One of the most popular complaints of the younger Americans is that the United States has been bogged down in endless war and interventionism virtually their entire lifetimes.

Welcome to history. As much as we may not like it, the United States has engaged in conflict and meddling more or less since its inception. The U.S. was born in war. It expanded through war. It freed its slaves through war. It grew into a superpower through war. And until utopia exists, it’s exceedingly likely we will need to clash with those who threaten our prestige and power.

Indeed, you can look at the parallels between today’s war against the Iranian terrorist regime and our very first foreign conflict to understand why.

From the founding, the Islamic states in Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis in North Africa were capturing American ships, demanding tolls and taking hostages. Without the protection of the British Royal Navy, President George Washington felt compelled to pay off the emirs. President John Adams was even more susceptible to blackmail, appeasing the Islamic rulers with ships, weaponry, ammunition and annual sums — let’s call them “pallets” — of gold and silver.

The Barbary States took the bounty, strung the U.S. along in negotiations, ultimately ignored the treaties they did sign and continued to take captives, murder Americans and disrupt trade.

After winning the White House in 1801, Thomas Jefferson halted the payoffs. His justifications for fighting the Barbary “pirates” — a historical mischaracterization that understates the importance of the Islamic sultans who had been raiding coastal towns and ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic for two centuries, grabbing over a million European slaves — were more than just narrow trading interests.

When serving as ambassador in Britain in 1785, Jefferson had met with Tripoli’s representative Abdul Rahman Adja and asked him why the Barbary States were targeting Americans who had shown them no hostility. Jefferson, in a letter co-written by Adams, described Adja’s response in a letter to John Jay.

“The Ambassador answered us that it 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 Mussulman (Muslim) who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise,” Jefferson wrote.

Sounds familiar. Centuries before the modern state of Israel existed or any American military interventions in the Middle East, Jefferson was confronted with Islamic supremacy. Paying tributes to these “barbarians,” Jefferson later argued, not only rewarded aggression and subverted America’s standing but was in direct conflict with the ideals of the new nation.

When Jefferson congratulated the Marines on their victory against the Algerians, it wasn’t merely for valiantly fighting the enemy but defeating those who “trample on the sacred faith of treaties, on the rights and laws of human nature.”

President James Madison also sent another naval force to Algiers in 1815 to subdue the Islamic corsairs.

Yet, in the imagination of contemporary isolationists, early American foreign entanglements were only taken on for immediate national interests, stripped of any idealism. This simply isn’t so.

And every subsequent generation saw war, as well. Initially, these were conflicts of Western expansion. Soon we were involved in conflicts around the world.

The Left and isolationist Right are perturbed by our interference with Venezuelan and Cuban sovereignty. But American history is littered with instances of us meddling in places including Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama, El Salvador and Cuba, again, to name a few.

“Gunboat Diplomacy” was not predominantly deployed to uphold the Monroe Doctrine and eject European powers from the Western Hemisphere, but rather to intimidate and quash domestic movements that threatened American influence.

By 1852, President Millard Fillmore famously dispatched Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan to end that nation’s isolationist policies and open trade by force, if needed. President Ulysses Grant sent another military expedition to Korea in 1871 to do the same. President Grover Cleveland sent the Navy to Samoa to protect American commercial interests from the Germans and British.

None of those nations threatened American sovereignty.

Some of these conflicts were more moral than others. Some backfired. Some were unnecessary tragedies. Some made the world safer. The U.S. has kept Europe free of all-encompassing war since 1945. Neither war nor intervention should ever be taken on lightly. The notion, however, that Americans are living through some uniquely bellicose or interventionist era is debunked by even a cursory reading of history.

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