The U.S. will reportedly be offering the Sudanese government some incentives to end the violence in Darfulr, and it will also be engaging with some levels of the government -- though not President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who's under indictment for war crimes.

Obama's full statement on the policy:

Today, my Administration is releasing a comprehensive strategy to confront the serious and urgent situation in Sudan.

For years, the people of Sudan have faced enormous and unacceptable hardship. The genocide in Darfur has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and left millions more displaced. Conflict in the region has wrought more suffering, posing dangers beyond Sudan’s borders and blocking the potential of this important part of Africa. Sudan is now poised to fall further into chaos if swift action is not taken.

Our conscience and our interests in peace and security call upon the United States and the international community to act with a sense of urgency and purpose. First, we must seek a definitive end to conflict, gross human rights abuses and genocide in Darfur. Second, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the North and South in Sudan must be implemented to create the possibility of long-term peace. These two goals must both be pursued simultaneously with urgency. Achieving them requires the commitment of the United States, as well as the active participation of international partners. Concurrently, we will work aggressively to ensure that Sudan does not provide a safe-haven for international terrorists.

The United States Special Envoy has worked actively and effectively to engage all of the parties involved, and he will continue to pursue engagement that saves lives and achieves results. Later this week, I will renew the declaration of a National Emergency with respect to Sudan, which will continue tough sanctions on the Sudanese Government. If the Government of Sudan acts to improve the situation on the ground and to advance peace, there will be incentives; if it does not, then there will be increased pressure imposed by the United States and the international community. As the United States and our international partners meet our responsibility to act, the Government of Sudan must meet its responsibilities to take concrete steps in a new direction.

Over the last several years, governments, non-governmental organizations, and individuals, and from around the world have taken action to address the situation in Sudan, and to end the genocide in Darfur. Going forward, all of our efforts must be measured by the lives that are led by the people of Sudan. After so much suffering, they deserve a future that allows them to live with greater dignity, security, and opportunity. It will not be easy, and there are no simple answers to the extraordinary challenges that confront this part of the world. But now is the time for all of us to come together, and to make a strong and sustained effort on behalf of a better future for the people of Sudan.

A man from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) gives the first presentation. Colorful graphs travel up and down his PowerPoint charts. Some are headed downward as the year 2050 approaches. They represent the farmland that is disappearing as a result of climate change, soil desolation, urbanization and the shortage of water. The other lines, which point sharply upward, represent demand for meat and biofuel, food prices and population growth. There is a growing gap between the two sets of lines. It represents hunger.

According to most prognoses, there could be 9.1 billion people living on Earth in 2050, about 2 billion more than today. In the coming 20 years alone, worldwide demand for food is expected to rise by 50 percent. "These are pessimistic prospects," says the OECD man. He looks serious and even a little sad as he describes the future of the world.

But for the audience in the Stuyvesant Room, mostly men and a handful of women, all of this is good news and the mood is buoyant. How could it be any different? After all, hunger is their business. The combination of more people and less land makes food a safe investment, with annual returns of 20 to 30 percent, rare in the current economic climate.

These are not Wall Street experts, nor are they people who shoot money across the continents like billiard balls. On the contrary, these are extremely conservative investors who buy or lease land to grow wheat or raise cattle. But land is scarce and expensive in Europe and the United States. Solving the problem means developing new land, which is available only in Africa, Asia and South America. This combination of factors has triggered a high-stakes game of real-life Monopoly, in which investment funds, banks and governments are engaged in a race for access to the world's arable land.

"The final frontier for finding alpha"
Susan Payne, a red-haired British woman, is the CEO of the largest land fund in southern Africa, which currently includes 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres), mainly in South Africa, Zambia and Mozambique. Payne hopes to raise half a billion euros from investors. She talks about fighting hunger, but the headings on her PowerPoint slides, embellished with photos of soybean fields at sunset, tell a different story. One such heading refers to "Africa -- the last frontier for finding alpha." The word "alpha" signifies an investment for which the return is greater than the risk. Africa is alpha country.

That's because land, which is extremely fertile in some regions, is inexpensive on the impoverished continent. Payne's land fund pays $350 to $500 per hectare ($140 to $200 per acre) in Zambia, about one-tenth the price of land in Argentina or the United States. For a small farmer in Africa, the average yield per hectare has remained unchanged in 40 years. With a little fertilizer and additional irrigation, yields could quadruple -- and so could profits.

These are perfect conditions for investors. Payne sees it that way, and so do her investors. In fact, there has been so much demand for this type of investment that Payne recently had to establish a new sub-fund.

A great deal of capital is currently available. It is the second year of the global economic crisis, and investors are seeking sound and safe investments, which is why the audience in New York includes not only hedge fund managers and agriculture industry executives, but also the representatives of large pension funds and the chief financial officers of five universities, including Harvard.

Thousands of investment funds, from small to large, have recently begun applying the most basic formula in the world: People must eat.

The U.S. investment management company BlackRock, for example, has established a $200 million agriculture fund and has earmarked $30 million for the acquisition of farmland. Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment company, has acquired more than 100,000 hectares in Ukraine. Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs have invested their money in pig-breeding operations and chicken farms in China, investments that include the legal rights to farmland.

Food is becoming the new oil. Worldwide grain reserves dropped to a historic low at the beginning of 2008, and the ensuing price explosion marked a turning point, just as the oil crisis did in the 1970s. There were bread riots around the world, and 25 countries, including some of the biggest grain exporters, imposed restrictions on food exports.

Then came the second crisis of 2008, the economic crisis. Two fears -- the fear of hunger and the fear of uncertainty -- converged, triggering what some are already calling a second generation of colonialism.

A win-win situation?
What is different about this colonialism is that countries are readily allowing themselves to be conquered. The Ethiopian prime minister said that his government is "eager" to provide access to hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland. The Turkish agriculture minister announced: "Choose and take what you want." In the midst of a war against the Taliban, the Pakistani government staged a road show in Dubai, seeking to entice sheikhs with tax breaks and exemptions from labor laws.

All these efforts have two hopes in common. One is the hope of poor nations to achieve the development and modernization of their ailing agricultural sectors. The other is the world's hope that foreign investors in Africa and Asia will be able to produce enough food for a planet soon to be populated by 9.1 billion people; that they will bring along all the things that poor countries have lacked until now, including technology, capital and knowledge, modern seed and fertilizer; and that these investors will be able to not only double crop yields but, in many parts of Africa, increase them 10-fold. Previous estimates had in fact forecast a decline in production capacity by 3 to 4 percent in 2080 compared with the year 2000.

If the investors are successful, they could achieve what development agencies have been unable to do in the past few decades: reduce the hunger that now afflicts more people than ever, namely 1 billion worldwide. In the best-case scenario this could be a win-win situation with profit for the investors and development for the poor.

It is not just bankers and speculators, but also governments that are acquiring land in other countries, seeking to reduce their dependence on the world market and imports. China is home to 20 percent of the world's population, but it has only 9 percent of the world's arable land. Japan is the world's largest corn importer, and South Korea is the second-largest. The Persian Gulf states import 60 percent of their food, while their natural water reserves are sufficient to support only another 30 years of agriculture.

Modern-day land grab
But what happens in a globalized world when colonies arise once again? What if, for example, Saudi Arabia acquires parts of Pakistan's Punjab region or Russian investors buy up half of Ukraine? And what happens when famine strikes these countries? Will the wealthy foreigners install electric fences around their fields, and will armed guards escort crop shipments out of the country? Pakistan has already announced plans to deploy 100,000 members of its security forces to protect foreign-owned fields.

Because of the political sensitivity of the modern-day land grab, it is often only the country's head of state who knows the details. In some cases, however, provincial governors have already auctioned off land to the highest bidder, as in the case of Laos and Cambodia, where even the governments no longer know how much of their territory they still own.

No one is sure exactly how much land is at stake. The number cited by the International Food Policy Research Institute is 30 million hectares, but this estimate is impossible to verify. Even United Nations organizations have to resort to citing newspaper reports, while the World Bank is trying to persuade countries to pay closer attention to the fine print on agreements.

Klaus Deininger, an economist specializing in land policy at the World Bank, estimates that 10 to 30 percent of available arable land could be up for grabs, although only a fraction of the potential number of lease and sale agreements have been signed. "There was a huge jump in 2008, when plans and applications in many countries more than doubled, in some cases tripled," Deininger says. In Mozambique, he says, foreign demand is more than double the existing cultivated farmland, and the government has already allocated 4 million hectares to investors, half of them from abroad.

The most spectacular deals are not being made by private investors, however, but by governments and the funds and conglomerates they promote:

• The Sudanese government has leased 1.5 million hectares of prime farmland to the Gulf states, Egypt and South Korea for 99 years. Paradoxically, Sudan is also the world's largest recipient of foreign aid, with 5.6 million of its citizens dependent on food deliveries.
• Kuwait has leased 130,000 hectares of rice fields in Cambodia.
• Egypt plans to grow wheat and corn on 840,000 hectares in Uganda.
• The president of the Democratic Republic of Congo has offered to lease 10 million hectares to the South Africans.

Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest and most aggressive buyers of land. This spring, the king attended a ceremony where he took delivery of the first export rice harvest, produced exclusively for the kingdom in hunger-stricken Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia spends $800 million a year promoting foreign companies that cultivate "strategic field crops" like rice, wheat, barley and corn, which it then imports. Ironically, the country was the world's sixth-largest wheat exporter in the 1990s. But water is scarce and the desert nation aims to preserve its reserves. Exporting food also means exporting water.

Part 2: "The investor needs a weak state"
Rich nations are exchanging money, oil and infrastructure for food, water and animal feed. At first glance, this seems to present a solution for many problems, says Jean-Philippe Audinet of the International Fund for Agricultural Development. In principle, he is pleased about the agricultural investments and says he fought for them for years: "What was bad was the period when markets were being flooded with cheap food products."

But many of the countries where land is being snapped up -- Kazakhstan and Pakistan, for example -- suffer from water shortages. Sub-Saharan Africa has adequate natural water reserves, but the only country in the region currently producing a food surplus is South Africa. Most countries, on the other hand, are importers and, with rapidly growing populations, will likely be even more dependent on food imports in the future. Can such countries truly become important food producers?

Audinet knows the risks: "The way these agreements are structured can harm the country and the farmers in the long term, robbing them of their most important asset -- land." Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, warns: "Because the countries in Africa are competing for investors, they are undercutting each other." Some contracts, says De Schutter, are barely three pages long -- for hundreds of thousands of hectares of land. These types of agreements stipulate what products are to be cultivated, the location, and the purchase or lease price, but they include no environmental standards. They also lack the necessary investment regulations and the stipulation that jobs must be created, De Schutter says.

Some investors agree to build schools and pave roads, but even when they live up to their promises, the benefits to the host governments and local farmers are often short-lived. In the long term, however, they must suffer the consequences of over-fertilizing, deforestation, the overconsumption of water, a reduction of ecological diversity, and the loss of local species. To boost harvests and achieve annual returns of 20 percent or more, the foreign large landowners must operate their farms on an industrial scale. And when the soil becomes depleted after a few years, many investors simply move on. Land is so cheap that they are not forced to value sustainable farming practices.

Rejecting the old model
Because of these risks Audinet and De Schutter, like most other experts, favor contract farming instead of land acquisition. In other words, the foreign investors provide the technology and capital, while the local farmers own or lease the land and supply rice or wheat at fixed prices. This is the classic, tried-and-tested model, but it is not what the new investors want. They want control, ownership, high returns and, most of all, security -- objectives rarely compatible with the interests of thousands of small farmers.

Senegal has decided in favor of contract farming and against large-scale land sales, but it happens to be a stable democracy. This cannot be said of many of the countries where land acquisition is taking place.

"When food becomes scarce, the investor needs a weak state that does not force him to abide by any rules," says Philippe Heilberg, an American businessman. In other words, the investor needs a state that permits grain exports despite famines at home, that is consumed by corruption or deep in debt, ruled by a dictatorship, racked by civil war, or obliged to send millions of workers abroad and while being dependent on those workers receiving visas and jobs.

Heilberg has found such a nation: South Sudan, which is in fact a pre-nation, autonomous but not independent. The 44-year-old American, son of a coffee merchant and the founder of the investment firm Jarch Capital, is now the largest land leaseholder in South Sudan, where he leases 400,000 hectares of prime farmland in Mayom County.

The mere mention of the words "South Sudan" conjures up images of civil war, refugees and famine, not of a place where one would consider growing tomatoes. But Heilberg raves that his project will be more beneficial to people than the U.N., and that he will create jobs and produce food. And he is adamant that Paulino Matip, from whom he has leased the land for 50 years, not be referred to as a warlord, but as a "former warlord" or "deputy army chief." Heilberg neglects to mention that the rebels led by Matip are suspected of having committed war crimes.

Instead of buying stocks, the former banker is now speculating on the political future of South Sudan, which he insists will be an independent country in 10 years, at which point land will be far more expensive than it is today.

Land acquisition is already a step further along in western Kenya, home to Erastas Dildo, 33, the kind of person the New York investors would probably characterize as a risk factor: a small farmer who owns three hectares of land. It is fertile land, where the corn turns bright green and grows 2 meters (6.5 feet) tall, where the cattle are as fat as hippos and the tomato plants bend under the weight of their fruit. The nearby Yala River flows into Lake Victoria. There are three small brick houses on the property. Erastas harvests his corn twice a year, and vegetables and tomatoes grow year-round. One hectare produces more than $5,000 worth of corn a year, a lot of money by Kenyan standards.

"They drove out 400 families"
But things changed when Erastas was contacted by Dominion Farms, a US agricultural producer that established a colony in the Yala delta, where it has leased 3,600 hectares of land for 45 years, at the ludicrous rate of €12,000 (almost $17,000) a year. Dominion, which plans to grow rice, vegetables and corn on the land, wants to include Erastas Dildo's three hectares in its venture.

The Dominion representatives offered to pay him about 10 cents per square meter. Erastas turned them down, and now they are making life difficult for the farmer. Their most effective weapon is a dam they have built. When Erastas tried to harvest his corn last year, it was under water. "They are playing with the water level to get rid of us," he says. And when that doesn't work, Erastas says, Dominion sends in bulldozers, thugs and sometimes even the police.

Under its contract, Dominion has agreed to renovate "at least one school and one medical facility" in each of the two local districts. "They drove out 400 families instead," says Gondi Olima of the organization Friends of the Yala Swamp. According to Olima, at first the Dominion venture created new jobs, as day laborers were hired to clear the site with machetes, but then the company brought in more and more equipment. "Now they have so many machines that workers are no longer needed," Olima says.

Dominion Farms denies the farmers' accusations and points out that it has already built eight classrooms, donated gateposts and awarded educational scholarships to 16 children, as well as providing beds and electricity for a hospital ward.

Perhaps Erastas and his family will be forced to make way for the development soon, as is already happening in many other places. The World Bank estimates that only 2 to 10 percent of the land in Africa is formally owned or leased, and most of that is in cities. A family may have lived on or occupied a piece of land for decades, but it often has no proof of ownership.

The hunt for land continues
Nevertheless, the land is almost never left unused. The poor, in particular, live off the land, where they collect fruits, herbs or firewood and graze their livestock. According to a joint study by several U.N. organizations, land grabs are often justified by defining the land as "fallow." As a result, according to the report, land grabs have the potential to dispossess farmers on a large scale. In many countries, there may be enough arable land available for everyone, but the quality is not uniform -- and the investors want the best land. That, as it happens, is the land where farmers usually live.

Because more than 50 percent of Africans are small farmers, large-scale land acquisition could be disastrous for the population. Those who lose their fields lose everything. The fact that the large investors can substantially improve harvests with their modern agricultural technology is of little use to Africans who, once they have lost their land and livelihood, cannot afford to buy the new farms' products.

The World Bank and others are now developing a code of conduct for investors. A declaration of intent had been planned for the July G-8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, but the heads of state in attendance could not agree on binding standards.

And so the hunt for land continues. Dominion has secured another 3,200 hectares, and Philippe Heilberg is in the process of leasing an additional 600,000 hectares in South Sudan. Back in New York, in the Stuyvesant Room, one of the speakers is reciting numbers to illustrate how fast the global population is growing: By 154 people per minute, 9,240 per hour or 221,760 per day. And each one of them wants to eat.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon. For more from Europe's most-read newsmagazine, visit Spiegel Online or subscribe to the daily newsletter.

In the comic-book imagination of some of our leading pundits, the two headline threats against U.S. power are indeed on the verge of teaming up. The intelligence world is abuzz with news that radical Islamists in Somalia are financing the pirates and taking a cut of their booty. Given this "bigger picture," Fred Iklé urges us simply to "kill the pirates." Robert Kaplan waxes more hypothetical. "The big danger in our day is that piracy can potentially serve as a platform for terrorists," he writes. "Using pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard."

Chaotic conditions in Somalia and other countries, anti-state fervor, the mediating influence of Islam, the lure of big bucks: These factors are allegedly pushing the two groups of evildoers into each other's arms. "Both crimes involve bands of brigands that divorce themselves from their nation-states and form extraterritorial enclaves; both aim at civilians; both involve acts of homicide and destruction, as the United Nations Convention on the High Seas stipulates, 'for private ends,'" writes Douglas Burgess in a New York Times Op-Ed urging a prosecutorial coupling of terrorism and piracy.

We've been here before. Since 2001, in an effort to provide a distinguished pedigree for the Global War on Terror and prove the superiority of war over diplomacy, conservative pundits and historians have regularly tried to compare al-Qaida to the Barbary pirates of the 1800s. They were wrong then. And with the current conflating of terrorism and piracy, it's déjà vu all over again.

Misreading piracy

Unlike al-Qaida, the Somali pirates have no grand desire to bring down the United States and the entire Western world. They have no intention of establishing some kind of piratical caliphate. Despite Burgess' claims, they are not bent on homicide and destruction. They simply want money.

Most of the pirates are former fishermen dislodged from their traditional source of income by much larger pirates, namely transnational fishing conglomerates. When a crippled Somali government proved incapable of securing its own coastline, those fishing companies moved in to suck up the rich catch in local waters. "To make matters worse," Katie Stuhldreher writes in the Christian Science Monitor, "there were reports that some foreign ships even dumped waste in Somali waters. That prompted local fishermen to attack foreign fishing vessels and demand compensation. The success of these early raids in the mid-1990s persuaded many young men to hang up their nets in favor of AK-47s."

Despite their different ideologies -- al-Qaida has one, the pirates don't -- it has become increasingly popular to assert a link between radical Islam and the Somali freebooters. The militant Somali faction al-Shabab, for instance, is allegedly in cahoots with the pirates, taking a cut of their money and helping with arms smuggling in order to prepare them for their raids. The pirates "are also reportedly helping al-Shabab develop an independent maritime force so that it can smuggle foreign jihadist fighters and 'special weapons' into Somalia," former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia David Shinn has recently argued.

In fact, the Islamists in Somalia are no fans of piracy. The Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which had some rough control over Somalia before Ethiopia invaded the country in 2006, took on piracy, and the number of incidents dropped. The more militant al-Shabab, which grew out of the ICU and became an insurgent force after the Ethiopian invasion, has denounced piracy as an offense to Islam.

The lumping together of Islamists and pirates obscures the only real solution to Somalia's manifold problems. Piracy is not going to end through the greater exercise of outside force, no matter what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman may think. (In a recent column lamenting the death of diplomacy in an "age of pirates," he recommended a surge in U.S. money and power to achieve success against all adversaries.) Indeed, the sniper killing of three pirates by three U.S. Navy Seals has, to date, merely spurred more ship seizures and hostage-taking.

Simply escalating militarily and "going to war" against the Somali pirates is likely to have about as much success as our last major venture against Somalia in the 1990s, which is now remembered only for the infamous Black Hawk Down incident. Rather, the United States and other countries must find a modus vivendi with the Islamists in Somali to bring the hope of political order and economic development to that benighted country.

Diplomacy and development, however lackluster they might seem up against a trio of dead-eyed sharpshooters, are the only real hope for Somalia and the commercial shipping that passes near its coastline.

From the shores of Tripoli

It would have been the height of irony if the sharpshooters who took out the three Somali youths in that lifeboat with their American hostage had been aboard the USS John Paul Jones, a Navy guided-missile destroyer. Considered the father of the American Navy, Jones was quite the pirate in his day. Or so thought the British, whose ships he seized and looted.

We are left instead with the lesser irony of the sharpshooters taking aim from the USS Bainbridge. This ship was named for Commodore William Bainbridge, who fought against the Barbary pirates in the battles of Algiers and Tunis during the Barbary Wars and was himself taken prisoner in 1803.

The parallels between the pirates of yesterday and today are striking. Then, as now, American observers miscast the pirates as Muslim radicals. In fact, as Frank Lambert explains in his book "The Barbary Wars," those pirates actually served secular governments that were part of the Ottoman Empire (much as Sir Francis Drake plundered Spanish ships on behalf of Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century or Jones served the United States in the 18th). Then, as now, the pirates resorted to preying on commercial shipping because they'd been boxed out of legitimate trade.

The Barbary pirates took to looting European vessels because European governments had barred the states of Algiers, Tripoli and Morocco from trading in their markets. Back then, the fledgling United States accused the Barbary pirates of being slavers without acknowledging that the U.S. was then the center of the global slave trade. Today, the U.S. government decries piracy, but doesn't do anything to prevent the maritime poaching of fishing reserves that helped push pirates from their jobs into risky but lucrative careers in freebooting.

The most improbable link, however, involves the conflation of terrorism and piracy. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, pundits and historians identified the U.S. military response to the Barbary pirates as a useful precedent for striking out against al-Qaida. Shortly after the attacks, law professor Jonathan Turley invoked the war against the Barbary pirates in congressional testimony to justify U.S. retaliation against the terrorists. Historian Thomas Jewett, conservative journalist Joshua London, and executive director of the Christian Coalition of Washington State Rick Forcier all pointed to those pirates as Islamic radicals avant la lettre to underscore the impossibility of negotiations and the necessity of war, both then and now.

The battle against the Barbary pirates led to the creation of the U.S. Marine Corps ("... to the shores of Tripoli") and the first major U.S. government expenditure of funds on a military that could fight distant wars. For historians like Robert Kagan (in his book "Dangerous Nation"), that war kicked off what would be a distinguished history of empire, which he contrasts with the conventional wisdom of a United States that only reluctantly assumed its hegemonic mantle.

Will the current conflict with the Somali pirates, if successfully linked in the public mind to global terrorism, serve as one significant part of a new justification for the continuation of empire and a whole new set of military expenditures needed to sustain such a venture?

The new GWOT?

The United States has the most powerful navy in the world. But what it can do against the Somali pirates is limited. Big guns and destroyers are incapable of covering the necessary vast ocean expanses in which the relatively low-tech pirates operate, can't respond quickly enough to pinprick attacks, and ultimately aren't likely to intimidate what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has quite correctly termed "a bunch of teenage pirates" with little to lose.

"The area we patrol is more than one million square miles and the simple fact of the matter is we just can't be everywhere at once to prevent every attack of piracy," says Lt. Nathan Christensen, of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Last year, approximately 23,000 ships passed through the Gulf of Aden. Pirates snagged 93 of them (some large, some tiny). Yet, in part because these trade routes are so crucial to global economic well-being, this minuscule percentage struck fear into the hearts of the most powerful countries on the planet.

The failure of the U.S. Navy to stamp out piracy has led to predictable calls for more resources. For instance, to deal with nimble, low-intensity threats like the speedy pirates, the Pentagon is looking at Littoral Combat Ships instead of another several-billion-dollar destroyer. The Navy is planning to purchase 55 of these ships, which, at $450 million to $600 million each, will come in at around $30 billion, a huge sum for a project plagued with costs overruns and design problems. With the ground (and air) war heating up in Afghanistan and the CIA in charge of operations in Pakistan, the Navy is understandably trying to keep up with the other services. The Navy's goal of a 313-ship force, which boosters champion regardless of cost, can only be reached by appealing to a threat comparable to terrorists on land. Why not the functional equivalent of terrorists at sea?

Pirates are the perfect threat. They've been around forever. They directly interfere with the bottom line, so the business community is on board. Unlike China, they don't hold any U.S. Treasury Bonds. Indeed, since they're non-state actors, we can bring virtually every country onto our side against them.

And, finally, the Pentagon is already restructuring itself to meet just such a threat. Through its "revolution in military affairs," the adoption of a doctrine of "strategic flexibility," and the cultivation of rapid-response forces, the Pentagon has been gearing up to handle the asymmetrical threats that have largely replaced the more fixed and predictable threats of the Cold War era, and even of the "rogue state" era that briefly followed. The most recent Gates military budget, with its move away from outdated Cold War weapons systems toward more limber forces, fits right in with this evolution. Canceling the F-22 stealth fighter aircraft and cutting money from the Missile Defense Agency in favor of more practical systems is certainly to be applauded. But the Pentagon isn't about to hold a going-out-of-business sale. The new Obama defense budget will actually rise about 4 percent.

George W. Bush's Global War on Terror, or GWOT, turned out to be a useful way for the Pentagon to get everything it wanted: an extraordinary increase in spending and capabilities after 2001. With GWOT officially retired and an unprecedented federal deficit looming, the Pentagon and the defense industries will need to trumpet new threats or else face the possibility of a massive belt-tightening that goes beyond the mere shell-gaming of resources.

The War on Terror lives on, of course, in the Obama administration's surge in Afghanistan, the CIA's campaign of drone attacks in the Pakistani borderlands, and the operations of the new Africa Command. However, the replacement phrase for GWOT, "overseas contingency operations," doesn't quite fire the imagination. It's obviously not meant to. But that's a genuine problem for the military in budgetary terms.

Enter the pirates, who from Errol Flynn to Johnny Depp have always been a big box-office draw. As the recent media hysteria over the crew of the Maersk Alabama indicates, that formula can carry over to real life. Take Johnny Depp out of the equation and pirates can simply be repositioned as bizarre, narcotics-chewing aliens.

Then it's simply a matter of the United States calling together the coalition of the willing monsters to crush those aliens before they take over our planet. And you thought "us versus them" went out with the Bush administration.