Relations have ping-ponged back and forth between the prospect of hopeful dialogue and peace and the smell of cordite and talk of war.Įven as nuclear negotiations continue, Iran is making provocative moves around the Middle East-providing an unprecedented flotilla of weapons to the Houthis in Yemen, boarding the Maersk Tigris, and apparently attempting to do the same to a U.S. For three decades, the two nations have been suspended between peace and war, between light and darkness, sparring repeatedly in the twilight.
That President Obama would face new military tensions with Iran just as he celebrates a huge potential breakthrough for peace regarding the nation’s nuclear program isn’t altogether surprising. Iran has long been a difficult conundrum for U.S. Unfortunately, the Pentagon has begun listening to those lessons only recently. The 1980s conflict also has influenced the Iranian military’s view of any future war with the United States, and it’s spent decades ensuring that it won’t repeat the crippling mistakes made fighting a previous U.S.
Ryan Crocker, one of America’s old Middle East hands and whose first posting as a newly minted diplomat was to Khorramshahr during the days of the Shah, once explained, “For Iran, history is not the past, but the present.” Just as Vietnam shaped a generation of American military officers, the Tanker War of the 1980s profoundly influenced the thinking of Iran’s current military leaders in fact, today Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy is headed by a veteran of that war. policymakers-and too many military officers-have long forgotten. The headlines could have been ripped right out of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when naval engagements with Iran became all-too commonplace.
President Barack Obama must have spent last week wondering if he’d stumbled back into the 1980s as he responded to new Iranian aggressions in the Strait of Hormuz and ordered the Navy’s 5th Fleet to escort ships transiting the Persian Gulf. These views represent his own and not those of the U.S. Crist is the author of The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (Penguin 2012).
0 kommentar(er)
