Iran is using excessive EEZ claims to deny U.S. access
Iran has frequently threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for adverse sanctions or military action. Ratifying UNCLOS would nullify Iran’s challenges should it ever choose to close the strait to U.S. or other flagged ships. Moreover, ratifying LOSC will provide the U.S. Navy the strongest legal footing for countering an Iranian anti-access campaign in the Persian Gulf.
Quicktabs: Arguments
In the years since adoption of UNCLOS (1982) and its entry into force (1994), Iran and the United States have maintained a continuous dialogue of disagreement concerning U.S. transit rights in the Strait. Lacking diplo- matic relations, the adversaries have traded diplomatic démarches using the embassy of Switzerland in Iran as an intermediary.172 The United States continues to defend the presence of American warships, submarines, and aircraft through the Strait of Hormuz as a lawful exercise of freedom of navigation.173
Likewise, Iran is steadfast in rejecting these claims. In a television inter- view in 2008, for example, Hoseyn Panahi-Azar, the director-general of the legal and international affairs department of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, stated that the regime of innocent passage applies to U.S. warship transits in the Strait of Hormuz. Transit through the Strait may not be suspended, he acknowledged, but Iran was entitled to “impose certain limitations based on their own laws [even] for transit passage.”174
Iran maintains that the careful balance of rights and duties reflected in UNCLOS are available only as a specific condition of agreement of the package deal. Since the regime of transit passage is a quid pro quo for acceptance of other terms of the treaty, states not party to UNCLOS, such as the United States, are not entitled to exercise transit passage in the Strait of Hormuz. To permit the United States to enjoy transit passage is to indulge Washington in the very type of “cherry picking” among the provisions of UNCLOS that the package deal was designed to prevent. The regime of transit passage is reserved only for parties to UNCLOS.
While the regime of transit passage in Part III of UNCLOS should have been the last word on the Strait of Hormuz, it is not. Iran and the United States are not parties to the Convention. For its part, the United States pledged, even before the end of the Third United Nations Conference that it opposed the treaty, but only due to Part XI on seabed mining (which itself subsequently was revised in an implementing agreement in 1994 to satisfy U.S. and other developed states’ concerns).171 Iran never ratified the treaty either, however, so the Iranian-American bilateral rela- tionship in the Strait is not governed by the terms of the treaty.
In the face of overwhelming conventional power by the United States, Iran has few conventional military options that augur in its favor. Tehran instead likely would resort to weapons of mass destruction, small unit ma- rine guerilla forces, and swarming tactics to inflict maximum damage on oil shipping. Closure of the Strait of Hormuz is at the top of the list, as it hits the United States at the foundation of its power — the global economy and America’s perch atop a grandly formal Eurasian alliance system. The oil market shock caused by a closure of the Strait would separate the United States from its Arab state friends in the Middle East that rely on bringing oil to world markets, and European and Asian allies who are dependent on Gulf oil. In this rather unconventional way, Iran has a global power projection capability, which is why the Chief of Naval Operations stated last year: “‘If you ask me what keeps me awake at night, it’s the Strait of Hormuz and the business going on in the Arabian Gulf[.]’”33
The Pentagon realizes the Strait is vulnerable. “‘The simple answer is yes, they can block it,’” stated Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey on January 8, 2012.34 For the past twenty years, Iran has invested heavily in the asymmetric capabilities needed to bypass the more powerful U.S. fleet and disrupt merchant shipping and threaten naval forces in the Strait. Iran has concentrated on acquiring naval mines, fleets of heavily armed speedboats, and powerful anti-ship cruise missiles, secret- ly situated along the bottleneck.
The regular Iranian Navy is relatively professional, and it operates an aging conventional surface fleet that is the remnant of the Shah’s constabu- lary force. The more politically favored and far less predictable Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN), however, is the country’s guerilla force at sea. The IRGCN has responsibility for security in the Strait of Hormuz, and since the early-1990s, it has invested heavily to keep U.S. forces off balance.35 The highly ideological IRGCN has 20,000 personnel and 5,000 Revolutionary Guard Marines.36 These forces regularly exercise war plans to close the Strait. The force operates from bases at Bandar Abbas and Qeshm along the Strait, practicing small boat swarm exercises against international shipping traffic with as many as forty boats.37
Iran’s naval inventory includes cruise missiles (generally first generation Chinese copies of the French Exocet missile and the indigenous Nasr missile), marine mines, Kilo- and Yono-class submarines, and Peykaap fast attack craft, the latter of which are armed with cruise missiles and torpe- does. These proxy forces are dispersed and mobile, and have mastered swarm techniques to overwhelm more powerful foes. More than a decade ago, a classified Department of Defense war game concluded that agile swarms of IRGCN speedboats could inflict major damage on the U.S. Navy’s powerful warships in a conflict. In the game, the United States lost sixteen major warships, including an aircraft carrier, to swarms of enemy speedboats.38