Jefferson versus the Muslim pirates

City Journal has posted a few of the highlights from its forthcoming Spring issue. Among them is Christopher Hitchens’s engaging account of “the first overseas war that the United States ever fought.” Hitchens gets off to a rousing start. He relates the wisdom dispensed by the academic historian Frank Lambert:

One of the historians of the Barbary conflict, Frank Lambert, argues that the imperative of free trade drove America much more than did any quarrel with Islam or

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