Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asked in Colombia on Wednesday about 5 Iranian tankers on the bottom of the Gulf of Oman, gave the plainest statement of policy anyone in this war has offered in 6 months: “for every time they do that or try to do that, they’re going to lose tankers.” By nightfall, Iran had “answered” with attacks on 10 ships and 20 missiles at a base in Jordan; a merchant seafarer was dead off the coast of the Emirates; and Brent crude had crossed $100. The Church has a specific name for the rule Rubio described, and she has been asking nations to give it up since before any of us were born.
The News Story
The United States and Iran carried out the largest exchange of attacks on shipping since their war began six months ago, pushing Brent crude above $100 a barrel for the first time since July.
U.S. Central Command said late Tuesday it had struck and destroyed five Iranian oil carriers after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tried twice in two days to hit an American warship. CENTCOM named the vessels as the M/T Kaviz, M/T Charminar, M/T Horizon 1 and M/T Riesco in the Gulf of Oman, and the M/T Derya near Kharg Island. American forces directed the crews to abandon ship before the vessels were hit, CENTCOM said, and no U.S. personnel were harmed. The command later released video it said showed the Riesco sinking.
Iran said Wednesday it had answered by attacking 10 ships near the Strait of Hormuz. The IRGC said its naval forces targeted two American vessels and eight tankers, and separately claimed ballistic missile strikes on the destroyers DDG-119 and DDG-53 that caused “significant damage.” Washington did not immediately respond to those claims. Iran also fired missiles at the Al-Azraq air base in Jordan. Jordan’s armed forces said air defenses engaged 20 ballistic missiles and destroyed 18, with two falling in unpopulated areas/ There were no casualties reported.
At least one seafarer was killed and another listed as missing after the Gibraltar-flagged Hercules Star was struck, reportedly by a drone, about 44 kilometers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. The monitoring group UK Maritime Trade Operations separately reported an attack on a cargo ship 52 kilometers southeast of al-Faw, Iraq.
Brent traded above $100 in early trading Wednesday, up more than 2.5% at about $100.44, while West Texas Intermediate rose to roughly $95. Crude moving through the strait has fallen to about 2 million barrels a day, down from 8 to 9 million in the weeks before fighting resumed on August 30. Iran declared the waterway closed in early March, and Washington is enforcing a naval blockade of Iranian ports.
The IRGC warned of imminent attacks on tankers near the waters of Bahrain and Kuwait and told crews to evacuate. It also said a restricted maritime zone would extend from Chabahar into parts of the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, with coordinates to be announced.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry called the strikes on its tankers a “war crime” and a violation of the U.N. Charter, and said its forces had acted in legitimate self-defense. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters during a visit to Colombia, defended the operations. “Iran continues to try to hit US naval ships, and for every time they do that or try to do that, they’re going to lose tankers,” he said.
Speaking Wednesday night at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, President Trump said the war would end “immediately” after the November 3 elections, adding that Iran’s leaders “can’t hold out any longer.” He said the administration is no longer seeking a negotiated end to the fighting, while leaving open the possibility of talks, and he repeated a threat to strike the Pickaxe Mountain nuclear site in Isfahan province.
The IRGC also claimed Tuesday it had captured an unmanned U.S. submarine near the entrance to the strait. The U.S. military said the drone had malfunctioned and carried no classified equipment.[1]
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
A Rule In One Sentence
Read and interpret Rubio’s sentence again as a rule, because that’s what it is. An attempt on an American warship, whether or not it hits, will be answered by the destruction of Iranian oil carriers. Notice 2 things about it. The tankers are chosen because Iran values them, and for no other reason. And the attempt alone triggers the rule; damage is optional.
Tehran runs the same rule from its side of the strait. Its Foreign Ministry called the sinkings a war crime and a violation of the U.N. Charter, and within hours the IRGC had struck 10 ships, 8 of them tankers, and put 20 missiles into the sky over Jordan. Then it warned crews near Bahrain and Kuwait to evacuate, because more was coming. A Gibraltar-flagged cargo ship 44 kilometers off the Emirates took a drone, and one of her seafarers is dead. His only stake in this war was a paycheck from a shipping company.
I want to be careful about what I’m claiming. Both governments say they’re defending themselves, and the Church grants that a state under attack has the right, and the duty, to organize a defense, even by force of arms.[2] I’m not going to pretend she doesn’t. The question I want to put is narrower: what is the shape of the rule each capital has now announced, and what does the Church say about a rule of that shape?
The Church’s Name For It
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, in its chapter on the international community, reaches for an analogy from ordinary domestic life. Quoting John Paul II: “As in the internal life of individual States … a system of private vendetta and reprisal has given way to the rule of law, so too a similar step forward is now urgently needed in the international community.”[3]
Vendetta and reprisal. Those are the Church’s words for “for every time they do that, they’re going to lose tankers.”
A vendetta is a rule of exchange. It skips the questions a court would ask- who did the wrong and what would stop the next one- and asks only what the other family values. Then it takes that. Your cousin cuts my cousin, so I burn your barn. The barn did nothing; it’s yours, and that’s the point. Every society that has climbed out of feud has done it the same way, by putting a law between the injury and the response so that the response is measured by the injury and aimed at the person who caused it. The Compendium claims that nations gave this up inside their own borders centuries ago and have never finished giving it up between one another. The same paragraph closes with the sentence a tanker war was written to test: “international law must ensure that the law of the more powerful does not prevail.”[4]
The Church does not leave legitimate defense as a blank check, either. Paragraph 501 of the Compendium says that self-defense, in every case, must respect “the traditional limits of necessity and proportionality.”[5] Put those 2 words next to the rule. Necessity asks whether sinking the Riesco stops the next missile. Proportionality asks whether the response is measured against the harm being prevented, and a harm that was attempted and missed is a small quantity to measure against. A rule that prices attempts, not damage, in oil carriers has walked away from both tests. It asks a different question entirely. It asks what will hurt.
Leo XIV Saw The Sentence Coming
Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas in May, before anyone had sunk a Kaviz or a Derya, and it reads like a transcript this week. He describes “the temptation to forge a collective identity in opposition to an enemy, fueled by narratives in which each party portrays itself as a victim entitled to retribution.”[6] That is Wednesday in one sentence. Tehran, the victim of a war crime, entitled to 10 ships. Washington, the victim of 2 attempts, entitled to 5 tankers. Each side invokes the law and practices the feud. Leo names where that lands: “The force of international law is thus replaced by the claim that ‘might makes right.'”[7]
He goes further, and this is the part I’d ask you to sit with. In the same passage he lists what a culture of power teaches nations to discard: “the principle of proportionality in responding to aggression, the protection of access to water, food and essential goods, and respect for the lives of civilians, especially children, come to be regarded as naïve relics of the past.”[8] Read the middle clause against the numbers. Crude through the strait is down from 8 or 9 million barrels a day to about 2 million. Brent is over $100. That bill lands on people who never fired a shot or agreed to this war, and it lands first, as Leo says elsewhere in the letter, on the poorest.[9]
The older tradition, which the Compendium itself summarizes in paragraph 500, would have handed us a just war checklist and asked us to grade Rubio’s rule against it. Leo has told us that framework is spent. “Without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense,” he writes, “it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.”[10] The test is whether the act is self-defense in the strictest sense. Sinking a tanker whose crew was first told to abandon ship, in answer to a missile that missed, is a reprisal. The strictest sense of self-defense does not reach it. Striking a cargo ship with a drone and killing a deckhand is a reprisal too, and it doesn’t even have the courtesy of the warning. Leo’s summary fits both: “The use of force, violence and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations.”[11]
A War With A Date On It
There’s one more sentence from Wednesday that belongs in this analysis, and it wasn’t Rubio’s. The President told the convention in Dallas that the war will end “immediately” after the November 3 elections, and that his administration is no longer seeking a negotiated end.
I don’t know the President’s mind, and I’m not going to claim I do. But Magnifica Humanitas has a paragraph for a war with a calendar date on it. “We cannot rule out the possibility,” Leo writes, “that some leaders may consider armed conflict as an effective way of diverting attention from domestic problems and a cynical tool for managing difficulties.”[12] He wrote that about no one in particular. It applies to anyone it fits, in Tehran as much as in Washington, and the IRGC’s announced schedule of coming attacks is its own kind of management. What Leo is describing is a shift in what a government is thinking about. Once the search for peace drops out, he says, the remaining concern becomes “how and when to take military action.”[13] A war that will end after an election is a war whose when has been decided. The seafarer off the Emirates died inside somebody’s when.
And he adds the line that ought to be pinned above every desk where these decisions get made: “It is much easier to start a war than to stop it.”[14]
What This Asks Of You
Something modest. When you hear “for every time they do that,” in a briefing or at a dinner table, recognize the grammar. It’s the grammar of the feud, and it’s spoken with equal fluency in 2 capitals. A Catholic doesn’t get to cheer it under one flag and condemn it under the other. The Church’s language for a defensible response is necessity and proportionality, and her word for a response aimed at what the enemy values is reprisal. Use her words.
Then pray with some specificity. For the seafarer on the Hercules Star and the one still missing. For the crews the Navy ordered over the side, and the sailors on 2 destroyers Iran claims to have hit. For the families in Isfahan province who live under a mountain the President keeps naming. And for the people, in both governments, who still have the authority to put a law back between the injury and the response. The Church says that step is urgently needed. It was urgently needed in 1991, when John Paul II wrote the sentence. It is a good deal more urgent at $100 a barrel.
This story turns on the rule of law between nations: the Church’s insistence that legitimate defense is bound by necessity and proportionality, and that reprisal is the vendetta wearing a uniform.
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Footnotes
- “US strikes five Iranian oil tankers, as Iran attacks 10 ships, Jordan base,” Al Jazeera, September 9, 2026, aljazeera.com; “Iran and US hit tankers in biggest wave of attacks on shipping since war began,” Reuters via Defense News, September 9, 2026, defensenews.com; “Iran and US hit tankers in biggest wave of attacks on shipping since war began,” Reuters via U.S. News & World Report, September 9, 2026, usnews.com; “Brent crude tops $100 as U.S.-Iran tit-for-tat strikes stoke oil supply worries,” CNBC, September 9, 2026, cnbc.com; “U.S. forces hit IRGC-linked oil tankers as oil nears $100 a barrel,” CBS News, accessed September 10, 2026, cbsnews.com; “Iran attacks vessels, US base in Jordan after tankers sunk,” The Hill, accessed September 10, 2026, thehill.com; “US and Iran trade attacks on tankers as six-month war escalates,” The National, September 9, 2026, thenationalnews.com; “Oil tops $100 for first time since July as US destroys five Iranian tankers,” The Daily Caller, September 9, 2026, dailycaller.com; “Trump says Iran war will end after midterm elections, as fighting continues in Strait of Hormuz,” The Washington Times, September 9, 2026, washingtontimes.com; “Trump says Iran war will end after the midterms and gas prices will fall,” CNN, September 9, 2026, cnn.com; “Oil nears $100 on reports of new U.S. strike in Iran and attacks on Saudi infrastructure,” NBC News, accessed September 10, 2026, nbcnews.com; “US, Iran engaged in tanker war: Where is the months-long conflict headed?,” Al Jazeera, September 6, 2026, aljazeera.com; “US-Iran war updates: US destroys 5 more Iranian tankers as attacks widen across the Gulf,” NewsNation, accessed September 10, 2026, newsnationnow.com. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 500, vatican.va. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 439, quoting John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, no. 52. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 439, quoting John Paul II, Message for the 2004 World Day of Peace, no. 9. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 501, quoting John Paul II, Message for the 2004 World Day of Peace, no. 6. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2026), no. 202, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 202. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 203. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 204. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 192. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 192. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 208. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 205. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 195. ↩
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