[Skybird]

Originally Posted by August

Instead? Weren't they already doing both?

From Neal's link:

Instead, rushing US ships and putting them on the defensive, as well as capturing sailors, works mainly for propaganda purposes for Iran, whose authoritarian regime controls the media and pushes a heavily anti-US agenda. With Trump similarly focused on optics and pledging to revitalize the US military, Iran may have pivoted towards quietly pursuing its foreign policy goals, rather than making a scene that Trump could react to violently.
"There's another side of this," said Schanzer. "They understood that there was a change in the rules of the risk/reward calculus, but they also seem to understand that there was less of a policy with regard to their regional activity from Yemen to Iraq to Syria."
So while Iran has dropped the very visible, US-centric naval run-ins, it's picked up on recruiting militias, deploying its armed forces to Syria, and supplying anti-US and anti-Israel militant groups. "

A shift. A strengthening of the one policy, a greater ignoring of the other policy.