USS Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf of Oman. A US aircraft carrier will meet ships of three superpowers

Sailing to the Gulf of Oman, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group will meet Chinese, Russian and Iranian ships returning from the Will for Peace 2026 maneuvers that ended a week ago and took place in South African waters.

American ships will certainly encounter a divided Chinese 48th Fleet. The 054A Daqing guided missile frigate is already in the Red Sea, and the two remaining ships of the flotilla are sailing to a little over 1,000 miles away. km of the base leased by China in Djibouti on the African continent.

According to the MaritimeExecutive website, after the Will for Peace exercises, these ships need time to regenerate before resuming operations and starting further maneuvers with Russian and Iranian allies, which are to be held in March in the waters of the Persian Gulf under the name Maritime Security Belt.

Like China's 48th fleet, The Russian Pacific Fleet is also spread outwhose ships conducted the Marumex-2025 exercise in the Andaman Sea with the Myanmar Navy in mid-November last year.

For this reason, there is currently only one Russian guided-missile destroyer in the Persian Gulf, Marshal Shaposhnikov, which three days ago was on a visit to Qatar, where it participated in the DIMDEX 2026 defense exhibition. In the Middle East, it is supported by the tanker Borys Butoma, but they will probably soon be joined by the Stojkiy-class corvette Steregushchi, which also took part in exercises in South African waters a week ago, and which is now flows along the eastern coast of Africa towards the Arabian Sea.

After the Will for Peace exercises, the Iranian 103rd fleet, consisting of the forward base ship Makran, the Naghdi corvette and the Shahid Mahdavi ship converted from a tanker, also returns to its home base of Bandar Abbas.

Will China and Russia just watch?

According to analysts China and Russia, as in the case of the American attack on Venezuela, will only watch the actions of the American flotilla in the Gulf of Oman.

“Iran is an important partner for China, but I don't think Beijing is particularly committed to the Islamic Republic,” wrote Jonathan Fulton, a China expert in the Middle East at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, in his latest China-MENA Newsletter, tracking China's activity in the Middle East. “Many narratives revolve around the question: What will China do to save its ally in Tehran? We should all know the answer by now: nothing,” Fulton added.

A similar opinion was expressed by the MaritimeExecutive website, according to which the Russians and Chinese will probably be afraid of getting involved in a potential conflict between Iran and the United States and will leave the Iranians alone to fight the Americans.

However, according to the findings of the Asian military portal DefenseSecurityAsia, Beijing has most likely already supported the Iranian regime. Starting on January 18, 16 Chinese military transport planes landed in Iran in just 56 hours. At the same time, four Belarusian Il-76 planes with cargo of Russian and Chinese origin also landed in Tehran, which may indicate coordinated logistics activities of Iran's allies, rather than a single Chinese operation.

Tadeusz Brzozowski (PAP)

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