Precisely what is at stake in the contemporary South China Sea? The content, effect and application of legal rules? The basis for those rules? The order within which those rules exist? Or order in another sense, that of an implied hierarchy with only room for the United States right at the very top? This chapter invokes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version of the Faust myth with an eye on, and in the context of, the South China Sea but from the removed if not quite neutral perspective of the East African Coast. Specifically, how would the struggle look to a Somali pirate? This follows the example of Niccolò Machiavelli’s famous dedication of The Prince to the Magnificent Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici that one needs to be down in the plains to study mountains and in the mountains to study plains.