Famously, a message from Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State John Hay electrified the 1904 Republican convention: “This Government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.”
Ion Perdicaris, a wealthy Greek-American, had been kidnapped in Morocco by a bandit named Ahmed al-Raisuli.
Hay’s line served as an ultimatum to bring the affair, after the deployment of the US Navy to Morocco and drawn-out negotiations, to a conclusion.
We’ve come a long way from the time when the kidnapping of one American, whose citizenship was actually a little murky, elicited a thunderous reaction as a matter of national principle.
Needless to say, no one is ever going to mistake Joe Biden for TR, one of the most compelling figures in American history, but the president couldn’t be a better representative of our attenuated sense of national honor.
A terrorist group killed and kidnapped American citizens and is still holding them in horrific conditions, and the US government has been doing a tap dance between the terrorists and an Israeli government fighting and bleeding to try to save them.
US officials condemn Hamas, yet there is none of the righteous fury one would expect of a government whose citizens have been subjected to such grotesque mistreatment.
When Hamas murdered Hersh Goldberg-Polin in cold blood, President Biden blamed Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for his recalcitrance in negotiations — even though Hamas took the hostages, Hamas has refused to release them, Hamas has a policy of killing them if there is some chance they could get rescued, and Hamas threatens to do the same again.
We’ve imposed no significant consequences on Iran for its sponsorship of a terror group with American blood on its hands.
We are mealy-mouthed and skittish, a superpower constrained by its unwillingness to fully take its own side in a fight.
We should feel a profound sense of national embarrassment, but Joe Biden doesn’t embarrass easily.
He left US citizens behind in Afghanistan and has failed to neutralize a rag-tag band of rebels who continue to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea despite the presence of the US Navy.
Back in 1904, when Perdicaris was released and saw American vessels in the water outside Tangier, he exulted at “such proof of his country’s solicitude for its citizens and for the honor of its flag.”
Biden is now falling short not just of the TR standard, but that set by Lord Palmerston, the great British foreign secretary, under much less provocation.
In 1850, Palmerston sent the Royal Navy to vindicate the interests of David Pacifico, a British citizen and Jew born in Gibraltar, who was seeking recompense from the Greek government for the destruction of his property.
Responding to his critics, Palmerston delivered a nearly five-hour speech defining the question in the matter as, “whether, as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus sum [I am a Roman citizen]; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England, will protect him against injustice and wrong.”
Of course, the sentiments of Hay and Palmerston are from long ago.
It is likely that Joe Biden and the people around him feel about those attitudes the way John Kerry felt after Vladimir Putin went into Ukraine the first time in 2014: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion.”
National honor, in any robust sense, presumably strikes them as atavistic and chauvinistic, too simplistic and unyielding for the demands of our complicated times.
Hamas, though, isn’t playing by 21st-century rules.
It is acting by the same bloody-minded imperatives of barbarians from any time or place.
We may think we are responding with great subtlety and sophistication, but we shouldn’t be surprised if they consider us weaklings and fools.
Twitter: @RichLowry