On Biden policy in the Middle East: A timeline tells a tale

Assistance was rendered to Central Park by USS Mason (DDG-87) and a nearby Japanese destroyer.  The intervention of the destroyers prompted the hijacking party to depart the tanker in haste and flee in its small boat.  Mason then pursued the hijackers and detained them.

I know there were Chinese warships nearby that didn’t render aid to the tanker.  That doesn’t matter.  (It really doesn’t.  The strategic-level weakness of the U.S. posture is the only thing that’s important.  It drives everything else.)

What matters is that after the incident, Houthis launched two ballistic missiles from Yemen toward the site of the hijacking and the intervention by Mason and JDS Akebono (DD-108).  The missiles missed Mason by some 10 nautical miles, but since the Houthis don’t have indirect-fire (beyond-line-of-sight) missiles that can accurately target a moving destroyer at sea, that’s a meaningless point.  The meaningful point is that the missiles were fired by the Houthis toward the location of the incident.

That turned out to matter particularly because after the initial reports had said the hijackers were Houthis, the Pentagon came out with an update stating that they were Somalis.

Far from meaning this was all a coincidence, something the facts could not possibly mean, this wrinkle clarifies instead that a hijacking by Somalis was known to the Houthis in Yemen, in real time.  The Houthis knew where it was – even if they weren’t the hijackers – and targeted that area with two ballistic missiles after the hijacking attempt went sour.  One possibility, of course, given numerous recent reports of Houthi drones in maritime incidents, is that the Houthis are tracking activity at sea using drone surveillance.

It’s not clear if the Pentagon’s update was meant to allay fears about the Houthis being involved in hijackings, or if it was merely to correct the record, like a good accountant.  But what is clear is that a colluding involvement with Somalis and Houthis performing separate but related tasks, followed by Houthi missile launches toward international air and/or water space, would be a significantly bigger regional escalation problem than involvement by Houthis alone.  We can’t be completely certain that Iran is a coordinating party in such an arrangement.  But that sure is a good bet (especially if drone surveillance is involved).

As discussed on Twitter/X, the Houthis (and Iran) should be deterred already by the U.S. military posture from committing any such disruptive act against regional security and stability.  The big problem here is that they are not so deterred.

Also on Sunday 26 November, the carrier USS Dwight D Eisenhower (CVN-69), with its air wing and a couple of escort ships, entered the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.  The strait transit came after several weeks of Ike parking and “doing doughnuts” in the Gulf of Oman off the Omani coast, a history noted in an earlier TOC article.  We don’t have a time hack for the transit, but I estimate based on normal tactical preferences that it occurred before the Central Park incident.  The Navy prefers for high-value assets to transit the SOH in daylight.

This move puts Ike and her air wing in position, at last, to have tactical influence on the calculations of Iran in both Iranian territory and that of Iraq and Syria, where Iran-backed proxy militias have been attacking U.S. troops.

But that’s not the full story – with the carrier or with the hijacking and missile launches in the Central Park incident.

Any recounting of the Central Park incident is incomplete without noting a definitive move made more than two and a half years earlier, when the new Biden administration removed the Houthis from the terrorist designation list.  Many observers were making that point on Monday 27 November.

That’s one front bracket of the timeline we’re going to look at.  The other connects directly to the Ike’s entry into the Persian Gulf on 26 November 2023.  Hardly anyone even knows this about it, but Ike’s entry was the first by a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier since early 2021.

Navy Times explains that USS Nimitz (CVN-68) was the last carrier in the Gulf:  “The carrier [Ike], which departed Norfolk, Virginia, in October [2023] for a scheduled deployment, is the first carrier to steam in those waters since the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group operated there in September 2020.”

September 2020 was when Nimitz first entered the Persian Gulf on her 2020 deployment.  She actually went in and out several times in the ensuing months, under orders from then-President Trump due to Iranian provocations in the Gulf operational theater.  (I wrote about Nimitz’s departure without replacement at the time.)

And here’s where the initial, more proximate portion of our timeline starts.  It starts with and centers on events in the Biden administration.  This framing is valuable in its own right.  But it’s also necessary to set up the second, equally intriguing portion of the timeline.  That one starts earlier, and leads us by a separate path to the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel.  We will consider it at the end.

The sagas time-pinned:  U.S. moves and Iranian activism in the Middle East

After President Biden took office on 20 January 2021, our front-bracket events took place as follows:

On 3 February 2021, the Pentagon indicated that USS Nimitz was exiting the Persian Gulf for good.  There was no carrier to replace Nimitz for carrier presence in CENTCOM, a fact noted (though at low volume) by media at the time.  Nimitz, nearing the end of her deployment, steamed out of CENTCOM immediately after exiting the Strait of Hormuz, and headed home to Washington State on the West coast.

There was no carrier in the Persian Gulf, with close, direct tactical air access to Iraq, Syria, or Iran, between 3 February 2021 and 26 November 2023.  The only carrier presence in the larger region emerged briefly during the disastrous evacuation of Afghanistan later in 2021.  That presence was outside the Gulf.

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