Iran has been threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz for years – it’s a key part of Tehran’s defence strategy
In a 1974 interview with the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the US journalist Mike Wallace briefly referred to the dispute over the naming of what has been generally called “Sinus Persicus” (Persian Gulf) since ancient times – and what Wallace called “the Gulf”.
Pahlavi asked his interviewer: “Why do you call it ‘the Gulf’? You have been to school, haven’t you?” to which Wallace replied that he had. “What was the name that you read during your school days?” the shah asked. “The Persian Gulf,” Wallace admitted, adding: “But they call it the Arabian Gulf”. “‘They’ can do many things,” Pahlavi concluded – and considered the dispute settled.
This Iran-centric attitude towards the Persian Gulf explains much of Iran’s strategy in the Strait of Hormuz even today. Match this commonly held and historically formed mindset with the geopolitical reality. Iran has the longest shoreline in the Persian Gulf and it controls the entry to the strait via a string of heavily fortified islands. You would imagine that Tehran’s ability to close the strait should have been clear to the decision-makers in Tel Aviv and Washington.
As if that wasn’t enough, Iran has dropped enough hints over the years that it considers its leverage over the strait as a trump card. Tehran has greeted pretty much every crisis it has faced with the assertion of its ability to control the flow of oil and gas through this chokepoint and the threat to restrict traffic through the strait or close the waterway entirely.
Relatively early in the republic’s existence, in 1987-88 – towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war – the Iranian navy mined international waters in the Persian Gulf. It did so in response to the so-called “tanker war”, a series of military assaults by Iran and Iraq against each other’s merchant vessels in the Persian Gulf and strait of Hormuz.
At about the same time, to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers attempting to transit the strait, the US launched Operation Earnest Will, which lasted from July 1987 to September 1988 and was the largest naval convoy operation since the second world war. As one of the major allies of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Kuwait’s vessels were drawing fire from Iran.
This internationalisation of the Iran-Iraq war lowered the threshold for further conflict and brought Iran and the US dangerously close to direct confrontation. In April 1988 the US navy launched Operation Praying Mantis against Iran in retaliation for USS Samuel B. Roberts hitting an Iranian mine.
Operation Mantis was the American navy’s largest surface combat action since the second world war. It destroyed several Iranian naval assets for the loss of one helicopter, before the Pentagon took the decision not to escalate and Iran took the US offer to de-escalate.
Lessons should be learned in terms of civilian casualties: the dangers of escalation became apparent at the end of the Iran-Iraq war when in July 1988, Iran Air Flight 655 – a civilian airliner – was shot down in the strait of Hormuz by the USS Vincennes, killing 290 civilians.
Asymmetric warfare
Throughout the 1990s and increasingly in the past two decades, Iran has continued to project its ability to control the strait of Hormuz in response to real and perceived US aggression. To that end, the Iranian navy has finessed its asymmetric strategy of using small fast-attack boats capable of harassing US navy vessels and international shipping. This is “gunboat diplomacy”, Tehran-style.
Between 2011-12, the then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened to close the strait in response to new sanctions from the west over its nuclear energy program. Again, in 2018 when the US president, Donald Trump, withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal struck by his predecessor Barack Obama and began to further intensify the sanctions regime against the country, Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani threatened to close the waterway. Neither Ahmadinejad nor Rouhani followed up on the threats, as they largely continued to prioritise diplomacy that would give Iran sanctions relief.
In recent years, whenever the US-Iran stand-off has intensified, Iran has reacted by threatening international shipping through the strait of Hormuz and in the wider Persian Gulf. But in none of those historical instances did Tehran actually follow through in this threat completely. But now it frames the attack from the US and Israel as an “existential” one that threatens Iranian sovereignty and territorial integrity.
This triggers Iran’s civilisational instinct as displayed all those years ago by the last shah. One reading of Persian etymology derives “Hormuz” from the Middle Persian pronunciation of the name of Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian deity of the ancient Persian kings. (Another translates the name as a corruption of Hur-Muz – meaning place of dates.)
In Iranian strategic culture, this history gives it the right to act as the hegemon in the Persian Gulf. It is astonishing that US and Israeli strategists were seemingly unaware of this history. They should have known how central the strait of Hormuz has been to Iran’s strategic calculations. Both are now in evidence at this dangerous juncture for the region and the wider world.
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.