OPINION:
It finally happened. After over 160 attacks on American troops, three U.S. soldiers died at the hands of Iranian proxies, and world commerce is held hostage by Houthi bandits.
Another president faced similar challenges 223 years ago. Alas, President Biden is no Thomas Jefferson.
In March 1785, U.S. Ambassadors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson paid a call on the Barbary envoy in London, His Excellency Abd Al-Rahman. The future presidents asked the ambassador why the Barbary pirates had a license to ravage the shipping of the young nation and imprison American seamen. As the late Christopher Hitchens posited, it “played no part in the Crusades or in the Catholic Reconquista of Andalusia.”
Al-Rahman had a pointed response to Jefferson’s history lesson. The dey of Algiers and the Ottoman sultan had celestial authority to wage war on all those who did not acknowledge Muslim authority in the Mediterranean. Americans could either pay ransom or see their ships taken as prizes and their sailors sold into slavery.
The two Americans left incensed but with two different policy reactions in mind when they became president. Adams paid the ransom. The Barbary ransom, however, repelled Jefferson, who refused to see his country further humiliated by the Mediterranean tyrants. He attacked Adams for humbling the United States before the world.
Jefferson immediately delivered a military thunderbolt when he became the president. Hitchens noted that the Virginian ignited the foremost targets of his intellectual and revolutionary fury — “hereditary monarchy and state-imposed religion.”
Within months of taking office, Jefferson dispatched the entire Navy and unleashed a new force on the world: the U.S. Marine Corps, which proceeded to invest in the “shores of Tripoli.” Jefferson ordered the bombardment and burning of towns in present-day Tunisia, Algeria and Libya, leaving Barbary forces in ruins. They soon sued for peace.
More importantly, Jefferson established a fundamental principle of American foreign policy. The United States would fight to protect the global commons and the right of innocent passage for Yankee merchants and naval vessels.
As Iranian-backed Houthis wage war on allied shipping, the Biden administration preaches “nonescalation,” and the Pentagon responds with one-off attacks — disgracefully telegraphing to the terrorists when and where the response is coming to “minimize” Houthi casualties. Mr. Biden’s weakness cedes control of operational tempo to the enemy.
Mr. Biden began with the debacle in Afghanistan and complemented that with the appeasement of Iran and the dispatch of billions of dollars to the terrorist regime. Sounds like Adams’ tribute to the Barbary corsairs.
The Jeffersonian model is not limited to a limited military response; it is grounded in overwhelming power. Destroying the Houthis and their masters, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, requires the same sustained response from sea and air.
A sustained and destructive response to Iran-backed Houthi terror is not launching another endless war; it is a path to reestablish deterrence. It is a principle the sage of Monticello understood very well. Sadly, don’t count on a Jeffersonian epiphany from the current occupant of the White House.
• Robert Wilkie served in the Trump administration as the 10th secretary of veterans affairs and as undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. He serves as distinguished fellow at the Center for American Security at the America First Policy Institute.
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