The United States has sent another aircraft carrier to the Arabian Sea off the Strait of Hormuz amid Iran's threat that it would block the vital shipping route for oil tankers carrying Gulf oil to the rest of the world.
The USS Abraham Lincoln arrived in the Arabian Sea on Thursday to replace USS John Stennis, which has left the region through the western Pacific.
USS Abraham Lincoln, along with USS Carl Vinson, forms the U.S. Navy's standard two-carrier strike group in the Middle East, under the control of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain.
Although the U.S. Navy portrayed it as part of a normal rotation and not a deliberate buildup of force, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said at a Pentagon news conference on Wednesday that the U.S. military was now "fully prepared" to deal with any Iranian effort to close the Strait of Hormuz, a vital Gulf avenue for international oil shipments.
The U.S. 5th Fleet is based in Bahrain, and all American ships to return to their base must go through the Strait of Hormuz, the bottleneck between Oman and Iran. The U.S. Defense Department had already made it clear that its warships would continue to remain in the Persian Gulf at all cost despite the Iranian threat.
The Strait of Hormuz, located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, links the oil-producing Gulf countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to the Indian Ocean. About 40 percent of the world's tanker-borne oil passes through the waterway.
Earlier this month, crude oil prices went up by 4.2 percent in the wake of tensions raised by Iran over the safe passage of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz and the test-firing of a series of missiles.
The Iranian government and the Revolutionary Guard, the country's most powerful military force, have recently threatened to block the strategic waterway if the West imposed sanctions targeting oil exports of Iran, the world's third largest oil exporter.
Latest in the rhetoric, Iranian Ambassador to Russia Seyyed Mahmoud Reza Sajjadi warned on Wednesday that Tehran would block the Strait of Hormuz in response to possible security threats from the United States.
In response to reports that Tehran continued to develop nuclear weapons, the United States has been working with its allies and partners together to tighten sanctions that already exist on Iran and to encourage countries around the world to decrease their dependence on Iranian oil.
Iran has the world's second-largest reserves of natural gas and is OPEC's second largest oil exporter. Global energy majors have come under increased international pressure over their activities in the country in the face of the sanctions.
America's punitive measures are tough enough to cripple Iran's energy and banking sectors.
It deprives the Islamic Republic of imports of refined petroleum products like gasoline and jet fuel and curtails considerably its access to the international banking system.
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