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13/12/2008 | The Significance of Pirates

Stratfor Staff

High-level discussions began Thursday over a U.S.-sponsored resolution at the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) that seeks to strengthen the international response to piracy in waters off the coast of Somalia.

 

The new resolution -— which comes just a week after the UNSC passed another U.S.-penned resolution, extending the current U.N. approach to Somali piracy by another year —- would authorize foreign countries to send military assets ashore into Somalia and into Somali airspace in pursuit of pirates.

This would significantly intensify the international fight against Somalia-based pirates, who are now in possession of some 17 major ships. Thus far, international law has authorized foreign warships to invade Somali territorial waters in counter-piracy operations, but their activity has been confined to maritime interdictions. The U.S. push for broader authority is meant to strike at the pirates in Puntland, the lawless part of Somalia where they find safe haven.

The slow expansion of piracy off the Horn of Africa increasingly has dominated headlines in recent years, but on a strategic level it has been little more than a nuisance for global commerce. After the capture of one supertanker from Saudi Arabia, major oil shipments from the Middle East to the West began steering an extremely wide berth around Somalia.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy, which is the de facto guarantor of worldwide maritime shipping security, has plenty of bandwidth to address any real challenges to freedom the of seas. Washington has been taking its time with the piracy issue politically, and slowly working to build an international consensus through the UNSC, because Somali piracy has not yet reached the point that it poses a strategic threat to U.S. interests. The request for further U.N. authorization means not that Washington is punting the issue, but rather that it is starting to consider taking on piracy more forcefully.

The deeper meaning of the piracy issue is that it runs up against the underlying U.S. interest in control of the seas: the foundation of U.S. global military dominance, and in turn the foundation of U.S. global economic dominance. Combating maritime piracy has been a perennial concern of the United States, and is in essence the cornerstone of U.S. naval policy.

Throughout its existence, the United States has depended on maritime commerce for its survival. Even the early European colonies in North America were at first heavily dependent on seaborne lines of communication to Europe, and over time the colonies came to rely heavily on commercial maritime trade, which was protected from piracy by the European navies. In 1783, however, when the American Revolutionary War officially ended with the Treaty of Paris, the U.S. government suddenly became responsible for the safety and protection of its own merchant traffic overseas.

The United States, with its Continental Navy in the process of being disbanded and the new government deep in war-related debt, could not protect its interests abroad and was forced to pay annual tribute and occasional ransoms to the “Barbary” states of Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis -— North African regencies of the Ottoman Empire that had long extorted payments from ocean-going powers through the threat of piracy. It was not until the turn of the 19th century that the reconstituted U.S. Navy was equipped with its first frigates. When tribute was demanded of President Thomas Jefferson’s new administration in 1801, he dispatched the Navy to protect U.S. commercial interests on the other side of the Atlantic. What followed was a series of naval engagements and the first U.S. expeditionary assault on foreign soil: the Battle of Derne in Tripoli, which the United States won and which was the decisive action in the First Barbary War.

U.S. interest in freedom of the seas —- and the U.S. Navy’s ability to protect that interest -— would only continue to grow. The core American imperative of ensuring the free flow of traffic on the high seas was a key factor in the War of 1812, as a Britain engaged in the Napoleonic wars forcefully impressed sailors aboard U.S.-flagged ships into Royal Navy service. And arguably one of the most important outcomes of World War II was that the United States achieved an effectively unchallenged hegemony over the world’s oceans — a hegemony only further solidified in subsequent decades.

The Somali pirates do not, at this point, pose a strategic threat to the U.S. interest in freedom of the seas — but the push to intensify operations against them shows that Washington wants to act against them before they have a chance to rise to that level.

Stratfor (Estados Unidos)

 


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