Reprinted with permission from The Screeching Kettle at Substack.
This week, Iran had the audacity to fly a drone near the USS Abraham Lincoln, an American aircraft carrier innocently parked 500 miles (or 434 nautical miles) off their coastline as part of a Trump naval “armada” deployed amid threats to bomb the country into oblivion over a nuclear weapons program that does not exist.
Like clockwork, war-hungry American news networks went into overdrive beating the propagandistic war drums. One headline from The Washington Post, titled “US shoots down Iranian drone that approached aircraft carrier Lincoln”, cited anonymous “officials” who claimed the drone was “acting aggressively”.
Other outlets like CBS News, PBS, CNBC, New York Post, and USA Today also echoed this narrative about the Iranian drone’s “aggressive” behavior around the Lincoln, which clearly felt threatened as a 5,000-personnel, nuclear-powered, missile-loaded carrier with the capacity to hold around 80-90 aircraft.
And while these articles rightly point out that the US ship is technically in international waters, it is still well within striking distance.
For Iran, the threat from the US is very real. Not only because the country is militarily surrounded by American forces, but also because the US acted on its saber-rattling last summer and bombed Iranian enrichment sites. That’s why this framing of a single Iranian drone as “aggressive” – particularly coming from the United States, one of the most hostile countries on the planet – is beyond laughable.
Flip the scenario: imagine how the US would react if an Iranian warship came within 434 nautical miles of North Carolina’s coastline – still firmly in international waters.
How would Washington react?
I think we know the answer.
Jon Reynolds is a freelance journalist covering a wide range of topics with a primary focus on the labor movement and collapsing US empire. He writes at The Screeching Kettle at Substack.
