Gunboat diplomacy was a tactic famously utilized by some of the imperialist powers during the 19th century. It is a somewhat outdated concept, although that doesn’t seem to have deterred the Iranian IRGC. Last week, ships from the U.S. Fifth Fleet were sailing through international waters in the Strait of Hormuz when they were threatened by high-speed, head-on assaults by three naval vessels from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The Strait of Hormuz lies between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, providing the only sea passage to the Indian Ocean for crude oil from many of the world’s largest producers. An average of 21 million barrels a day flows through the strait, which is over 20% of global consumption. Around one-third of the world’s sea-borne petroleum and nearly all the liquefied gas from Qatar, the leading global gas exporter, passes through this constricted chokepoint only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point.
With the current global energy crisis caused by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, the route has become even more strategically critical. As the theocratic regime faces crisis upon crisis at home and abroad, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi, known as the “Butcher of Tehran,” have ramped up their aggressive activities in the strait to frighten those they regard as the regime’s enemies, even threatening to close the strait altogether.
Using the Iranian IRGC to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz is hardly likely to encourage American sympathy. Indeed, the United States knows that the Iranian IRGC and its extraterritorial Quds Force are behind all of Iran’s proxy wars in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza and are known to sponsor international terror worldwide. The regime’s foreign wars and acts of terror are a calculated strategy to distract their enraged and starving population from another nationwide uprising that could sweep the mullahs from power.
Khamenei presides over a pyramid of corruption. The Iranian IRGC answers directly to Khamenei. It controls almost the entire economy, including all of Iran’s monetary and financial institutions, and pays no tax. It is behind the acceleration of the regime’s determined efforts to construct a nuclear weapon and its clandestine activities have continued before, during, and since the signing of the deeply flawed JCPOA. Sham attempts at bullying the United States into reinstating the deal are doomed to fail, as are aggressive attempts to threaten international shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.