As the Iranian Islamic Republic escalates its aggression throughout the Middle East — directly or via proxies — America is sending mixed messages about its intentions. Is a reprise of Operation Praying Mantis in the offing?

The White House has declared a beefed-up naval presence near Iranian shores in response to recent seizures of oil tankers by the Islamic Republic. Separately, an Iranian proxy in Iraq was responsible for a March drone attack in Syria that killed an American contractor, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.  

“The Department of Defense will be making a series of moves to bolster our defensive posture in the Arabian Gulf,” the National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, said late last week. “Iran’s unwarranted, irresponsible, and unlawful seizure and harassment of merchant vessels must stop,” the Fifth Fleet commander, Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, said. 

Earlier in May, two oil tankers, the Panama-flagged Niovi and the Marshall Islands-flagged Advantage Sweet, were seized by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps navy. The vessels are anchored at Iran’s Bandar Abbas. The seizure was an apparent response to redirection of two tankers belonging to a shadow fleet that smuggles Iranian oil to Communist China in violation of American sanctions, the Suez Rajan and the Pablo. 

The IRGC acts “may be the beginning of a cycle in which the US Navy is drawn, yet again, into a risky mission to protect commercial shipping in the Gulf from Iranian aggression,” a retired Navy admiral, James Stavridis, writes in a Bloomberg column. “Simply allowing Iran to seize commercial shipping operating legally as bargaining chips to avoid sanctions won’t be tolerated.”

Tehran has threatened for decades to shut down naval traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, where 40 percent of the world’s oil is shipped. Admiral Stavridis was in service in the 1980s, when American and Iranian vessels often clashed. The skirmishes ended after the Navy in 1987 launched Operation Praying Mantis, which included constant American patrols in the Gulf and the removal of Iranian mines to assure freedom of navigation. 

That operation occurred in a different time, under President Reagan, who preached peace through strength. President Biden is a strong believer that disputes are best resolved through diplomacy, even when none seems to be available. 

Two and a half years after Tehran continuously rebuffed Washington’s frantic attempts at reviving the 2015 nuclear deal, Mr. Biden’s aides keep insisting that diplomatic negotiations are the most effective way to end the Iranian rush to a bomb. Mr. Biden is yet to seriously offer any alternative to that approach. 

Meanwhile the Islamic Republic’s aggression far exceeds the Gulf. Israel has just completed a round of hostility against Iran’s Gaza proxy, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Separately, American officials are concerned that despite a Beijing-sponsored rapprochement between Tehran and Riyadh, Iran continues to arm its Yemeni proxy, the Houthis, in anticipation of ending a ceasefire there. 

“The Iranians continue to smuggle weaponry and narcotics toward this conflict, and we are very concerned that this would continue despite the benefits that would come from a Saudi-Iran deal,” Washington’s special envoy to Yemen, Tim Lenderking, told reporters last week, adding that the IRGC is training the Houthis to attack Saudi Arabia.

On another front, a U.S. contractor was killed in a drone attack in northeast Syria on March 23. The Journal reports that the attack was launched by an Iranian-backed group in Iraq, where 2,500 American troops are stationed, their bases often being bombarded by militias trained and armed by the IRGC. 

“We’re not looking to get into tit for tat skirmishes with these groups, which some of the groups want us to do,” an unnamed senior U.S. official told the newspaper in response to its finding, referring to Iranian-backed Iraqi militias. “Our policy is to hold Iran accountable for all these attacks.”  

Washington, though, is yet to hold Tehran accountable. “We’re not doing it now,” the policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran, Jason Brodsky, tells the Sun. “We’re not holding the Islamic Republic responsible. Killing an American citizen has to carry a stronger response than hitting at proxies in Syria.”

Even as IRGC-trained proxies attack Americans and our allies, and while Tehran takes American and European citizens hostage, talks of reviving the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action occasionally flare up on both sides of the Atlantic.

After talk spread last month that Britain and France planned to void the nuclear deal by deploying the snap-back option at the United Nations, reports from Berlin claimed that Europeans are once again pressuring Mr. Biden to revive the JCPOA. Such mixed messages about the West’s intentions will not deter the Iranians, Mr. Brodsky says.

The sooner America and its allies communicate directly and clearly to Tehran that seizing ships in the Gulf is unacceptable, the better, Mr. Stavridis wrote in his column. Otherwise, he added, “we may be back in the convoy business again in the Middle East.”