With the presidential election around the corner, the world economy in freefall and Iran poised to go nuclear, U.S. efforts to stem a piracy epidemic in the Gulf of Aden seem as remote from America’s consciousness as a similar naval campaign – the Barbary Wars – waged two centuries ago.

There has been a dangerous rash of hijackings by Somali pirates in the waters between the Horn of Africa and Saudi Arabia’s southwestern coast. Pirates now hold about a dozen commercial vessels for ransom. This year, they have seized 29 ships and earned an estimated $30 million.

Piracy is symptomatic of the general lawlessness of Somalia, a failed state since the early 1990s.

The Gulf of Aden is strategically located near two vital shipping lanes – the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, the gateway to the Suez Canal. The brazenness of seafaring brigands in the region has become a great concern to the world’s maritime powers, especially the United States, which relies on Persian Gulf oil.

In June, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution authorizing other nations to enter Somali territorial waters to deal with pirates. About 10 countries have dispatched warships there to help. NATO defense ministers have also agreed to send a joint naval task force.

The U.S. Navy has had active anti-piracy efforts off the Somali coast since 2005. Most recently it joined the Russian navy in tracking a Ukranian freighter, carrying 33 tanks and armaments, which was hijacked in September.

The Soviet Union and the United States had supplied weapons to Somalia to counter each other’s regional influence during the Cold War. The United States poured $200 million in military aid into the country in the 1980s and gave political and economic support to the corrupt and brutal dictatorship of Gen. Siad Barre.

After the Cold War, the U.S. withdrew economic support, leaving Somali society, heavily armed and desperately poor, fractured by warfare between rival factions, gangs and militias, with a central government too weak to impose law and order on land or sea.

Somali piracy started as a freelance activity, but many pirates are now supported by warlords eager for a share of the profits. As a result, they are bolder, and better financed, organized and equipped.

Similar conditions spurred the U.S. to combat piracy during the nation’s infancy. In 1794, the United States Navy was created to stop pirates from interfering with American commercial shipping in the Mediterranean Sea off the Barbary Coast of North Africa.

Amid the ruins of another failed state, the Moslem Ottoman Empire, semi-autonomous principalities arose in Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Their leaders, little more than warlords, sanctioned raids on foreign commercial vessels to gain booty and ransom.

For years, the United States paid the equivalent of “protection” money to these rulers to insure safe passage of American shipping through the Mediterranean. But the cost – up to $1 million a year in ransom and tribute (almost one fifth of the country’s revenues in 1800) – was prohibitive and the practice distasteful to a proud new republic.

To deal with Barbary piracy, Congress in 1794 authorized construction of a navy consisting of three frigates, including the U.S.S. Constitution (now a floating museum in Boston Harbor). It still took seven years and two presidential administrations before the fledgling navy was used for its purpose.

In 1801, the new President Thomas Jefferson refused to pay the annual tribute, and sent frigates to protect American shipping in the Mediterranean. The navy blockaded Barbary ports, bombarded coastal cities and attacked ships of the pirate principalities.

Hostilities ended in 1805, only to resume in 1815, when the seizure of an American merchant vessel prompted a declaration of war on Algiers. An American fleet under naval hero Stephen Decatur subdued enemy warships and imposed treaties favorable to the United States on Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli.

The Barbary Wars sparked not only the birth of an American navy, but the beginning of U.S. naval presence in the Mediterranean, and, for better or worse, the start of a long history of American intervention in the Moslem world.

If the U.S. sent warships around the world to protect maritime commerce when it was a bit player on the world stage, it can’t be expected to allow piracy in the same region today when it threatens our lifeline to Middle East oil.

But the world is more complicated than 200 years ago. Bravado and shots across the bow aren’t any more likely to end Somali piracy than to stop Middle East terrorism. Serious, sustained diplomacy and substantial economic assistance are required to put the broken pieces of Somalia back together.

The U.S. has paid little attention to Somalia since 1994, when American peacekeeping troops withdrew after failing to stop clan warfare impeding United Nations famine relief efforts. In October, 1993, 18 Army Rangers were killed by militia fighters in Mogadishu, their bodies dragged through the streets. Televised scenes of this debacle turned public opinion against the peacekeeping mission.

After that Somalia was treated like Vietnam – a bad memory, best forgotten.

But ignoring Somalia is, increasingly, no longer an option.

Elliott L. Epstein, a local attorney, is founder and board president of Museum L-A and an adjunct history instructor at Central Maine Community College. He can be reached at [email protected]