I think I’m on solid ground here when I say the founders of this country would be repulsed by the idea that the U.S. government would ever give a sh!t about a Cyprus-flagged container ship, managed by a Dubai-based company, having a missile or rocket fired at it by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Barbary Wars (1801–1805 and 1815) were conflicts between the young United States and the "Barbary States" of North Africa — Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco, nominally under Ottoman rule but acting independently.
For centuries these states funded themselves by piracy: seizing merchant ships in the Mediterranean and along the Atlantic approaches, and either ransoming or enslaving their crews. (sound familiar?)
European powers mostly just paid tribute to buy safe passage rather than fight. (sound familiar again?) Before independence, American ships had sailed under British protection and paid no such price. After 1776, that protection vanished, and American vessels became fair game.
The US initially followed the European playbook, paying tribute and ransom (see "Obama") — at one point this ate up a fifth of the federal budget. But when Tripoli's pasha demanded more money than Congress would pay and declared war in 1801, Thomas Jefferson refused to keep paying and sent the newly built US Navy and Marines instead. That First Barbary War (1801–1805) included the famous raid to burn the captured USS Philadelphia. A second, brief war in 1815 against Algiers finally ended American tribute payments for good.
Why go so far from home so long ago when we were a newly birthed nation? A few overlapping reasons: protecting commerce, since Mediterranean trade was economically important (sound familiar yet again?) and merchant crews were being enslaved; establishing sovereignty, since fighting back (rather than paying tribute like Europe did) was a statement that the US was a real, independent nation with the will to defend its citizens and ships; cost, since ransom and tribute payments were becoming unsustainable; and it also served as a proving ground, being essentially the first military test of the new republic and the first time the US projected power overseas, helping justify and build out a standing navy that many in Congress had been skeptical of funding.
We are dealing with an "opportunity cost" this time -- the cost to the USA and West if Iran builds a nuke and flattens NYC, London, Paris, or Washington DC.
Do perceive a commonality between the problems of the early 1800s and today? There's a straight line between them...an Islamic jihad line.
The Founders were concerned with freedom of the seas and commerce.
The showed this with the wars on the Islamic Barbary states in the early 1800’s.
America became the primary defender of freedom of the seas (formerly the role of the British Empire) after WWII.