On Thursday, Donald Trump tweeted that the United States had shot down an Iranian drone that had come too close to an American ship. Almost immediately, Iran claimed the event never happened, and that all its drones were safely tucked in at their bases. It’s a measure of how Trump has handled international relations that no one seems to know whom to believe.
As The New York Times reports, military officials state that a “relatively small drone” was fired on after coming within a kilometer of the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer in the Strait of Hormuz. The statement says that the drone was “shot down over international waters,” but it doesn’t provide any information about any portions of the drone being recovered.
Meanwhile, CBS News reports that Iranian officials deny that they’re missing a drone. Not in the strait. Not anywhere. The Iranian deputy foreign minister even suggested that the United States might have shot down one of its own drones by mistake.
This high stakes version of “You touched me,” “No, I didn’t” is playing out less than a month after Iran very definitely did shoot down an American drone. That event, also involving a drone that was apparently in international waters but that was judged to be too close to a vital asset, ratcheted up the tension between the two nations to the point that Trump ordered a military strike on Iran … only to call it off after planes were already in the air.
In between those two drone events, Iran also made it clear that it intended to enrich more uranium than was allowed under the terms of the former agreement preventing it from developing nuclear weapons—the agreement from which Trump withdrew despite its being a legal treaty and despite his having no evidence that Iran was in violation at that time. Now Iran is very much waving its flag to show that it is willing to violate that former treaty because the United States has been squeezing Iran through increasingly tight economic sanctions, including threatening any nation that buys oil from Iran.
Which means that the odds of a conflict remain high—and while Iran shooting down an American drone was seen by Trump as provocation of war, America shooting down an Iranian drone is … also seen by Trump as a provocation of war.
On one hand, there seem to be big factions in both the Trump White House and the Iranian government that do not want this to erupt into an actual war. Both of them have been happy with the conflict to this point—it’s allowed Trump to talk tough and the Iranian leadership to focus internal unrest on a nice external target—but they’d very much like to find a way to collect their winnings and go home before things get big holes in them.
But on the John Bolton hand, there are others on both sides who really, really do want to see this explode into a genuine shooting war. At the moment, that side is not getting its wish, and this week Bolton was busy attending the founding meeting of “Oh hell yes, we’re Nazis.” But that doesn’t mean they won’t get all the big explosions that they want. With dozens of ships, hundreds of planes, and thousands of men all circling each other in a tiny expanse of sea, in a space where commercial shipping and air travel offer plenty of opportunity for hideous mistakes and disasters, the situation could spin off the rails at any moment.
The best that can be hoped for is that Trump will believe he’s “won” this one, so American ships and sailors can move out of harm’s way, and cooler heads on both sides can … go back to being yelled at by Bolton.