The results were deadly: Thirty-seven American sailors aboard a Navy frigate died when it came under attack by an Iraqi warplane, and 290 people on an Iranian commercial airliner were killed when it was attacked by an American guided missile cruiser. An American frigate hit a mine placed by Iran east of Bahrain, blowing a hole in its hull and injuring 10 sailors. Army helicopters attacked an Iranian ship as it was laying mines, killing several sailors and forcing the rest to jump into the sea. And the United States and Iran engaged in a daylong naval battle that saw two Iranian oil rigs and six Iranian vessels sunk or damaged.

Then, as now, the crisis began with assurances from American officials that the Navy was in the gulf to assure safe passage for oil tankers.

Two European diplomats said this week that neither Britain nor France are keen to join an escort program because that would put those ships in harm’s way and could potentially draw those countries into a conflict. If Iran is looking for ways to hit back at the West for crippling American sanctions that have put a chokehold on the Iranian economy, one diplomat said, an obvious pathway is to mine the Strait of Hormuz, as Tehran did during the Tanker War.

That conflict came with all of the drama of escalatory action on the high seas, including an armed takeover of an Iranian mining boat by Navy SEALs. Tensions had been building for months as the Iran-Iraq war dragged on, but the conflict entered a new phase in May 1987 when the frigate Stark and its crew of 221 men, assigned to protect Kuwaiti tankers from Iran, steamed out of Manama, Bahrain, and headed toward its assigned station “on the edge of the tanker war’s killing zone,” according to David Crist’s book, “The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran.”