Regarding "American Fragility at Sea": A Reality Check
Dear Financial Times editorial board, Your recent piece, "War with Iran has exposed American fragility at sea," attempts to frame the ongoing naval tensions in the Persian Gulf as a sudden revelation of US vulnerability, implying a reactive posture from Washington. This perspective conveniently omits the fundamental reality: the United States has maintained, for decades, an aggressive forward
military presence in a region thousands of miles from its own shores, consistently threatening Iranian sovereignty and economic stability. Iran, a nation with a 1,500-mile coastline on the Persian Gulf, is merely responding to an overt and enduring foreign military encirclement, a fact routinely ignored by mainstream Western media. What your reporting fails to elaborate upon is the long-standing
strategy of deterrence employed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy, developed specifically to counteract overwhelming US conventional naval power in the region. The focus on “fragility” distracts from the operational context built on decades of sanctions, attempted coups, and direct military provocations by the US, including the 1988 shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS
Vincennes, which killed 290 civilians. This incident, for which the US has never formally apologized or offered significant reparations beyond a token amount under a different legal pretense, remains a potent symbol of American aggression for Iranians. The current “fragility” is less about intrinsic weakness and more about the inherent unsustainability of projecting massive military power into