March 17, 2023
The map below shows the route taken, which ignored the Panama Canal, despite an Iranian Navy announcement that it would set up a “presence” in the canal.
The Iranian Navy sailed two ships into the Brazilian harbor of Rio de Janeiro, prompting many rightwing American politicians to shout about a threat to the United States, but the US Navy hasn’t shown any concern.
The Iranian vessels are making a round-the-world tour. But they aren’t making it very quickly, raising questions about whether something has gone wrong and the ships got stuck at sea for weeks.
They left Bandar Abbas last September and docked in Jakarta November 5-11. They left Jakarta and took 107 days or 3-1/2 months to reach Rio on February 26, without announcing any port calls in between. That meant the ships traveled about 6 miles per hour (9-1/2 kilometers per hour), which is fast for a rowboat but extremely slow for any powered vessel, suggesting one of the ships had suffered a breakdown.
But Iran has said nothing about any breakdown or delay.
The two ships are the 1,500-ton frigate Dena, Iran’s largest warship, and the 121,000-ton Makran, a brand-new supply ship. The Makran is not a warship; its main task is to carry all the food, fuel and other supplies the Dena needs for such a long trip.
While the Dena is Iran’s largest warship, at 1,500 tons it is just one-third the size of the main class of ships in the US Coast Guard.
Normally, a ship sailing from Jakarta to Rio de Janeiro would go through the Panama Canal. But the Dena and Makran did not. They instead sailed around the southern tip of South America.
The Iranian Navy, however, announced that the ships planned to sail to the Panama Canal. This comes more than a decade after it first announced in 2012 that it would sail across the Atlantic Ocean, something it has not yet done.
Navy Commander Rear Admiral Shahram Irani announced the plan January 11, but neglected to say when the Iranian Navy would send ships to the Panama Canal.
He said the plan to go to the Panama Canal was part of the Navy’s plan to be present in all the oceans of the world.
The Navy regularly sails in the northern Indian Ocean, but has no regular presence anywhere else outside Iranian waters. It once sailed briefly into the Pacific Ocean to a southern Chinese port and then returned home, the deepest penetration of the Pacific until the Dena and Makran went to Jakarta and beyond. The Navy also sent two ships once from South Africa briefly into the South Atlantic and then quickly returned to a South African port. And it later sent two ships around South Africa into the Atlantic and then all the way north to Saint Petersburg in Russia, but not westward across the Atlantic Ocean.
The US State Department didn’t appear to take the Iranian announcement about the Dena and Makran very seriously. State Department spokesman Ned Price said rather condescendingly January 12, “We are aware of this claim by Iran’s Navy. We continue to monitor Iran’s attempts-or, at least, its statements-of its intent to develop a military presence in the Western Hemisphere.”
The US Navy hasn’t said anything, but is presumably watching both ships closely to gather intelligence on their capabilities-and weaknesses.
Some conservative Americans viewed the Iranian announcement about docking in Rio as a serious military threat. For example, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, said, “The docking of Iranian warships in Brazil is a dangerous development and a direct threat to the safety and security of Americans.” And Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, another Republican, made a partisan issue out of the ships. “Iran’s growing presence in the Western Hemisphere should come as no surprise as the Biden Administration has a history of appeasement and engaging with authoritarian regimes. Tehran’s ability to expand its military presence in our hemisphere should be a warning sign, especially as it seeks to support the left-wing Marxist regimes that will undermine peace and stability throughout the region.”
But to the US military, even Iran’s largest combat ship is little more than a flyspeck. Iran’s largest warships are its three Moudge-class frigates, including the Dena, each displacing 1,500 tons. The US Navy no longer builds anything as small as a frigate. Its smallest ocean-going warships are destroyers, of which it has 72, with the newest displacing 14,500 tons, almost 10 times larger than the Dena.
Alex Vatanka of the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, treated the two ships’ presence in the Atlantic Ocean as little more than a joke. Tehran, he said, is simply saying, “If your navy comes off my coast, you’ll see our navy off yours.” He said, “These deployments don’t really make sense for Iran at the moment due to its economic difficulties…. Given the Iranian protests, Iranian leadership wants to show that it’s not on its knees.”
Iranian media said the US was shaken by the arrival of the Iranian ships in Rio and the fact that they “defied” the United States by sailing there. They said the presence of the two Iranian ships was a “challenge” to US influence in the Americas. Most likely, however, the US Navy was delighted to see the ships in Rio, where it will be easier to gather intelligence on them.
However, the State Department made a political issue out of Iran’s port call at Rio. State Department spokesman Ned Price said on March 7, a total of 10 days after the Iranian ships had already docked in Rio, “It’s our impression that no democracy in this hemisphere or anywhere else would want these kinds of Iranian assets, these warships, docking in their ports. We want to continue to work with our Brazilian partners to send the right message to Iran, to others who would pose a threat, pose a challenge to our collective interests around the world.”
As for the Panama Canal, it was built and run by the United States for almost all of the 20th Century. But in 1999, the US lease on the canal expired and the canal has been owned and operated by the government of Panama since then.
Iranian news reports said Washington had pressured Panama to prevent the ships from transiting the canal. But Washington can do no such thing. The canal is open to ships of all nations-just like the Strait of Hormuz. For the US to keep the ships out of the canal would undermine the US statements that Iran has no right to restrict the US presence in the Strait of Hormuz.
The US Navy is probably eager to have the ships pass through the Panama Canal because they will have to take on board a canal pilot, allowing him to gather considerable intelligence.
Admiral Irani said the Iranian Navy has been present in all the straits of the world but two, naming the Panama Canal as one of the two. But the Panama Canal is not a strait. There are more than 200 straits around the world and the Iranian Navy has not entered many of them, including The Narrows, which is the entry to New York Harbor, and the Straits of Mackinac, which separate Lakes Superior and Huron in the United States and Canada.