Iran is preparing to reprise the saber-rattling and aggression that brought the United States to the brink of a clash in the Persian Gulf last year, according to U.S. sources and analysts.
“What we have moving forward in the Gulf is, this is really Iran trying to reassert a new normal that, ‘We will be doing this to you for the foreseeable future,’” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Behnam Ben Taleblu, an expert in Iranian aggression, told the Washington Examiner. “I think this will be another summer of Iranian escalation.”
That dynamic was made clear through a pair of ostentatious provocations last week, including one incident in which Iranian fast-attack boats swarmed U.S. Navy warships. Just days earlier, a Hong Kong-flagged oil tanker was briefly forced into Iranian territorial waters by forces “believed to have been IRGC personnel” — a scene that recalled the longer-term seizure of a British-flagged tanker in 2019.
“Just getting back to normal after their COVID funk,” a congressional Republican aide told the Washington Examiner, referring to the devastating spread of the new infectious disease in Iran. “This is what they do when they’re not doing other stuff.”
Iran targeted oil tankers more forcefully last year, especially in the weeks around the first anniversary of President Trump’s withdrawal of the U.S. from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Those attacks were perceived by Iran hawks in Washington as an attempt to drive a wedge between the U.S. and western European proponents of the Iran deal — a series of maneuvers calibrated to avoid provoking a major retaliation or driving the Europeans into Trump’s arms.
A renewal of that strategy during a pandemic adds a wrinkle to this game of chicken. “We don’t have the bandwidth for a conflict right now, but that cuts both ways,” the congressional Republican aide said. “Either we ignore, or we do something over the top to head off escalation.”
Trump warned that the killing of an American constitutes a redline that will provoke U.S. retaliation, but Tehran might feel impunity to take aggressive actions short of that threshold, despite the recent U.S. killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
“They can be provocative without causing a war, and it’s the best of both worlds for them,” American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Michael Rubin told the Washington Examiner. “They get to depict themselves as strong, they don’t have to suffer the consequence, and they get a slight uptick in the price of oil, usually.”
That might sound like an argument for hitting back, but Rubin cautions that “there is no magic formula” because the regime might also benefit politically from a modest confrontation with the U.S.
“Normally, Iranians don’t particularly care for their government,” Rubin said. “If they can goad the Americans into a fight, even a small one, then they can try to rally the Iranians around the flag, and so the question is whether we will fall into that trap or not.”
Thus, any target for a potential retaliatory move would have to be chosen carefully, perhaps with a bias, analysts say, against a high-profile punishment of Iranian forces in the Straits of Hormuz.
“If the Iranians are going to engage in cross-domain escalation, we reserve the right to respond in different domains,” Ben Taleblu said. “Just because Iran does something at sea, that doesn’t mean that we have to respond at sea.”
