched by the degradation of blackmail to ensure safe conduct of trade was all too much to allow such a state of affairs to continue. How could any treaties be upheld without threatening force behind them on both sides? The Barbary Question was paramount, then, in hastening the Constitutional Convention of May 1787, which effectively destroyed the tenuous Articles of Confederation, established a strong central government, and provided the moral and legal ballasts for the advent of American military power.
It is no exaggeration to say, as the historian Thomas Bailey did, that “[i]n an indirect sense, the brutal Dey of Algiers was a Founding Father of the Constitution.” Nor was much heed given in those post-colonial days to the consideration that by flouting one messianic and sanguinary Islamist, a hundred more would spring up in his place.