Sometimes you have to take on the Barbary pirates

The United States' first overseas conflict was fought without a declaration of war. The Barbary pirates of Tripoli and other North African city-states had plagued Europe for centuries — taking ships, raiding coastal towns and enslaving their Christian captives.The Europeans dealt with it by paying tribute and ransom. The United States followed suit, but President Thomas Jefferson believed that payments just encouraged the practice. In 1801 he sent the fledgling Navy and a handful of Marines to deal with the situation.By 1805 the pirates had had enough. They exchanged their American captives for ransom and quit seizing American ships. It took another round of "persuasion" in 1815 (in cooperation with several European nations) to permanently stop their state-sponsored piracy.There is a famous essay, "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read" (it's readily available on the web, and worth the read). It traces the lineage of a simple pencil, that still-indispensable writing instrument, which requires ingredients from all over the world — graphite from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), wood from California and Oregon, clay from Mississippi, pumice from Italy, rubber from the Dutch East Indies (now Malaysia), and on and on. A product so common-place, so ordinary and cheap, and yet millions of people from the entire world are involved in its production, each playing a perhaps minuscule, but nonetheless crucial role in its making.The point of these seemingly disconnected anecdotes is this: America's interests do not end at the water's edge. Never have, never will. Thomas Jefferson recognized the fact and decided it was worth fighting and dying for. Ever since, sometimes enthusiastically (Teddy Roosevelt), sometimes very reluctantly (Barack Obama), presidents have come to the same conclusion. It's a sad commentary on human nature, but military force is as indispensable to successful foreign policy as diplomacy, and successful domestic policy requires successful foreign policy.And now it's Donald Trump's turn. How a man of his age and experience could have been so naïve as to take the radically-noninterventionist positions he did during the campaign is a mystery to me, but it's heartening to see him listening to and learning from his more-experienced advisers in the military and intelligence communities. Sometimes — not all the time, not everywhere — the application of military force does wonders, explaining in a few violent minutes what years of gentlemanly discussion fail to make clear. Yes, there really are serious consequences for bad behavior.It was easy, almost obligatory, to laugh at former Secretary of State John Kerry when he launched his secret weapon, James Taylor singing "You've Got A Friend," after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in Paris. I doubt 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles pulverizing a Syrian air base elicited any guffaws when current Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Vladimir Putin recently.The conversation probably ran more along the lines of, "Hi, Vladimir, let's talk about how we're going to keep this from turning into World War III while we go about the nasty business of getting rid of the Assad family's tyranny. Got any ideas? We sure do."But killing pirates to protect freedom of navigation and restraining the imperial ambitions of the world's bad actors is one thing, and intervening in a civil war is quite another. The former, all but die-hard pacifists will understand. The latter troubles most conservatives and not a few liberals, not from a sense of "it's none of our business what barbarians do to one another," as from a knowledge that intervention can become a slippery slope, leaving us sliding into a conflict we can't solve and may leave as bad or worse than we found it.The concept is called "the duty to protect", and it means that the powerful have a moral duty to protect the weak and defenseless from the depredations of barbarians regardless of national boundaries. The problem is that its uniform application would leave us fighting in dozens of countries, some of them very powerful and dangerous adversaries, and others where we have no conceivable strategic interests.It is such a problematic policy that most administrations avoid it on the reasonable assumption that even excoriating criticism is better than being drawn into a deadly trap with no good way out. Morality and wise statecraft, God forgive us, are occasionally at odds.So consider our attack on that Syrian airbase as the long-overdue response to the violation of the red line of chemical weapons, intended to restore confidence — and fear — in America's willingness to use military force if it is in our interest to do so. If Trump is serious about putting America First, it's a necessary first step.Kenneth D. Gough of Elizabethton is a semi-retired businessman.