TR provides a counter-example to Biden’s fecklessness.
TR provides a counter-example to Biden’s fecklessness.
H onor has always had an enormous influence on human affairs and the conduct of governments — until, evidently, the advent of President Joe Biden in the year 2021.
There’s no perspective from which his exit from Afghanistan looks good. But abstracting it from any considerations of honor at least takes some of the sting out of a deeply humiliating episode that would have been considered intolerable throughout most of our nation’s history.
We’ve struck back at ISIS-K after its attack last week. Otherwise, the administration has seemed immune to the pull of such factors as self-respect, credibility, loyalty, and prestige.
It is dishonorable — even if you believe we had to get out — to throw away what we had sacrificed for in Afghanistan in this grotesquely reckless manner.
It is dishonorable to criticize our erstwhile Afghan friends, especially after we pulled the rug out from under them, and kowtow to our current Afghan enemies.
It is dishonorable to do things we told people repeatedly that we wouldn’t.
It is dishonorable to abandon Afghan allies who put it all on the line for us and believed that, if the worst came, we would get them out.
It is especially dishonorable, unfathomably so, to leave Americans behind enemy lines, a potentiality that the administration has been trying to prepare the American public for in recent days (and hopefully somehow won’t come to pass).
A counterexample that reflects a more traditional American approach is President Teddy Roosevelt’s famous handling of the Perdicaris Affair in 1904, which involved the massive deployment of naval firepower over the kidnapping of one American in a faraway land of which we knew nothing.
Roosevelt’s reflexive bellicosity can seem atavistic at a time when national honor has lost a lot of its purchase.
James Bowman, who wrote a book years ago called Honor: A History, argued that the declining influence of honor in our time is a function of the enormous destructiveness of modern warfare and the feminist and psychotherapeutic reactions to it.
But it hasn’t disappeared, and never will. “Honor is the name of one category of concerns and motives that has dominated relations among peoples and states since antiquity,” the great historian and classicist Donald Kagan once noted. “Although concepts of what is honorable and dishonorable can vary over time and place, sometimes superficially and sometimes deeply, and although other people’s ideas of honor, especially those of an earlier time, can seem silly or outmoded, such surface variations often conceal a fundamental similarity or even identity.”
As for TR, his response to the Perdicaris kidnapping combined a sense of outraged honor at the mistreatment of one American with a prudent view of what military force really could achieve. It added up to a successful foray in coercive diplomacy.
Both Jerry Hendrix in his book Theodore Roosevelt’s Naval Diplomacy and Edmund Morris in his biography of TR have good accounts of the episode. Ion Perdicaris was a 64-year-old expat who lived in Tangier. He was a prominent figure in the English-speaking community in the Moroccan town.
The sultan of Morocco had limited control over the country, with bandits running loose in outlying areas, especially the charismatic Moulay Ahmed el Raisuli.
Raisuli had been jailed for several years and emerged from imprisonment bent on revenge against his personal and political enemies. He also ran a robust business in kidnapping Westerners.
The brigand showed up at the villa of Perdicaris on an evening in May 1904, and made off with him and his son-in-law, who was a British subject.
Samuel Rene Gummeré, our consul general in Tangier, learned of the kidnapping immediately and wired Washington about what he believed was the “immense importance to have a war vessel here” to show that the U.S. understood the “gravity” of the situation.
TR didn’t need persuading — he sent a squadron as fast as it could arrive, and then more firepower on top of that. The ships began to show up at Tangier about two weeks later, firing salutes in the harbor as they arrived.
The idea was to pressure the sultan to give Raisuli what he wanted to cough up Perdicaris. A rescue attempt was thought too likely to result in the murder of the captives. Raisuli had killed before and in fact the bandits slit the throat of one messenger from the sultan bearing an unwelcome message during the course of negotiations.
Raisuli welcomed the arrival of the American ships. He told Perdicaris that he thought they would put pressure on the sultan to play ball: “The presence of these vessels may result in his acceding to my demands, and then you will be able to return to your friends.”
Secretary of State John Hay cabled Gummeré: “President wishes everything possible done to secure the release of Perdicaris. He wishes it clearly understood that if Perdicaris is murdered, this government will demand the life of the murderer….You are to avoid in all your official action anything which may be regarded as an encouragement to brigandage or blackmail.”
Raisuli made extravagant demands of the government, including $70,000 for himself, control of the territory where he was operating, and a prisoner release.
He got most of what he wanted, and then increased his demands.
Gummeré fumed that the hot-and-cold negotiations were putting the U.S. in an “undignified and humiliating” position. He wanted to give the Moroccans an ultimatum demanding an indemnity for every day the negotiations dragged and to threaten to send Marines ashore to seize the customs house in Tangier.
Meanwhile, it had emerged that, decades prior, Perdicaris had become a citizen of Greece. Later, it was determined that he hadn’t technically renounced his U.S. citizenship, but this was obviously a significant complicating factor.
TR decided to persist. Edmund Morris describes his thinking: “Rightly or wrongly, Raisuli believed Mr. Perdicaris to be American; he had therefore done deliberate violence to the whole concept of American citizenship. For that he must be held responsible, and the Sultan responsible for him.”
As the great historian Barbara Tuchman put it, “America’s fleet, flag, and honor were committed.”
Then, came Hay’s famous message: “We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead. Further than this we desire least possible complications with Morocco or other powers. You will not arrange for landing Marines or seizing custom house without specific directions from the department.”
Jerry Hendrix points out that the muscular, memorable first sentence is balanced with a warning against precipitous action in the rest of the message.
The negotiations had begun to bear fruit and Gummeré could report back that the Moroccan ransom money for Perdicaris was en route.
The captive did, indeed, return safe and sound. When Perdicaris saw the U.S. ships in the harbor as he approached, he rejoiced.
“Thank Heaven,” he thought, “it is that flag, and that people — aye, and that President, behind those frigates, thousands of miles away, who have had me dug out from amongst these kabyles! That flag and no other!”
Ensuring that endangered Americans always feel that way about our flag is of the highest importance, and should rightly be considered a profound obligation of our government and — yes — a matter of national honor.