Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued its warning to South Korea in Korean.
Esmaeil Baqaei, the ministry's spokesman and the official who states Iran's positions to the outside world, posts in English nearly every day. On Monday, he put up a statement on X, written in Korean, addressed to a public whose president had landed in Nice the evening before.
It opens warmly. "The relationship between Iran and the Republic of Korea has a history spanning more than 64 years, and the ties between our two countries have developed throughout on a foundation of mutual respect," he wrote. "Iran places great importance on its friendly relations with the Republic of Korea."
The warning sits in the middle. Any other country that stations forces in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, or joins operations there, cannot be regarded as anything other than a direct supporter of the party committing aggression, and it will bring about serious consequences.
The statement ends on sovereignty. "No state possessing sovereignty and responsibility should submit to American pressure and intimidation and join in complicity with acts of aggression and appalling crimes against the great people of Iran."
Nowhere in it does Baqaei write South Korea, or navy, or deployment. The middle paragraph says "another country." Writing the whole thing in Korean did the naming for him.
Lee Jae Myung spent Monday in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, co-chairing a film summit with Emmanuel Macron. He arrives in Paris on Tuesday for lunch at the Élysée, a summit and a state dinner. A Cheong Wa Dae official said last week the agenda could take in nuclear power cooperation and a South Korean troop deployment to the Strait of Hormuz.
Tehran wrote to South Koreans in Korean. Seoul will work out its reply over lunch in Paris, which would not be a first.
Twice already this year, South Korea has taken a position on Iran, and both times it did so inside a text somebody else had drafted.
On March 19, the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan condemned Iranian attacks on commercial shipping and the closure of the strait, and told Tehran to comply with Security Council Resolution 2817. Seoul's name went onto the document afterward. So did more than 30 others.
Two weeks later, Lee and Macron stood together at Cheong Wa Dae and announced that South Korea and France would work to secure safe maritime routes through Hormuz. Neither explained how, and they took no questions.
There is a precedent for what happens when Seoul enforces an Iran policy it did not write.
The Hankuk Chemi was carrying 7,200 tons of chemical products when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps boarded it on Jan. 4, 2021, and took it into Bandar Abbas. Iran said the tanker had been polluting the Gulf. Its owner said it had not. What Tehran wanted was the roughly $7 billion of Iranian oil money sitting in two South Korean banks, frozen there under American sanctions.
Most of the crew flew home in early February, after Seoul agreed to unblock $1 billion. The ship and its captain stayed until April 9. The remaining money was not released until August 2023, and then only because Washington and Tehran had struck a prisoner deal.
Iran had no way to reach the government that wrote those sanctions, so it took a ship belonging to the government that enforced them.
Four weeks ago, the Iranian embassy in Seoul put a softer version of the same argument to AJP. Mohammad Esmaeil Passandideh, counselor and deputy head of mission, said the postwar period would be a good moment to rebuild. He also said Iran had given South Korean shipping free and secure passage right through the war, and had expected Seoul to speak up in return. That second claim is his, and it has not been verified.
He said something else in that interview. Iran, he told AJP, was not looking to close or blockade the strait once the war ended. On Sunday, Mohsen Rezaei, who runs Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said a restricted zone would be declared around the strait and parts of the Gulf, with any ship entering it added to a sanctions list.
An assurance from Tehran is worth what the receiving government can test it against. Testing takes people who know the file, channels that do not run through a third capital, and a settled view of your own. South Korea is thin on all three.
The standard reply is that Seoul cannot afford to freelance on this. In March, that held up. Before the war, roughly 70 percent of South Korean crude came through Hormuz. Middle Eastern barrels are now about half of imports, down from two-thirds a year earlier, with American, African and Latin American oil taking the rest. The dependency that justified the silence has shrunk considerably, though nobody in Seoul appears to have revisited the silence.
None of this settles whether South Korean ships should sail. That argument is worth having, and serious people in Seoul are on both sides of it.
What is not worth having is a third year in which this country's Iran policy amounts to whatever Washington asks for and Paris helps phrase.
Passandideh said it in August, weeks before any of this week's messages went out.
"It will be too late for Korea to wait for the green light from the United States," he said.
*The author is the assistant editor of AJP.
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