Piracy: irritating nuisance or broken window?

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Thursday, April 16, 2009 - 2:21 AM Share

Rob Farley and I have a bloggingheads exchange about piracy. Actually, it's mostly me asking Rob questions and floating ridiculously stupid policy options. In the end, Rob thinks the cost of any policy response vastly outweighs the actual cost of piracy itself.

One of the commenters to the diavlog raised an interesting question:

Pirates are the "squeegee men" of international relations, it seems to me. They don't do that much economic damage in the grand scheme of things, but they do help to create a sense of uncontrollable lawlessness that may contribute to other, more dangerous problems. If that's true, the application of some "broken windows" policing may be of value in dealing with them - it could provide a common project for nations to cooperate on, and it would be a concrete step that nations could take in defense of civilization in general. Such a project might not be a bad thing in itself, and more importantly, it might get nations in the habit of considering how to protect civilization itself.

I don't think this analogy holds up very well, in that a) Somalia appears to be a truly sui generis case; and b) you could pour as many naval resources into the area as you'd like, and it's still a very, very, very large body of water.

Still, I'm curious if readers find this analogy persuasive.

EXPLORE:U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY

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BLUE13326

4:40 AM ET

April 16, 2009

When you guys discuss costs,

When you guys discuss costs, you give a pretty simplistic analysis, don't you think? You just pick a figure that is estimated to be the amount of ransom paid ($200m) and say well the missiles necessary would cost more than that. But that fails to take into account any projected growth rate in the business as it becomes widely known that nothing will be done; not just for Somalia, but if it spreads to other coastal countries, even ones with relatively stable governments, where the piracy is privately sanctioned or used as a prop to get US aid to 'combat' the practice. And, to further the broken windows analogy, as someone who lived in NY under Dinkins and the beginning of Guiliani's tenure, the 'squeegee problem' got progressively worse as it was tacitly sanctioned, and NY really was a crappy place to live. Also, when discussing reputational damage, you don't take into account that the US's role as guarantor of world trade; this makes the reputational damage far worse for us than for France, China, or whomever, if we allow this practice to continue without a response. Now, it may be that we can no longer play this role, but that's still a hit to our reputation, and has externalities in other areas, such as our currency.

I'm not as convinced as your leftist co-commentator that airstrikes would be so useless; he uses a strawman analogy to prove his point in comparing it with the drug war. But, I'm not aware that launching airstrikes on bases of drug lords was ever really tried, so it's hard to know whether that would have been effective. It's a stupid argument on his part. While the coastline is big, there are known areas where these people live and spend their money, and killing a bunch of the higher ups and destroying their property would likely have an impact. The question would be whether we would be able to deal with the almost certain civilian deaths this policy would bring about.

But, one thing we know for sure: You can't have piracy without ships, and hitting the ships in their ports might be a good start.

MAJORMARGINAL

4:55 AM ET

April 16, 2009

Squegee men

The squeegee men and panhandlers of the large cities are a nuisance. They either intimidate others for money or play on the heartstrings. Most of them I have dealt with have long rap sheets.
The pirates are serious criminals.
The squeegee men and panhandlers commit the equivalent of petty theft.
The pirates commit the equivalent of armed robbery, aggravated assault with firearms, and kidnapping.
On the macro level the pirates may seem insignificant.
On the micro/personal level the magnitude of evil the two do not compare.

BUZZ KILLINGTON

11:49 AM ET

April 16, 2009

Piracy in the Americas

Is anybody reading familiar with how piracy was eliminated in the Americas? Authorities at the time had far less technology, and were dealing with a much, much larger area.