Pirates armed with guns and grenades grabbed headlines around the world last week by hijacking the Saudi Arabian tanker Sirius Star 724km off the coast of Somalia in East Africa and holding hostage the crew of 25. The piracy was bold as the captured ship was the largest ever taken and was seized the farthest from land.
In striking contrast, five pirates armed with long knives recently boarded a tug towing a barge in the Straits of Singapore off the coast of Malaysia as she headed from Singapore to Thailand. The pirates stole personal belongings of the crew of seven, and then put them ashore unharmed.
While piracy near Somalia has soared in number and audacity, that in the South China Sea in Southeast Asia has been on a steady decline, largely due to the concentrated anti-piracy operations of Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Thailand has just joined the campaign while the US and Japan have supported the Southeast Asians in the background.
IMB STATISTICS
The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which tracks piracy worldwide, reported 49 incidents in Southeast Asia during the first nine months of this year, down from 133 in the same period of 2004. Piracy around the Indonesian archipelago was third in the world, behind Somalia and Nigeria, on Africa’s west coast, but had dropped to 23 incidents from 70 in 2004.
“The number of attacks has dropped due to the increase and constant patrols by the littoral states,” IMB said.
Patrols at sea begin in 2004, those in the air in 2005. Moreover, the bureau said, “all except two of these cases were low level incidents aimed at theft of valuables and stores.”
In addition, a lash-up between pirates and terrorists in Southeast Asia, long feared by US and Southeast Asian officials, has so far failed to materialize. Even so, intelligence agencies continue to watch this closely. A critical part of the US support has been erecting radar sites for Southeast Asian nations to track ships. If a ship deviates from its plotted course, that may be a sign it is under attack.
The US has also encouraged Southeast Asians to share such intelligence.
US HELP
The IMB said the US had given Indonesia five radar stations to provide surveillance in the Straits of Malacca and four to watch the Straits of Makassar, with three more coming. Radar stations have either been given to Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines or are on the way.
Although piracy in that region has declined, said Captain Jeffrey Breslau, spokesman for the US Pacific Command in Hawaii, “Maritime security remains a central theme of this command’s theater security cooperation program.”
“The focus of discussions regarding maritime security is on partnership and cooperation among regional nations,” Breslau said. “Most countries realize that building a collective capacity to defeat or deter piracy serves to promote regional stability as well as prosperity.”
The Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea are important to the US for military operations and to the economies of most Asian nations. They comprise the primary passageway for US warships between the Pacific and Indian oceans. If that sea lane was closed, ships would need to sail routes three to five times longer.
Over the last two decades, that passage has become the world’s most traveled sea line of communication. Between 50,000 to 70,000 ships a year transit this passage, more than through the Suez and Panama Canals combined, particularly carrying Persian Gulf oil to China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
SOVEREIGNTY ISSUES
US officers said getting Southeast Asian nations to work together meant overcoming issues of sovereignty. Those nations, once ruled by the US, France, Britain, Portugal or the Netherlands, are jealous of the independence gained after World War II and suspicious of any encroachment on sovereignty.
The officers said they have sought first to get agencies within a nation to work together. In Indonesia, for example, 13 agencies are engaged in maritime security. Second is to get each nation to work with its next-door neighbors.
Third is to foster a process in which decisions can be made rapidly. In cultures that prizes consensus, this takes patient explanation. Fourth is interdiction of a suspected pirate and communicating in a timely manner with another nation’s forces.
“An advantage we have in the Pacific,” said one officer, “is that we have functioning governments ashore. The first step to stopping piracy begins ashore. Without that, pirates can live and operate freely, as you see in Somalia.”
Richard Halloran is a writer based in Hawaii.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017