The Waterways: An “Accidental” Confrontation
Despite the Iran-as-bogeyman narrative, it is unlikely that Trump will launch any direct military attacks against Iran. This is a president who has voiced contempt for the $6 trillion wasted on Mideast wars and interventions. More confrontation in the region will be costly, and is likely to draw him into clashes with major powers with which he’d prefer to do business.
Although he insists “all options” remain on the table with Iran, Trump’s choices are actually fairly limited. Sanctions never worked and the Iran nuclear deal has ensured that other global players needn’t participate in future ones. Under pressure from allies, he has backtracked on his threats to scuttle the nuclear agreement, which he now seems to understand would needlessly isolate the U.S., not Iran. Subversive activities—such as color revolution plots, propaganda, or cyberwarfare—have proven futile given Iran’s historic vigilance on and within its borders. Conventional war would require a substantial Iranian provocation and isn’t likely to be sanctioned by the UN Security Council.
But there is one theater in which a U.S.-Iran confrontation could easily spark: the various waterways around the Islamic Republic and its neighborhood.
Both countries have plenty of naval and shipping vessels in close daily proximity to each other. Tensions are high, rhetoric remains inflamed, and Iran’s foes in the Persian Gulf and Washington are in a great position to trigger an event, then fan its flames.
Defense Secretary James Mattis, a committed Iran hawk, almost did so several weeks ago when he considered letting U.S. forces board an Iranian ship in Arabian Sea international waters, according to a passing mention of the incident in the New York Times. But the Intercept understood the import of the close encounter and led with the headline: “Trump’s ‘moderate’ defense secretary has already brought us to the brink of war.”
War is indeed a distinct possibility if the U.S. makes an aggressive move. Iran is no banana republic. It has endured an eight-year war with Iraq, which was encouraged, financed, and armed by great powers and regional states alike. The Islamic Republic performed a remarkable claw-back from the assault and went on to
amass conventional and asymmetrical capabilities to deter future attacks.
So when Trump saw fit to slap sanctions on Iran after a January 29 ballistic missile test, Iranians made sure to fire off
more, just a day after sanctions were announced. And the Iranian responses keep coming, a reminder that any military confrontation with Iran will be highly unpredictable. The Islamic Republic makes sure to remind us of its
overt and
hidden capabilities through regular public
missile tests,
advanced air defense
demonstrations and war game
exercises, such as the just-concluded
Velayat 95 drills in the Strait of Hormuz, Sea of Oman, and Indian Ocean.
As tensions between the U.S. and Iran have increased, so have the number of gulfs, straits, seas and oceans in which the two nations’ navies and commercial vessels now operate. The Pentagon insists its naval presence in so many far-flung west Asian waterways is vital to thwart terrorism and piracy. But this is Iran’s backyard, and the Islamic Republic needs little justification to police regional waterways against these very same kinds of threats—and to protect its own territorial and maritime borders.
During a November visit to Tehran, I asked Dr. Sadollah Zarei, director of the think tank the Andisheh Sazan Noor Institute and a MENA expert close to the IRGC, about this. “U.S. actions give us a behavior precedent in our naval reach,” he said. The U.S. naval presence in Iran’s neighboring waters “gives us even more right to be active in the Persian Gulf, in the Gulf of Aden, and other waters.” As a result, Zarei explained, “we are now in the Gulf of Bengal and the Indian Ocean.”
Is Zarei worried about an adversary state brandishing its vast military firepower within spitting distance? He cracks a smile and explains calmly: “When the U.S. is there, Iran’s focus and discipline is better. They’re useful that way. It brings us together, creates support for our security forces, our army, our borders.”
On the other side of the fence, Washington continues to feed this Iranian discipline and cohesion by elevating recent “incidents” in the waterways—mostly unrelated to Iran—into national media hysterics about Iran.
Investigative reporter Gareth Porter has worked to untangle fact from fiction over U.S. accusations that Iran is shipping arms to Yemen’s
Houthi rebels through some of these waterways. In short, Porter
has shown that most of the Pentagon’s claims appear to be demonstrably false. And because of
Wikileaks’ 2010 State Department cables cache, we now know that—in private at least—U.S. officials are also skeptical of their own public charges.