There is a curious habit in modern political discourse: the reflexive insistence that every act of Islamist hostility must somehow be America's fault.
The script is familiar. If a militant movement emerges somewhere in the Muslim world, the explanation must lie in American bases, American oil policy, American support for Israel, or American interventionism. Western foreign policy is treated as the universal solvent that explains every drop of Islamist venom.
It is a comforting theory. It is also historically illiterate.
Because the first violent confrontation between the United States and militant Islamic regimes occurred before the United States had done anything to anyone in the Muslim world.
Before Israel existed. Before oil politics mattered. Before America had a navy capable of projecting power across the ocean.
In fact, it occurred when the United States was weak, obscure, and barely solvent.
And the reason given at the time had nothing whatsoever to do with geopolitics.
Jefferson's Moment of Clarity
In March 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met in London with the ambassador from Tripoli, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja.
The young American republic had discovered that its merchant sailors were being captured by North African corsairs, hauled into Barbary ports, and sold into slavery. In 1785, two American ships — the Maria and the Dauphin — had been seized by Muslim pirates. Their crews were enslaved.
Jefferson and Adams asked what any rational diplomat would ask: Why attack a nation that had never harmed you?
The ambassador did not mumble about trade disputes or territorial grievances. He did not blame colonialism. He did not point to foreign bases.
He offered a theological explanation.
Jefferson and Adams recorded it in a letter to Congress dated March 28, 1786. The ambassador explained, they wrote, that hostility toward America "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 Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise."
No ambiguity. No diplomatic hedging. Just doctrine.
The Americans had assumed they were dealing with pirates motivated by money. They discovered they were dealing with something more combustible: religious legitimacy attached to violence.
The Barbary States and the Slavery Economy
For centuries, the Barbary states of North Africa — Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco — operated an economy that blended piracy, slavery, and tribute extraction.
European ships were seized. Their crews were sold into slavery or ransomed. Entire coastal villages in southern Europe were occasionally raided.
It was not merely criminality. It was institutionalized. Tribute payments from European powers effectively functioned as protection money.
The young United States briefly joined the humiliating arrangement. In 1795, Congress appropriated $800,000 for peace treaties and ransom payments — over twenty percent of total federal revenues in 1800.
Jefferson found the idea intolerable. He concluded that paying tribute to predators only encourages them.
And so, when Tripoli declared war on the United States in 1801 — demanding $225,000 immediately plus $25,000 annually — Jefferson responded with something revolutionary: He sent the U.S. Navy across the Atlantic.
To the Shores of Tripoli
The First Barbary War (1801–1805) was the United States' first overseas military conflict. It produced the Marine Corps line that still rings with antique defiance: "To the shores of Tripoli."
The lesson was clear. When the Barbary states encountered weakness, they attacked. When they encountered resistance, they reconsidered.
The conflict ended not with tribute but with force. Piracy against American shipping declined dramatically afterward. The problem was fully settled in 1815 after a second Barbary War brought total defeat to the Muslim slave-trading pirates.
Christopher Hitchens' Annoying Question
Christopher Hitchens — a man who delighted in puncturing fashionable illusions — often invoked the Barbary Wars for one simple reason: they ruin the timeline.
If Islamist hostility toward America is merely a reaction to American imperialism, then why did it appear when America had no empire?
When Barbary pirates enslaved Americans in the 1780s, the United States had no overseas bases, no Middle Eastern policy, no intelligence services meddling in foreign governments, no oil interests, and no Israel. The republic was an impoverished post-colonial state trying to pay its debts.
Yet Americans were still being enslaved in the name of religious legitimacy.
That fact should make any serious thinker pause. But it rarely does.
Death to America — But Not to American Policy
Fast-forward two centuries. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution created a theocratic regime that openly declared itself hostile to the United States.
Since that year, crowds in Tehran have regularly chanted a phrase that has echoed for nearly half a century: "Death to America."
Notice something. The chant does not say "Death to American sanctions," or "Death to American troops in the Gulf," or "Death to American support for Israel."
It says Death to America.
Iran's revolutionary leadership calls the United States "the Great Satan." That is not a diplomatic complaint. It is a theological diagnosis.
Here the counterargument demands attention: America overthrew Iran's elected government in 1953. The CIA, working with British intelligence, orchestrated the removal of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and restored the Shah to power. Iranians have not forgotten. Is "Death to America" not justified grievance?
The 1953 coup was real. It was interventionist, anti-democratic, and driven by oil and Cold War paranoia. It sowed legitimate resentment. The Shah's authoritarian regime — backed by the United States for 26 years — was brutal. SAVAK, the Shah's secret police trained by the CIA, tortured dissidents.
That history matters. It explains part of Iranian anger. But it does not explain the form that anger took.
When Iranians overthrew the Shah in 1979, they did not install a democratic government to replace the one America had destroyed in 1953. They installed a theocracy. The Islamic Republic's founding ideology was not anti-imperialism in the secular sense. It was explicitly religious.
Ayatollah Khomeini's speeches did not focus primarily on American oil policy or Cold War alliances. They described America as inherently corrupting — a civilization at war with Islamic values. The framing was not "America wronged us in 1953." It was "America represents moral decay."
This distinction matters. Grievance-based hostility seeks redress. Ideological hostility seeks transformation or elimination.
If every American base closed tomorrow, if Israel vanished, if oil flowed freely — would "Death to America" stop being chanted? The ideological evidence suggests otherwise.
When Belief Systems Drive Conflict
Modern political commentary has developed an almost pathological reluctance to acknowledge ideology. Every conflict must have a material cause. Every militant movement must be reacting to some Western misstep.
But ideology matters. Sometimes it matters more than economics, more than geography, more than policy.
If a regime believes that its political authority comes from divine mandate, and that unbelieving societies represent moral corruption, then hostility toward those societies can become a permanent feature of its worldview.
This was the logic Jefferson encountered in 1786. It is visible in the rhetoric of modern revolutionary Islamism.
The West's interventions — and there have been many, some catastrophic — provide fuel. But they did not light the fire.
The Temptation
There is a certain moral vanity in believing that one's own country is responsible for every conflict. It flatters the ego. It suggests that if we simply corrected our behavior, the hostility would dissolve.
But history does not always reward such comforting assumptions. Sometimes hostility emerges from ideological commitments that have nothing to do with the actions of the targeted society.
Jefferson learned that early. The American founders were many things — idealists, philosophers, experimenters in republican government. But they were not fools.
Jefferson understood that diplomacy works best between parties who share at least some common assumptions about the legitimacy of compromise. When one side believes it is executing divine instruction, compromise becomes much harder.
That is why he built a navy.
History is full of arguments about who provoked whom. But the Barbary episode leaves us with an uncomfortable question: When a regime or movement openly declares that its hostility toward you arises from doctrine — not grievance — should we take them seriously?
Jefferson did. And the young United States acted accordingly.
The debate about Islamist hostility toward the West often begins in the wrong century. It begins with the Cold War, or with oil politics, or with the Iraq War. But the story starts earlier — in a London meeting room in 1786, where two American diplomats asked a simple question.
Why are you enslaving our citizens?
The ambassador's answer was refreshingly candid: Because your civilization rejects our doctrine.
More than two centuries later, the West is still arguing about whether to believe him.
Sources: Primary documentation from Founders Online (National Archives): Jefferson and Adams to John Jay, March 28, 1786. First Barbary War details from Congressional records and Library of Congress archives. Iran coup verified through declassified CIA documents and National Security Archive materials. This dispatch does not argue that Western interventions are irrelevant — they are not. It argues that ideology is also causal, not merely reactive.