How To Beat the PiratesLet's start by treating them like the criminals they are.

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Perhaps it's time for another Congress of Vienna, this one amid the instabilities brought on by the end of the Cold War. The parallel is imperfect, to say the least. No Metternichs or Bismarcks strut the global stage today. Nor does any handful of nations seem willing or able to carve out and command "spheres of influence" that keep the rest of the world in subjugated equilibrium.

However, the new assemblage could at least begin by dealing with the Somali pirate problem. The framework for cooperation is already in place. International law has long regarded theft on the high seas as a scourge transcending the normal rules of national sovereignty. Piracy, in fact, inspired the concept of "universal jurisdiction," which allows any nation-state to take action against transgressors, even if it is not a victim of the crime. (In this case, any state is allowed to arrest and prosecute pirates, even if the ship they've pirated is flying another country's flag.) This principle has since been codified in the 1958 Convention on the High Seas and the United Nations' 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Every state has a vested interest in this cause. The Somali pirates have captured merchant ships owned not just by the United States and Western European nations but also by Ukraine, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia.

Nor is this issue complicated by ideology or sectarianism. The Barbary pirates at least saw, or justified, their actions as political struggle, stemming from Catholic Spain's conquest of Granada, which forced the exile of the Moors (the name at the time for Muslims), who retaliated by attacking Spanish boats, a practice subsequently supported—and gradually dominated—by the sultan of the Ottoman empire. The Moors and their descendants, in this sense, were the Islamist radicals of their time.

The Somali pirates, by contrast, are simply bandits. They are in fact held in contempt by most of the Islamist gangs that hang out elsewhere along Somalia's coast—though some of these gangs have formed mafia-style alliances offering protection in exchange for a share of the loot. (The extent, or durability, of these relationships is unclear.)

In other words, piracy could be a wedge issue in President Obama's quest for mutual interests between Western and Muslim nations.

One thing these nations could do is translate those interests into binding policy. International law on piracy—which reflects universal interests—is firm on principle but mushy on enforcement. It's not clear, for instance, whether a merchant ship's captain and crew have the right to shoot armed pirates boarding their ship, unless the pirates shoot first. This is lame—and it's one reason freighter companies don't want armed marshals onboard.

So here are some modest proposals for a fleshed-out legal code on combating pirates:

Allow authorized crewmembers to shoot pirates—the fact that armed outsiders are boarding a merchant ship in international waters should be deemed sufficient provocation. Declare a safety zone around merchant ships—anyone crossing into the zone is warned to cross back; those who proceed face the risk of getting shot. Armed marshals should be required onboard merchant ships traveling through straits declared to be dangerous, especially if they are carrying particularly sensitive goods; the marshals could be paid out of a common international fund.

In October, NATO announced that it was sending its Standing Naval Maritime Group—a flotilla of seven ships—to the waters off Somalia. The decision, made at a conference of defense ministers, was sparked by the rise in piracy and particularly by the capture of a Ukrainian cargo vessel that was carrying tanks and other military supplies. This concept should be taken well beyond NATO to include any and all countries that have navies and that sign on to this new anti-piracy regime. That way, the ships will not be seen as merely Western war vessels.

The fight against the Somali pirates is not, nor should it be presented as, a campaign in the "war on terror" or any euphemism that the Obama administration might want to substitute for the phrase. Nor is it a battle for Western civilization. In this sense, proposals to deploy naval convoys, as was done in World War II to defend trans-Atlantic freighters from Nazi submarines, similarly miss the mark. These pirates aren't Nazis; their acts aren't sowing a crisis of existential proportion; to suggest otherwise only puffs up their image and perhaps their prestige and bargaining power among other anti-Western outlaws. These pirates are nasty criminals, nothing more. And the fight against them should be treated, and seen, as a routine and legitimate procedure to stamp out nasty crime.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at .

Photograph of Maersk-Alabama Capt. Richard Phillips (right) with Cmdr. Frank Castellano by U.S. Navy via Getty Images. Photograph of boat on Slate's home page by AFP/Getty Images.

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