(REUTERS) — A U.S. aircraft carrier strike group sailed through the Strait of Hormuz Tuesday more than a month after Iran warned a different carrier -- USS John C. Stennis -- not to return to the Gulf as Iranian navy boats sailed by.
Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, used for a third of the world's seaborne oil trade, if Western moves to ban Iranian crude exports cripple its energy sector.
Tuesday aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln -- part of the Bahrain-based U.S. Fifth Fleet -- sailed through the strait of Hormuz with the Cape St George destroyer cruising behind.
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"If you listen to the (Iranian) rhetoric ... you might think that there are some tensions," Admiral Troy Shoemaker, commander of the carrier strike group nine, told Reuters.
