WarSclerotic

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps launched on Saturday a drill near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the passageway for nearly a third of all oil traded by sea.

Television showed amphibious forces landing on the island of Qeshm in the Persian Gulf during the exercises, in which naval vessels, helicopters, drones, rocket launchers and commando units also took part.

The annual war game dubbed “The Great Prophet” came a day after the USS John C. Stennis, a U.S. aircraft carrier, sailed into the Persian Gulf. The carrier was shadowed by Revolutionary Guards speedboats. An Iranian drone flying near the carrier, presumably in order to film U.S. troops.

Iranian speedboats also fired rockets in the area of the carrier, but a U.S. Navy spokeswoman said they were pointed away from U.S. vessels. “We believe it was part of their [Iran’s] naval exercise,” Lt. Chloe Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Bahrain-based U.S. Fifth Fleet, said.

Tehran feels increasingly under pressure after President Donald Trump in November renewed sanctions that the U.S. had lifted under a 2015 nuclear deal. The U.S. pulled out of the deal in May.

“Hopefully, with these exercises, our enemies will realize more than ever how devastating our response would be to any move by them,” IRGC chief Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said.

In an apparent comment on the arrival of the Stennis, Jafari told state television: “They’ve come, pretending to ensure the Persian Gulf states’ security. … But it is Iran which has to provide security for the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf and our friends and brotherly countries on its southern coast.”