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Not a week passes by without my seeing a commentator complaining that their generation has lived through endless war and interventionism.
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Welcome to history. As much as we may not like it, the United States has been engaged in conflict and meddling more or less since it began. 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 be in struggles with those who threaten our prestige and power.
Indeed, you can look at the parallels between today’s clash 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, continued to take captives, murder Americans, and disrupt trade.
After winning the White House in 1801, 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 & laws of human nature.”
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.
President James Madison also sent another naval force to Algiers in 1815 to subdue the Islamic corsairs. And every subsequent generation saw war, as well. Initially, these were conflicts of Western expansion. Over 13,000 Americans died in the Mexican-American War, for instance, more deaths as a percentage of the total U.S. population than in any other war other than the Revolutionary and Civil wars.
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.
We finally booted the Spanish from the hemisphere in 1898, losing 2,061 Americans in a war that was shorter than the Iranian conflict in which we lost 13. Over 3,000 perished in the Philippine-American War, fought over expanding trade and empire. It is doubtful that more than a sliver of Americans have ever even heard of our quelling of Muslim extremists in the Moro Rebellion.
By the start of the 20th century, American presidents were regularly sending Americans to die abroad and intervening in the affairs of other nations. We, obviously, fought in two world wars, losing around 550,000 American lives.
But even in my lifetime, the U.S. was still embroiled in the Vietnam War, in which more than 58,000 Americans were killed. To put that in perspective, 10,000, or twice as many Americans who perished in the War on Terror, died from nonhostile deaths in Vietnam.
Twenty years earlier, Americans fought communists in the Korean War, in which 36,574 Americans died and another 103,284 were wounded. There were over 7,000 prisoners taken during the Korean War. It is difficult to imagine contemporary Americans dealing with the massive sacrifices necessary to win any of these conflicts. Fortunately, it’s unlikely that the country will be asked to do so.
There were no major clashes between Vietnam and the First Gulf War, though nearly 2,000 Americans perished on foreign ground. During the Cold War, we were involved in an endless string of covert proxy conflicts. There wasn’t a warzone on the planet where the U.S. wasn’t attempting to counter Soviet expansionism. The civil war in Angola didn’t immediately menace the family in Akron, and yet the U.S. made it its business to intercede.
Those of us who were around for any part of the Cold War were constantly being informed that nuclear annihilation was a genuine possibility — something an American born in the past 35 years has never really had to seriously contemplate.
President George H.W. Bush had one post-Cold War term and sent the U.S. to Panama, the Gulf War, and Somalia. Former President Bill Clinton also sent Americans to Somalia, involved us in a Balkans war, bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan. Former President George W. Bush was forced to deal with the fallout of the Islamic terrorist attacks of 9/11. Former President Barack Obama, who shot to national fame delivering a passionate antiwar speech at a Chicago rally in 2002, involved American troops in Syria, Libya, and surged them in Afghanistan.
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And still, though you might not know it from the political rhetoric and media coverage, from 1995 to 2025, there have been dramatically fewer deaths from terrorism, war, and genocide. You’re not living through the most violent time in history, not even close.
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.
