Essay question: “It has been said that we have entered what may be the most dangerous security environment the world has ever known. Evaluate this assertion from the perspective of world history by choosing another time period where a dangerous security environment also existed and compare the present with the past, concluding with your own assessment.”
My answer: International security has never faced a more dangerous threat than the modern rise of Islamist terrorists. Organized under local affiliations from Northern Africa to the Middle East to South East Asia (and increasingly in the shadows of the West), Islamists are ideologically united in Islam’s political goals, the most important being the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate. The Islamist threat would be dangerous enough in the face of united global opposition. Yet in their search to accommodate Islamism, whether through isolationism, moral ambiguity, or curtailments on free speech, Western nations have shown a provocative weakness. The fledgling American democracy of the early 1800s faced a character-defining moment of similar stakes when it fought the Islamist Barbary pirate states. As this was the first time that the infant American constitutional republic had fought a war, the stakes for democracy were enormous. By resisting the Barbary pirates, the U.S. proved that democracies not only have an interest in global security, but that they can also fight for it. Thus, the Barbary Wars, like the Global War on Terror, were a crossroads for democracy. Would it defend its principles, or would it capitulate in the face of a “dangerous security environment”? Unfortunately for the warriors of today’s GWOT, while the premises remain the same, the advanced strike capabilities of the modern Islamist make the threat much deadlier. Regardless, the Barbary Wars proved that principled democracies can act as unlikely barriers to destabilizing ambitions of international terrorists.
Today’s Islamists derive their power from their base of suicidal ideologues willing to kill civilians, as well as their ability to exploit the vulnerabilities of globalization. The Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, uses wealth gained from its global oil sales to fund Islamist terrorism. Islamists may also conduct cyber attacks to devastate Western economies. Most dangerous is the threat of Islamist terrorists gaining access to nuclear weapons. These irrational fanatics embrace suicide killings as a path to martyrdom, and will not be deterred by the notion of “mutually assured destruction.” Technological advances in information, communication, and travel give individual Islamists an unprecedented ability to carry out violent jihad. All of these factors worked to the advantage of Faisal Shahzad, for example, who nearly succeeded in an attack on civilians in Times Square earlier this year. Shahzad’s inspiration came from communication via internet with Yemen-based Anwar al-Awlaki, al Qaeda’s most influential recruiter. He traveled to Pakistan for training in bomb making, and returned to the U.S. to attempt the attack.
The Barbary pirates took advantage of a centuries-old power vacuum in the Mediterranean Sea, in which no state was willing to take responsibility for the region’s security. 18th century world powers, such as Great Britain and France, found tributes and reactionary naval security more appealing than all-out war in pursuit of their Mediterranean shipping interests. The liberty-minded American revolutionaries in the young United States, however, found tributes to be both economically unbearable and morally objectionable. One of the driving factors behind the transition of the Articles of Confederation into a constitutional republic in 1788 was the desire of Americans to unite against the inhumane (the pirates were human-traffickers) and expensive (tributes and ransoms reached 20 percent of the national budget in the 1790s) threat to the nation’s legitimate interests in the region. From a broader perspective, the stakes for the international security environment were striking: If the American experiment was to bow to the pirates, what hope would there be for an Enlightenment-style transition from the uncertainty of perpetual nation-state wars to a new security order founded on mutual commercial and democratic interests?
The U.S.’ decision in 1801 to confront the dangerous security environment in the Mediterranean head-on through a declaration of war on the Barbary states may seem an enviably simple solution in light of the complexities of today’s GWOT. While the Americans subdued the pirate-sponsoring states through naval victories in the first Barbary War (1801-1805) and through a bold Marine-led land campaign in the second Barbary War (1815), the GWOT cannot be won in a single theater, let alone with a sole dependence on military strategies. Nevertheless, the first step to any solution in the modern fight against Islamists is to summon the same moral clarity expressed by the U.S. during the Barbary Wars. The U.S. today must articulate its commitment to the uncompromising democratic principles that are threatened by Islamists. A realist mentality of short-term fixes must not play substitute for a long-term war of ideas.
The costs and outcome of this all-in approach to the GWOT are uncertain. Yet in fighting the Barbary states, Americans chose the uncertainty of war to the certainty of leaving its freedoms and values hostage to pirates on the high seas. Just as the blows of appeasement had compounded in the late decades of the 18th century, the military victories against the Barbary states initiated a positive feedback loop: they inspired the European navies to take a similar stand in the Mediterranean, they cleared the path for New World democracies to prosper with free trade, and they forged a battle-hardened American military that would be able to hold its own against the British in the War of 1812. Most importantly, the military victories validated the power of democracies, which would discover a mutual interest in a secure world environment. Today, as Islamists continue to disrupt the world security environment, the West should draw strength from the moral high ground of its democratic ideals. A short-sighted strategy of turning these very ideals into weakness by apologizing for them and surrendering them as “tribute” to Islamists will, as the history of U.S. involvement with the Barbary states shows, only compound the unprecedented threats to the modern security environment.
