Let’s toss this to the judges. Starting last night, the US began striking Iranian forces near Bandar Abbas for locking surface-to-air radars on US Navy aircraft. Our ships fired on and destroyed Iranian boats attempting to mine the Strait of Hormuz. And this morning, CENTCOM announced that it would begin escorting tankers out of the Persian Gulf again, a few weeks after Donald Trump paused Project Freedom.
So is that operation back on? At first, it seemed like it, and even the Wall Street Journal thought so:
The U.S. Navy has restarted assisting vessel crossings through the Strait of Hormuz, according to U.S. military officials.
The officials told The Wall Street Journal that a Greek supertanker laden with two million barrels of crude was guided by the U.S. Navy, as it crossed the waterway off the Omani coast.
The ship was stuck in the Middle East Gulf since early March and is now heading to India to deliver its cargo.
The protection is a renewed push of “Project Freedom,” an earlier U.S. initiative to guide ships through the vital shipping corridor that was halted roughly 36 hours into the operation.
Later, however, the WSJ corrected its story after CENTCOM denied that Project Freedom had restarted. Instead, the spokesman said that, er, the US would just help vessels traverse the Strait of Hormuz to deliver their cargoes:
A spokesman for U.S. Central Command said that the U.S. wasn’t resuming Project Freedom and that reporting that said it was picking back up was inaccurate.
The officials said the Navy plans to help about a dozen vessels including supertankers and container ships to cross through the waterway over the coming days.
Well, that certainly clarifies matters! We’re just helping commercial shipping through the Strait and taking out hostile craft and assets that interfere with it. How that differs from Project Freedom is anyone’s guess.
So far, three vessels have made it through today, the WSJ added in an update. Notably, one of the three was inbound to the Persian Gulf, but apparently not heading for an Iranian port:
Three large vessels transited the strait with their AIS tracking switched off, according to analysis on Tuesday from Windward, a shipping-intelligence firm. The ships included an inbound container ship, an outbound bulk carrier and a third vessel that was likely a tanker, the firm said. Vessels sometimes switch off their AIS to avoid detection or to remain safe during hostilities.
Meanwhile, three speedboats of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were detected nearby, according to Windward. The vessels maintained a patrol pattern east of the commercial ships, the firm said. The company uses high-resolution images and other sources of intelligence to analyze the situation in the strait.
This makes it sound very much like Project Freedom has restarted, sotto voce at least. The US has taken steps over the last 24 hours to begin forcing the Strait of Hormuz open, and the Iranians haven’t done much about it … yet. Three fast-attack boats on the eastern perimeter of the international waterway is not much of a response, not when the IRGC used to deploy them in swarms. After running afoul of Seahawks and Apaches in the early going, either the IRGC has run short of these boats or wised up about their vulnerabilities when matched up against a modern blue-water navy and a command structure that understands combined arms.
So why not just say that the US has restarted Project Freedom? The US and its partners likely want to increase pressure on Iran to stop stalling the negotiations over the “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU), the framework for dialing down tensions while forcing Iran to cut a deal over its uranium stores. Trump still wants a negotiated settlement that gets him the “nuclear dust” and leaves Hormuz open and free, and apparently still thinks he can get it with the help of Pakistan and Qatar.
So do the Iranians, apparently. The regime finally restored Internet connectivity for the first time since the protests in early January over the currency crisis nearly tipped over into a popular revolt:
“Following the mission of the esteemed President and in line with the government’s promise, the first step towards free and regulated access to cyberspace has been taken,” Mohammad Reza Aref, the first vice president of Iran, said in a statement Tuesday.
Adding, “With the reopening of the internet, smart services will be facilitated, the demands of the people who stood by the system and Iran will be met, and the obstacles to knowledge-based development and scientific authority will be removed.”
The posture of the regime seems to have shifted toward a more realistic appraisal of its situation, too, the WSJ notes separately. The regime has not responded to the restart of Project Freedom in hopes that they can extricate themselves from the mess they created:
Iran is pursuing two intertwining goals in its negotiating strategy with the U.S., say Iranian officials and Arab mediators: securing financial relief for an economy that is under severe strain without giving enough ground on its nuclear program to allow President Trump to claim victory.
Iran mostly shook off an overnight skirmish with U.S. forces in which it lost several Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fighters, staying at the negotiating table on Tuesday. Tehran has been seeking economic relief by regaining control of some of the $100 billion in assets frozen by the West and regaining access to world oil markets, these officials say. …
Iran signaled that strikes wouldn’t derail negotiations. Tehran’s top negotiator, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, remained in Qatar on Tuesday for talks after arriving a day earlier. The officials said Iran delayed announcing that several members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been killed in the strike to keep the talks on track.
Both of these developments show that some people in Iran want an exit ramp from a disastrous conflict. Turning the Internet back on is a risk for several reasons, but one of the biggest is that it will set an expectation for a return to normalcy. Renewed fighting will create even more backlash, especially when the populace will use the connectivity to get access to outside media reports rather than remain stuck in the IRGC’s propaganda bubble of the last three months. The regime has to have participated in that reopening (as opposed to just the supposedly independent civilian government), which means the IRGC is investing in a negotiated settlement in the near future.
Does that mean that Vahidi and his Nepo Babytollah sock puppet will really agree to surrender the “nuclear dust,” as Trump claims? I’m still highly skeptical that the IRGC junta will agree to anything in good faith, but the way in which the White House claims to have structured the MOU means the IRGC won’t get any benefits without first providing their linked concessions. The sotto voce restart of Project Freedom is a signal that Trump won’t wait forever for that deal to get inked. If this deal happens at all, it will be within the next couple of days. Stay tuned, as always.
Editor’s Note: For decades, former presidents have been all talk and no action. Now, Donald Trump is eliminating the threat from Iran once and for all.
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