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Top US Navy official: We Reached 'Uneasy Deterrence’ With Iran

A US MH-60 Seahawk helicopter flies over Revolutionary Guard patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, as tensions run high over the Iranian nuclear program. (AP)
A US MH-60 Seahawk helicopter flies over Revolutionary Guard patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, as tensions run high over the Iranian nuclear program. (AP)
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Top US Navy official: We Reached 'Uneasy Deterrence’ With Iran

A US MH-60 Seahawk helicopter flies over Revolutionary Guard patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, as tensions run high over the Iranian nuclear program. (AP)
A US MH-60 Seahawk helicopter flies over Revolutionary Guard patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, as tensions run high over the Iranian nuclear program. (AP)

The top US Navy official in the Mideast said on Sunday the US has reached an “uneasy deterrence” with Iran after months of regional attacks and seizures at sea, even as tensions remain high between Washington and Tehran over its nuclear program.

Vice Adm. Sam Paparo, who oversees the Navy’s 5th Fleet based in Bahrain, struck an academic tone in comments to the annual Manama Dialogue hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

He described having a “healthy respect” for both Iran’s regular navy and the naval forces of its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which the US designated as a foreign terrorist organization in 2019.

“We have achieved an uneasy deterrence. That uneasy deterrence is exacerbated by world events and by events along the way,” the vice admiral said, The Associated Press reported.

Paparo offered a different stance than his immediate predecessor, Vice Adm. James Malloy, whose last comments to journalists in August, referred to Iran as “reckless and provocative” and always trying in dramatic naval drills to “lower the denominator until they’re sure that they can look like they’ve won something.”

Malloy’s tenure saw oil tankers seized by Iran and a series of limpet mine explosions targeting tankers that the Navy blamed on Iran. Tehran denied being involved, though Revolutionary Guard members were filmed taking an unexploded mine away from one tanker.

Notably, the several months that Paparo’s been in charge have not seen any major crises.

The Revolutionary Guard typically patrols the shallower waters of the Arabian Gulf and its narrow mouth, the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran’s regular navy largely operates in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. While previous commanders have made a point to differentiate between the professionalism of the two, Paparo dismissed it as an “old idea” that included a lingering belief that the service was still loyal to Iran’s former shah, who was toppled in the 1979 Islamic revolution.

“Forty-one years into the revolution, I think we can dispense with that notion,” the vice admiral said.

“I sincerely doubt there’s a difference among them.”

Paparo also said he did not believe the 5th Fleet’s mission would be affected by the Navy potentially reconstituting a 1st Fleet responsible for the Indian Ocean.

Still, Paparo’s remarks carried a clear warning, quoting former US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at one point.

“Be polite, be professional and have a plan to kill everyone in the room,” he said. “That’s how we conduct ourselves at sea.”

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Despite Sharp Decline, Inflation Remains a Sore Point for Harris

Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech at The Alan Horwitz "Sixth Man" Center, a youth basketball facility, as she campaigns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech at The Alan Horwitz "Sixth Man" Center, a youth basketball facility, as she campaigns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
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Despite Sharp Decline, Inflation Remains a Sore Point for Harris

Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech at The Alan Horwitz "Sixth Man" Center, a youth basketball facility, as she campaigns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech at The Alan Horwitz "Sixth Man" Center, a youth basketball facility, as she campaigns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

For six months or so in 2021, as vaccines paved an economic reopening from the COVID-19 pandemic and fresh waves of federal benefits flowed to household bank accounts, President Joe Biden's administration reaped the benefit with an approval rating pinned above 50%.
It has been mired around 40% ever since, with the scarring impact of subsequently high inflation still cited by voters as a major issue even though the pace of price increases has declined, wages and the economy continue to grow, and the jobless rate remains low, Reuters said.
As good as the economy might seem across most major indicators, inflation that peaked at 9% more than two years ago has been hard for Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to outrun, and given former President and Republican candidate Donald Trump a cudgel that remains effective on the eve of the election even as inflation has dwindled to 2.4%.
"Inflation has not faded as an issue," said Justin McCarthy, a spokesperson for Gallup, the polling giant that fields monthly surveys that include an open-ended question, without lists or prompts, of what respondents feel is the "most important" issue facing them. Those citing inflation as the most serious issue has fallen from highs of around 20% during the peak inflation surge in 2022 to around 15% in recent polls, but that remains double the historic norm and is part of broader concern about the economy cited by more than 40% of respondents.
It's an area where Trump continues to hold a polling edge despite Harris' pledges to address issues like high housing costs or the "price gouging" she cites as a cause of high prices in the grocery aisle.
In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 68% of respondents in seven swing states said the cost of living was "on the wrong track," and 61% said the same about the economy. Half said Trump had "a better plan, policy or approach" to managing the economy compared with 37% for Harris, while on inflation Trump was favored 47% to 34%.
In-person voting concludes on Tuesday, with polls showing an overall tight race between Harris and Trump nationally and in the battleground states seen as determining the outcome.
The Biden administration and later the Harris campaign recognized early on the problem inflation posed.
Biden named one of his signature pieces of legislation the "Inflation Reduction Act," though much of it focused on subsidies for electric vehicles and clean energy. As rising rent and housing prices emerged as a particularly acute issue, they launched proposals that included capping rent increases, tax incentives for affordable housing construction, and downpayment help for first-time home buyers.
What they didn't publicize so much is how sticky a problem it would be for the households living through it.
Attitudes improved somewhat as inflation began to ease last year, but the change only went so far.
'UNAMBIGUOUSLY NEGATIVE'
Solutions have been offered by both campaigns, but inflation, the responsibility first and foremost of the Federal Reserve through its management of interest rates and credit conditions, is difficult for elected officials to address.
Republican President Richard Nixon tried the direct route by freezing wage and price increases for 90 days in 1971 and establishing a government panel to approve them after that. Inflation was 4.3% at the time and did fall below 4% in the summer of 1972 as Nixon campaigned for reelection.
But it soared that fall as the controls were eased, and following an embargo by Arab oil exporters in 1973 exceeded 12% by the end of 1974.
When inflation started rising during his term in office, Democratic President Jimmy Carter used a major address in 1978 to announce plans to limit government spending and call for voluntary wage and price limits from business. By the middle of his losing reelection bid against Republican Ronald Reagan prices were rising more than 14% annually.
After two recessions, a period of punishing interest rates imposed by the Fed and its firmer commitment to inflation control, price increases gradually settled close to the 2% level the central bank eventually adopted as its official target - and stayed there until the COVID-19 pandemic.
Economists have sparred over the exact reasons inflation took off beginning in 2021, and if that could have been prevented. But they generally agree on the broad mix. As the pandemic limited spending on in-person services, it also created deep backlogs in the manufacture and delivery of the goods, from bikes to appliances to automobiles, that were suddenly in high demand as a result of roughly $5 trillion in stimulus from the federal government.
The pandemic support began under Trump; Biden added more in a move some economists feel may have supercharged demand beyond what was needed.
It is a debate being litigated in hindsight and in the shadow of a health crisis that lingered long enough - new COVID variants were still suppressing in-person gatherings through 2021 - to even implicate the Fed. Inflation took off in 2021; the central bank did not raise rates until March 2022.
What doesn't seem in doubt is the impact on the public mood, something that shouldn't be a surprise.
Surveys about inflation have been consistent in finding that price shocks register deeply and are not quickly forgotten.
"Inflation significantly complicates household decision-making, which is seen as its most critical consequence," researchers Alberto Binetti of Bocconi University and Francesco Nuzzi and Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard University concluded from the results of an online survey of 2,264 people conducted between March and May. "This complexity affects daily economic choices" and adds to economic uncertainty.
Nor do people seem to care much if, as has happened recently and Democrats have tried to emphasize, wages rise faster than prices.
"Inflation is perceived as an unambiguously negative phenomenon without any potential positive economic correlates," they found, with people expecting it to be fixed "without significant trade-offs."