https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-tanker-boarded-iran-guard-bbb977f8756fb4967c2e1f9756d94212
A South Korean tanker was seized by Iranian armed forces near the Strait of Hormuz and directed into Iran. This comes ahead of negotiations over 7 billion dollars of Iranian assets frozen in South Korean banks. While the official Iranian government response has refused to acknowledge any connection between the two events, government spokesman Ali Raibei directly confronted the issue in his response: “If anybody is to be called a hostage taker, it is the South Korean government that has taken our more than $7 billion hostage under a futile pretext.” The asset freezing was conducted as a result of a recent campaign by the United States to push its allies to economically pressure Iran. The vessel was going from Saudi Arabia into the UAE when Iranian forces seized the vessel. Since its movement into Iranian waters, the captain of the vessel has lost contact with South Korea and the precise location of the ship is unknown. South Korea plans to conduct future negotiations with Iran to sort out the situation. The Foreign Ministry of South Korea has affirmed that the crew members of the vessel are safe.
As a major ally of the United States, South Korea acts in the global theater as a representative for their larger friend. Accordingly, sometimes they have to get wedged into the middle of some of the United States’ biggest global feuds. This seizure shares similarities to an incident in 2019 when Iran seized a British oil tanker after one of their own vessels was taken near the British territory of Gibraltar. Like the UK, South Korea is a nation that has lined itself up with the United States as a representative of Western democracy. Incidents such as the one with this tanker are, more than about South Korea and Iran, about The United States and Iran. With a new Biden foreign policy soon to take effect, it will be interesting to see what shape the U.S.’s relations with Iran will take in the future, particularly regarding the famous JCPOA nuclear deal.