Lost at sea: How two Iranian warships are testing American mettle

The Biden administration has tried to deflect anything that could possibly derail negotiations for a new nuclear deal.

What is the Iranian navy doing in the southern Atlantic? It is a question that Pentagon officials have had a hard time answering since late May, when they became aware that a large, repurposed oil tanker and a newly built frigate—both with Iran’s navy—were sailing past the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, heading westward.

Officially, the Iranians sent both ships to improve “their seafaring capacity” in untested, difficult waters far from home. If nothing else, Iran is flexing its muscles and seeking to project power beyond its near abroad. But U.S. officials worry that the larger ship—which satellite imagery shows is carrying seven fast boats of the type Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps use in the Persian Gulf to swarm larger vessels—may be carrying weapons to its Southern Hemisphere ally, Venezuela…

Iran has also been ferrying mysterious goods by cargo plane to Venezuela for quite some time, and it could deliver weapons—if this is indeed what the ships’ journey is about—by cargo plane. What, then, is the reason for the lengthy journey across perilous waters, by two warships, if not to poke America in the eye?

Because it thinks Washington will not push back, Iran is trying to provoke the United States in its own backyard, even at a time when the two sides appear close to a deal in Vienna to return to compliance with the 2015 nuclear accord, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The Biden administration has done everything in its power to make Iran think the U.S. is in retreat. It has done so in the hope of mollifying Iran and persuading it to negotiate. It has repeatedly said that “maximum pressure,” the Trump administration’s Iran strategy, did not yield any result. And so the new administration has dusted off the old policy playbook from the Obama administration.