Fifty years ago I lived for five years in the Middle East and tried to understand the culture. The difficulties in this area have been caused by a total lack of understanding of their rules of life.
Shopping for a pair of shoes or a truck load of grain, invariably involves what we consider graft. Look at the Australian Wheat Board Inquiry where graft to Saddam Hussein was condemned by Australia. Palm greasing is the way that their commercial activities are accomplished and have done for millenia. Because it is not our way, we condemn it.
Aid to the Middle East fifty years ago had no effect upon the workers of the area. Military aid went to military people where it is used to subdue ordinary people. Food aid usually went to feed the military and financial aid ended up in a bank account somewhere, somewhere where it could not be located.
Relationships with the Middle East and Asia will never improve while we insist that our way of doing business has to replace theirs.

One possible solution might be to station troops on every single vessel that passes through these flashpoints.
Each ship could have an exclusion zone within which any trespassing vessel would be blown out of the water and left to sink.
Such tough love might be the only thing that stops the pirates from collecting their Jizya.
Once the Mohammedans get the idea, they will hopefully take it as a message from Allah and desist.

Yes Proxy, most of the problems in the world today, can be traced to the day that emotive cr#p led to the finish of gun boat diplomacy.

The more things change, the more they stay the same:

"It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every muslim who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise."
"American Peace Commissioners to John Jay," March 28, 1786
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War

This problem is as old as Islam.