ANALYSIS - White House Aides Push International Patrol To Escalate 'Tanker Wars' With Iran

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 23rd July, 2019) US President Donald Trump's top cabinet officials appear to be hijacking White House policy in an effort to escalate the current so-called tanker wars with Iran including with an idea to create an international coalition to patrol the Persian Gulf, analysts told Sputnik.

On July 19, Iran seized a United Kingdom (UK)-flagged oil tanker, the Stenio Imperio in the Strait of Hormuz. Speaker of the Iranian parliament Ali Larijani told a legislative session in Tehran that "the Revolutionary Guards response was a response to the UK seizure of an Iranian tanker in the Strait of Gibraltar on June 4 which Iran has described as an act of "pure piracy."

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is considering a plan to create an international coalition to protect maritime seaways off Iran and Yemen following recent attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz

University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle told Sputnik, however, that instead of stabilizing and boosting security in the region, the proposal could destroy it.

"This whole venture is extremely dangerous and could readily lead to outright war," Boyle said. "Once naval hostilities are underway, the Trump administration can easily escalate them into all-out war against Iran."

White House National Security Adviser John Bolton had worked under President Ronald Reagan during the so-called "tanker war" between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s when both countries attacked each other's shipping in the Gulf, Boyle recalled.

"Bolton knows exactly what he is doing here since he worked for Reagan at that time... That Tanker War degenerated into outright military hostilities between the United States and Iran, which is the real objective here today,'" he said.

The Reagan administration did not provoke Iran into a full-scale conflict with the United States at that time but Bolton appeared to hope to succeed in that aim now, Boyle advised.

"The immediate objective here is to re-ignite the Tanker Wars from the Iraq-Iran War that the Reagan administration illegally intervened into on behalf of Iraq. Now they are going at it again figuring this time it will create a casus belli," he said.

Washington was trying to force its European and Northeast Asian allies to join the new coalition in a bid to isolate Tehran, Boyle pointed out.

"Right now it looks like the Trump administration is trying to dragoon the NATO States into 'Sentinel' and other states that get their oil from the Gulf like Japan and South Korea as well as the Arab Gulf States," he said.

Center for Freedom & Democracy Director Ivan Eland told Sputnik that the United States would also seek to gather all its Arab allies into the new anti-Iranian coalition.

"The coalition will probably be all the Arab enemies of Iran: Maybe almost every country except Qatar. The real objective may be to get into a maritime conflict with Iran by miscalculation or 'accident,'" he said. "This might be a gambit by hawkish foreign policy advisers Bolton and Pompeo to back into war, because their boss would rather use threats merely to get Iran to the negotiating table. And war could be possible."

US hawks could be angling for a maritime war with Iran now, Eland cautioned.

"Punishing Iran at sea is less escalatory than bombing the country or any ground attack, either one of which could trigger Iranian attacks on US targets throughout the middle East," he said.

US policymakers might also believe that such clashes at sea likely could be confined to jousting with the Iranians, Eland suggested.

"Even if a maritime war with Iran doesn't break out, this would be a dangerous escalatory move by the US," he said.