By a margin of 342 to 69, the US House of Representatives voted this week to advance the Stop Harboring Iranian Petroleum (SHIP) Act, which would mandate sanctions on anyone involved in the trade of Iranian oil products, at any stage in the supply chain. A companion bill has been introduced in the Senate with 27 co-sponsors, and are envisioned as responses to the Iranian regime’s support for terrorism, particularly the dozens of attacks that have been carried out against American targets by militant groups in Iraq and Syria over the past several weeks.
Those attacks are evidently intended to keep pressure on Israel and its allies amidst the conflict that began October 7 with a surprise attack upon the Jewish state by the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist groups. The so-called Al-Aqsa Storm killed more than 1,300 Israelis, many of them women and children, but has been praised by Iranian officials as part of the “legitimate defense” of the Palestinian people. Many of those officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, have even gone so far as to predict that it would hasten the “eradication” of the Jewish state by mobilizing the various militant groups that Tehran collectively refers to as the “Axis of Resistance.”
Khamenei repeated this threat last week, directly addressing Israeli and Jewish audiences with a statement in the Hebrew language. It once again referred to the October 7 attack as a “crushing defeat,” before asserting that ongoing Israeli retaliations against Hamas would be “silenced in days” if not for American support. Tehran is presumably working to undermine that support by encouraging its proxies to attack regional bases housing US military personnel, while a far-reaching military buildup continues inside the Islamic Republic.
That buildup entails a number of supposed milestones and recent achievements, though many experts have called into question the veracity of certain Iranian claims. Last week, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed to have unveiled a hypersonic ballistic missile – the second of its kind – and even asserted that it was capable of evading the most advanced missile defense systems. If true, this would represent an achievement shared the United States and China, and perhaps nobody else – a near-impossible feat for a country facing extensive international isolation and some of the heaviest sanctions in history.
There is no indication that Iran has tested the Fattah-2 ballistic missile, but the regime’s failure to dispel skepticism on this point has not prevented it from making similarly bold claims in other areas of military development. On Monday, for instance, Iran’s Fars News Agency quoted Rear Admiral Alireza Tangsiri, commander of the IRGC’s naval forces, as saying that the country has become “a progressive and deterrent power” that commands the respect of “all self-proclaimed maritime superpowers” and causes frustration among them.
Tangsiri praised an Iranian Navy flotilla for completing an uninterrupted circumnavigation of the globe earlier this year, and thus recalled attention to contemporary Iranian statements which said that such an operation would demonstrate Tehran’s ability to project force anywhere in the world, including near the Western hemisphere. The implied claim of readiness to confront American and European naval forces was reinforced by Fars’ vague statement that Iran had thwarted “several pirate attacks on both Iranian and foreign oil tankers and trade vessels.”
The state media outlet also said that “the Iranian Navy has been conducting patrols in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, safeguarding merchant containers and oil ships owned or leased by Iran or other countries.” Both statements were no doubt intended, at least in part, to highlight the worsening tensions at sea between Iran and its Western adversaries. Each side of that latent conflict has attempted to seize commercial vessels, with differing levels of success, as Iran has sought both to punish ships for alleged ties to Israel and to retaliate against Western enforcement of existing sanctions on Iran’s oil trade.
Against the backdrop of the war between Israel and Hamas, Iran has evidently enlisted elements of its “Resistance Axis” to carry out that retaliation and punishment on its behalf. Since the outbreak of that war, the Iran-backed Houthi movement has fired a number of missiles and drones along the Red Sea in the direction of Israel. Although these have all reportedly been intercepted by Israeli missile defenses or American warships in the area, the Houthi doubled down on their provocations last week by targeting at least one such warship alongside commercial vessels transiting the Sea of Oman.
After boarding one cargo ship via helicopter and commandeering it last week, the Houthi proceeded, days later, to attempt a second seizure before being repelled when the US Navy responded to a distress call. During the incident, the Houthi also fired a ballistic missile in the direction of the USS Mason, though it fell far short of the apparent target, effectively bringing an end to the confrontation.
The Mason was reportedly accompanied by a Japanese destroyer, thus illustrating the multinational makeup of a counter-piracy task force that is operating in the region. This US-led coalition was established with the specific aim of responding to escalating Iranian threats to commercial shipping, and last weekend’s incident arguably demonstrates that that mission has only increased in importance since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
As part of its own militarist propaganda, the Iranian regime has attempted to position itself at the head of an alternative maritime security coalition, ostensibly comprised of regional powers and tasked with driving out Western influence. Although Tehran reportedly succeeded in convincing the United Arab Emirates to cease participation in the US-led coalition, there has been no recent information to suggest that a viable alternative is taking shape, unless one counts piracy by the Houthi or other militant groups as evidence of the Islamic Republic expanding its control over regional waters.
Realistically, though, Tehran’s control cannot be said to expand beyond the Strait of Hormuz, and even that is dubious given that warships from the US and its allies routinely transit that narrow passageway while accompanying commercial vessels as they enter and leave the Persian Gulf. Recently, though, the IRGC conducted drills on three islands just inside the Strait.
The move comes just after a US Navy flotilla entered the Strait, led by the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower and accompanied by British and French warships. Iranian officials have threatened to close off the Strait to international maritime traffic in response to various perceived slights by Western powers, and although its capacity to do so is widely disputed, but with a broader military buildup and mobilization of terrorist proxies, would certainly become a threat.
