The Pentagon said that Iran launched the one-way attack drone that struck a Liberian-flagged, Japanese-owned, and Netherlands-operated chemical tanker that was shipping oil from Saudi Arabia to the Indian port of Mangalore on Saturday just 200 nautical miles off of the subcontinent’s coast. The National Security Council claimed the day prior that Iran is helping the Houthis target allegedly Israeli-linked vessels, but this is the first time that the Islamic Republic was accused of carrying out its own strike.
This incident is concerning because Iran and India cooperate with Russia on the North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC), which has served as a valve from Western sanctions pressure for Moscow over the past 22 months and enabled it to preemptively avert potentially disproportionate dependence on China. Moreover, India’s trade ties with Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics are dependent on this route, and Iran will become a fellow member of BRICS at the start of the year.
The abovementioned observations mean that any such drone attack by Iran risks disrupting this emerging Eurasian connectivity corridor to the Islamic Republic’s own detriment seeing as how Tehran also stands to financially and strategically benefit from facilitating trade along the NSTC. For these reasons, the Pentagon’s latest accusation shouldn’t be taken at face value since the US has self-interested reasons in portraying Iran as a rogue state that can’t be relied upon by any of its partners.
The larger context is that the US is in the midst of a spiraling dispute with India after the Justice Department charged one of its officials late last month with conspiring to assassinate a Delhi–designated terrorist–separatist with dual American citizenship on its soil over the summer. On top of that, its newly announced naval coalition in the Gulf of Aden-Red Sea region that was assembled to protect ships against the Iranian-backed Houthis’ attacks has been marred by controversy over who’ll command it.
It therefore can’t be ruled out that the US falsely attributed blame for Saturday’s drone attack in the Indian Ocean to Iran as part of a ruse to rope India into the aforementioned coalition and ruin its connectivity ties with Iran upon which Russia also depends as a valve from Western sanctions pressure. That hypothesis can only be proven throughout the course of a joint Indian-Iranian investigation, however, which is why it’s imperative for Tehran to fully cooperate with Delhi on this.
The outcome will determine the future of India’s ties with Iran and the US over the next year at the very least since the first’s culpability in Saturday’s attack would create very serious problems while the latter’s potential lies about who was responsible would further accelerate the deterioration of mutual trust. In between these two extremes lies the composite scenario whereby the Iranian-backed Houthis carried out this attack but without their patron state being aware of it ahead of time.
That possibility also can’t be dismissed since the earlier cited National Security Council claim explicitly mentioned that “Iran has often deferred operational decision-making authority to the Houthis.” Considering this, it could very well be the case that they made the decision to attack that vessel off of the subcontinent’s coast, after which the US took the opportunity to falsely blamed Iran for the earlier described reasons related to ruining its ties with India and creating economic troubles for Russia.
Even so, while Indian-Iranian ties would remain stable in that scenario and Russia’s valve from Western sanctions pressure would stay open as if nothing happened, Indo-US ties would worsen after Delhi realizes the game that Washington was playing in trying to destroy one of its top partnerships. Once again, the truth can only be revealed through a joint investigation with Iran, and that’s why the Islamic Republic would do well to share all relevant information with India upon request.
