MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA: "Somalia's pirates: A long war of the waters; Thanks to greater vigilance and naval patrols, the seas off Somalia may be a bit less dangerous than they were. But they are still the riskiest in the world," The Economist, 9 January 2010.
The usual piece on the subject. Why I cite: it reminds me that this is a problem easily solved by collaboration among the world's great power militaries--if they wanted to throw enough resources at the problem.
But the larger reality is that all of them, while devoting modest naval resources in this direction, still view the situation as a lesser-included that shouldn't seriously derail larger preparations for, and hedges against, one another.
And that's a pretty accurate capture of where we stand today: the world's great powers remain an uneasy bunch, with some fretting over their relative decline and others getting used to their absolute rise.
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