Retaliation: Lessons From Greek-Iranian Naval Incidents

Two and half millennia since the Battle of Salamis, Iran and Greece once again found themselves entangled in naval incidents, from which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has learned the inefficient lesson of responding in kind. On April 15, Greece’s coast guard seized Lana, a Russian flagged and operated crude oil tanker in the Aegean Sea, citing violations of international sanctions imposed against Russia. At the time, Greek authorities emphasized the seizure order concerned the ship itself and not its cargo. However, by May 26, following a “judicial intervention by U.S. authorities concerning the ship’s cargo,” crude oil was confiscated by the U.S. government as a part of U.S. sanctions against Iran. The IRGC retaliated on May 27 by seizing two Greek oil tankers off the coast of Iran. And, on June 9, Ahmed Naderi, Iran’s ambassador to Athens, tweeted that a Greek court of appeals had overturned the Greeks’ original seizure of the oil, and the Associated Press confirmed the story.

• June 14: Mohammad-Javan Akhavan, Javan newspaper executive director, in an overview of the affair wrote in an editorial: “As predicted, when the Islamic Republic of Iran retaliated beyond proportion, the logic of power cleared the path of release of the property of the Iranian nation unjustly looted in Greece … It appears such retaliation, which at times punitively exceeds the enemy’s initial act, has to some extent proved its efficacy and can impact international and regional power equations.” Addressing the West, he concluded: “Take a look at the oil market: If we are not allowed to sell oil, you may not be able to purchase oil from your regional vassals.”

Javan often serves as the mouthpiece of the IRGC, so the editorial should be taken seriously as reflecting the dominant view among the IRGC leadership. But while the logic of retaliation as deterrence may be valid, there is also an alternative lesson that the IRGC leadership ought to have learned from the affair: the logic of a rational resolution of the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program, which caused the U.S. sanctions regime against Iran in the first place.

AGSIW’s Iran Media Review monitors, translates, and reviews critical Persian-language media sources identifying important developments and trends in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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