From the Shores of Tripoli: What a Forgotten War Can Teach Us About the Strait of Hormuz — The Argument Nobody Is Making

There is a painting in the Art Institute of Chicago that almost no one stops to look at. Thomas Birch painted it sometime between 1806 and 1812, and he called it Capture of the Tripoli by the Enterprise. Dark Mediterranean water, two ships locked in combat, a break of cold light through storm clouds illuminating the moment of American victory. It is a beautiful painting about a war that has been almost entirely forgotten — which is a pity, because that war contains the most important argument the United States ever made about the freedom of the seas, and that argument is more urgently relevant today than it has been in two centuries.

Thomas Birch, Capture of the Tripoli by the Enterprise (Art Institute of Chicago)

The war was the First Barbary War, 1801 to 1805. The Barbary States — Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, Morocco — had for decades been extracting tribute from the merchant ships of every nation that wished to pass through the Mediterranean without being seized, their crews enslaved, their cargo confiscated. The system was simple: you paid, or you suffered. The British paid. The French paid. The Danes paid. Washington paid. Adams paid. It was simply the cost of doing business in waters controlled by hostile powers. Sounds familiar?

Then Jefferson was elected, and Jefferson said no.

His argument was not military. It was philosophical, and it was absolute: the sea belongs to no sovereign. Free navigation is not a privilege to be purchased from whoever happens to control the nearest coastline. It is a right that exists prior to and independent of any state's territorial claim. You cannot toll the ocean. You cannot charge admission to international waters. The moment you accept that principle — the moment you pay — you have conceded something that cannot be unconceded.

Jefferson sent the Navy. He sent the Marines. Lieutenant Andrew Sterrett won the first American victory of the conflict on August 1, 1801, defeating the Tripolitan corsair in the engagement Birch would later paint. Stephen Decatur sailed into Tripoli harbor at night and burned the captured USS Philadelphia rather than let it be used against his own fleet — an act so audacious that Admiral Horatio Nelson called it the most bold and daring of the age. The Marines planted the American flag on foreign soil for the first time in history at the Battle of Derna in 1805. Hence the opening line of the Marines' Hymn, which Americans have been singing ever since without necessarily knowing what it refers to: From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.

Jefferson's principle became the founding doctrine of American maritime policy. It was eventually codified in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which took effect in 1994 and which holds that all ships enjoy the right of transit passage through international straits — a right that shall not be impeded.

I thought about all of this over the past several weeks as the Strait of Hormuz crisis unfolded and the Jefferson precedent went almost entirely unmentioned in the coverage. The parallel is exact. Iran is doing precisely what the Barbary States did: controlling a maritime chokepoint and demanding payment for passage. The scale is vastly larger — twenty percent of the world's oil rather than Mediterranean merchant shipping — but the structure is identical. The legal and moral argument against it is identical. Jefferson made it in 1801 and it has not lost a word of its force.

So why the silence?

Partly because the current moment does not reward principled historical frameworks. Partly because neither the United States nor Iran has ratified the Law of the Sea Convention, which muddies the legal waters even though the underlying customary international law remains clear. And partly — let me be direct about this — because invoking Jefferson's principle with full consistency would foreclose options that the current administration would prefer to keep open.

Jefferson refused the toll because the principle was non-negotiable. When asked about the Hormuz toll, Donald Trump said he was thinking of a joint venture. "It's a way of securing it," he told ABC News. "It's a beautiful thing."

I want to be precise here, because I can already hear the objection: are you comparing Trump to Jefferson? I am doing the opposite. I am pointing out that they are not comparable. Jefferson had a principle and acted on it at considerable risk and expense. What is being proposed in the current negotiations is not the application of Jefferson's principle. It is its abandonment — dressed, as these things usually are, in the language of pragmatism and deal-making.

A joint toll booth with the country you just went to war with is not freedom of navigation. It is the tribute system Jefferson refused, rebranded as a business opportunity.

The experts have noted that if the Hormuz toll precedent stands, China could apply the same logic to the Taiwan Strait. One maritime law scholar called that scenario the end of an international society. He was right. And Jefferson would have recognized immediately what was at stake, because he faced the same logic in 1801 and understood that a principle abandoned for convenience is no longer a principle. It is merely a negotiating position.

In Thomas Birch's, Capture of the Tripoli by the Enterprise, the ships are locked in combat on dark water, a break of light coming through the clouds. The men on those ships were fighting for something Jefferson had named clearly enough that it fit in a single sentence: the sea is free.

We have been singing about it ever since. It would be worth remembering what we were singing about.

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