ABOARD THE U.S.S. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, in the North Arabian Sea — Out here, deterring Iran means avoiding Iran.
The 5,600 men and women aboard this nuclear-powered aircraft carrier do not venture near Iranian waters, despite a warning from President Trump’s national security adviser that the warship is in the Middle East “to send a clear and unmistakable message” to Iran to steer clear of American interests in the region.
Instead, it is the Abraham Lincoln that has steered clear of Iran. In the past four months, the ship has entered neither the Persian Gulf nor the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial oil-tanker highways it is supposed to protect.
“We recognize that tensions are high, and we don’t want to go to war,” said Capt. William Reed, a fighter pilot who commands the ship’s air wing. “We don’t want to escalate things with Iran.”
In short, the Navy has carried out the order of its commander in chief to counter Iran in the Middle East, but in the least provocative way. Just where to station the Lincoln — one of the country’s 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers — is a decision made by the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which has its headquarters in Bahrain. The fear is that sending an aircraft carrier through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, right when Mr. Trump has turned up the heat on Tehran, could provoke exactly the kind of conflict the Pentagon wants to avoid.
“Anytime a carrier moves close to shore, and especially into confined waters, the danger to the ship goes up significantly,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired admiral and former supreme allied commander for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “It becomes vulnerable to diesel submarines, shore-launched cruise missiles and swarming tactics by small boats armed with missiles” — all parts of the Iranian arsenal of weaponry and tactical maneuvers.
During each of those deployments, the carriers routinely tangled with Iranian fast boats. Both sides constantly watched each other. American naval ships openly roamed the waters along Iran’s 1,100 mile-long southern coastline, their radars trained on the Iranian shore and on Iranian ships leaving their harbors. Iranian fighter jets patrolled the skies, keeping an eye on American combat planes taking off from the Roosevelt every time an Iranian jet came close to the ship.But these are not normal times. Mr. Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, including his withdrawal from an agreement meant to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and the imposition of crippling sanctions, has sharply increased tensions between the two adversaries. The Navy has sent smaller warships through the Strait of Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf, but Navy officials say privately that an aircraft carrier could prove too tantalizing a target for Iran to resist.
Why the U.S. Should Remain Protector of World Oil Flows
President Trump has suggested handing protection of tankers in the Strait of Hormuz to other countries, though that would carry its own costs
As tensions with Iran began escalating last month, President Trump made a startling statement: The U.S. shouldn’t be bearing the burden of protecting the flow of oil tankers past Iranian waters and through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the principal assignments the U.S. has accepted for the last four decades.
Instead, he said, China and Japan depend far more on Persian Gulf oil than does the U.S. these days, so they should protect their own ships. “We don’t even need to be there in that the U.S. has just become (by far) the largest producer of Energy anywhere in the world!” the president tweeted.
As tensions mount further, thanks to Iran’s announcement over the weekend that it is breaking the level of uranium enrichmentagreed to in the 2015 deal restraining its nuclear program, Mr. Trump’s pronouncement is more relevant than ever. Iran has made clear in recent weeks that it has two weapons with which to fight back against crippling American economic sanctions: One is to scare the world by reviving its nuclear program. The other is to shake the world economy by blocking the flow of oil tankers carrying oil out through the Strait of Hormuz, a threat illustrated with attacks on a handful of tankers.
In response, Mr. Trump was asking, essentially: Why should we care, if we don’t need your region’s oil as much as we used to? It is a question that seems at once both reckless and perfectly reasonable—one a lot of Americans probably are asking themselves.
Yet the question also serves as notice that political leaders regularly need to remind Americans, and perhaps themselves, why they benefit from assuming the kind of world leadership role that includes protecting the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf.
The reasons the U.S. should still accept—indeed, should want—this role are both practical and geopolitical. The practical reasons start with the fact that the U.S. economy is still vulnerable to a disruption of oil supplies, from the Persian Gulf or anywhere else.
Oil is the ultimate fungible global product. If the price goes up for somebody because of a supply disruption, it goes up for everybody. The origin of the barrel of oil from which your gallon of gas is derived doesn’t really matter much in determining how much it costs. If there is a global shortfall, everybody pays the price, literally.
In that global marketplace, the Strait of Hormuz isn’t quite as important as it once was, but it is still very important. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that 21 million barrels of oil a day flowed through the Strait last year, or about 21% of the world’s total consumption.