WASHINGTON — The first piracy of a U.S. merchant ship since the Barbary Wars has focused this country’s attention on the high-seas crime wave that followed the collapse of Somalia in the 1990s and is now inflicting ever-greater ransom costs on traders from the British Isles to the Far East.

To Americans, this week’s seizure of the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama may be a one-of-a-kind drama, but to the merchants of three continents who send 80 percent of their commerce through the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, it is part of a growing threat. “This is something that hasn’t happened since the United States Navy and Marines were founded to fight the pirates two centuries ago” in North Africa, said J. Peter Pham, a national-security professor at James Madison University in Virginia.

But African-affairs specialist Pham and other experts agree that the efforts of many nations to curb the attacks have been frustrated. This week’s seizure of the food-laden ship from Norfolk, Va., was the 12th this year in this region — three times the total by this time in 2008, a year when a record 42 vessels were taken.

Last year also marked the most sustained response to the piracy. Convoys of naval vessels from the United States, the European Union, China, Russia and other nations cut down on attacks in the Gulf of Aden. But the pirates adapted, said Derek Reveron, a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport. They pushed their mother ships to strike isolated targets far offshore in the Western Indian Ocean. The Maersk Alabama was attacked about 280 miles east of the Somali coast.

Several analysts said the short-term tactics for freeing the hostage from the Maersk Alabama, Captain Richard Phillips of Vermont, must be separated from the political dilemma of quelling piracy over the long haul.

Mackubin Thomas Owens, who also teaches national security at the Naval War College, said saving the American’s life trumps philosophical concerns. Ransom payments are to be avoided, he said, “but we need to do some kind of negotiating” with the kidnappers, as FBI personnel are presumably doing, with the support of the Navy destroyer Bainbridge. Out of fuel and low on food and water, the pirates may run out of resolve, said Reveron.

For the long term, Owens takes a strict line on anti-piracy policy, viewing it as a straightforward matter of restoring the age-old doctrine that pirates are, literally, outlaws with no rights to trial or other legal protections. “The only way this is ever going to be resolved is to simply take pirates out whenever you identify them,” said Owens.

Such a clear-cut policy could be difficult and perhaps dangerous to execute, responded another member of the Newport Navy faculty, Nikolas Gvosdev. When warships approach suspected pirates, “the guns disappear, the fishing nets come out,” and illicit activities are difficult to establish, he said. It would take only one mistaken U.S. attack on innocent fishermen for the hard-line policy to exact a very high political cost in the global arena.

Similarly, there are opposing views of whether merchant fleets should arm their crews or travel with convoys through pirate-infested seas. Gvosdev said the shipping industry properly sees these questions as cost-benefit equations. Some merchants have assumed the cost of embarking with mercenaries on board. But most of the industry — and the companies that insure them — are “dead-set” against the armed-defense option, calculating that, with 20,000 cargo ships plying the region every year, the chances that a given vessel will be seized are acceptably small.

Pham said that is “a rational economic decision” for any individual merchant, “but it becomes the tragedy of the commons,” effectively spreading the rising toll of ransom to customers worldwide — and inviting the pirates to take more.

The surest cure for piracy is to restore order inside Somalia — a daunting task to some who have seen repeated setbacks since the central government failed in 1991. Gvosdev holds out the model of U.S. payments to tribal Sunnis in Iraq to who turned against al-Qaida and helped to quell the insurgency — at least so far. He said money and training for Coast Guard-like units in particular regions of Somalia could shut down pirate havens even in the absence of a strong central government.

“I find it a great irony,” Pham added, that the destroyer in the standoff with the pirates is named for Commodore William Bainbridge, a leader of the Navy’s successful wars on the Barbary pirates of Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli in the early 19th century.

“If four pirates in a dinghy can attack a vessel flying the Stars and Stripes and get away unscathed,” Pham predicted, others will be further emboldened.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com