Iran Guard commander threatens US Navy after Trump tweet (Source Associated Press)

The leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard warned Thursday he ordered his forces to potentially target the U.S. Navy after President Donald Trump’s tweet a day earlier threatening to sink Iranian vessels.

While the coronavirus pandemic temporarily paused those tensions, Iran has since begun pushing back against the Trump administration’s maximum pressure policy both militarily and diplomatically. The Guard also launched Iran’s first military satellite Wednesday, unveiling a previously secret space program. Speaking to state television Thursday, Guard Gen. Hossein Salami warned his forces “will answer any action by a decisive, effective and quick counteraction.” “We have ordered our naval units at sea that if any warships or military units from the naval force of America’s terrorist army wants to jeopardize our commercial vessels or our combat vessels, they must target those (American) warships or naval units,” Salami said. Iran has had tense encounters at sea for years with the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of all oil passes. The U.S. has patrolled the area to protect global shipping for decades, something Iran describes as akin to it patrolling the Gulf of Mexico. Trump on Wednesday, facing a collapsing global energy market and the pandemic at home amid his re-election campaign, tweeted out a warning to Iran that he ordered the Navy to “shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea.” “We don’t want their gunboats surrounding our boats, and traveling around our boats and having a good time,” Trump told reporters Wednesday evening at the White House. “We’re not going to stand for it. … They’ll shoot them out of the water.” The International Crisis Group, noting the tensions, urged both countries to create a deconfliction hotline to avoid a possible military confrontation. “In the absence of a major diplomatic breakthrough, an indirect military communications channel could go some way toward ensuring, at least, that a single incident will not spark a wider conflagration,” it said in a report Thursday. Iran in the past has rejected idea of a hotline.