Iran and North Korea Conduct Missile Tests to Gauge President Trump’s Response

President Reagan and President Gorbachev of the Soviet Union did much to reduce nuclear tensions in spite of Reagan being reviled by the left as a warmonger. He was nothing of the sort, and the world became a safer place because he and Mr. Gorbachev were able to move beyond the threat of nuclear war, something neither side could win. It wasn’t that many years later, and the Soviet Union was no more — without a shot fired.

President Trump, likewise, is accused by the left as being hateful, xenophobic, aggressive, and incompetent. And that’s just for starters. It’s going to turn out that of these characteristics, probably aggressive is the only one that will stick — and that will apply to his personality, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

We saw what happens when a passive, equivocating president holds office. Mr. Obama became famous for the red lines that got moved. Why should any nation have taken him seriously? Nations like Iran quickly learned that they could milk him for all its worth. Now things have changed.

With Obama having spent eight years allowing North Korea to approach the point where it can threaten other nations with nuclear missiles, it has chosen to test President Trump by test firing four ballistic missiles near enough to Japan as to demonstrate it could hit US and Japanese military installations.

With Obama no longer available, Iran has turned bellicose. President Trump has called out Iran for its sponsorship of international terrorism and aggression, and Iran, seeing the treaty negotiated with the weak Obama regime in peril, has accused the US of breaking it while launching war drills.

As tensions between the U.S. and Iran continue to mount, the semi-official news agency Tasnim is reporting that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has successfully conducted yet another ballistic missile test, this time from a navy vessel.  Called the Hormuz 2, these latest missiles are designed to destroy moving targets at sea at ranges up to 300 km (180 miles).

Reports on the latest test quotes Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force, who confirmed that “the naval ballistic missile called Hormuz 2 successfully destroyed a target which was 250 km away.”

What some people don’t seem to get, is that once a nation can successfully launch missiles from naval vessels, the problem of distance between countries when it comes to attacking with missiles goes away. This is especially true if a nation has incredibly silent diesel-electric submarines and can figure out how to fire missiles from them. Suddenly, you don’t need a missile with a 6,000 mile range anymore. Not comforting with events like the US losing track of fifty North Korean subs with obviously unstable Kim Jong-Un threatening to nuke New York City. 

In this case, however, Iran might be more interested in demonstrating its ability to sink whatever it wants whenever it wants anywhere in the Persian Gulf including the narrow Straits of Hormuz.

Of course, this latest provocation follows additional tests conducted earlier this week in which Iran test-fired a pair of ballistic missiles into the Gulf of Oman and subsequently proceeded to provoke a U.S. Navy ship in the area.

There is little question that Iran is rapidly bolstering its ability to project force in its backyard.

“It’s a concern based on the range and that one of the missiles worked,” said one official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose the launch. Two years ago, Iranian cruise missiles destroyed a large barge designed to look like an American aircraft carrier. Iranian state-television broadcast the images publicly at the time.

The new Iranian short-range ballistic missile launches come a week after Iran successfully test-fired Russian surface-to-air missiles, part of the S-300 air defense system Russia sent to Iran recently.

According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Iran has conducted as many as 14 ballistic missile launches since the landmark nuclear agreement in July 2015. A senior U.S. military official told Fox News that Iran had made great advances in its ballistic missile program over the past decade.

The question that must be asked is whether Iran can present a credible threat to US aircraft carriers operating in the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman. No doubt American carriers have incredibly sophisticated technology for intercepting and destroying incoming missiles, not to mention the defensive capability of those destroyers and cruisers that surround them.

Yet, those carrier defenses must be 100% effective; one hit by the right sort of Iranian missile could be devastating to a US carrier, even if it didn’t sink it. Iran’s idea, perhaps, is to cause enough doubt in the minds of US naval leadership and the president to make them think twice about putting as valuable an asset as a carrier within the range of such missiles.

President Trump has at least two nations that have gotten bolder and have developed more sophisticated weapons during his predecessor’s eight years in office. He can expect to be tested — in fact it has already started.

Source: ZeroHedge