A president who again says that it is a mountain in Iran's desert that this war will end up at and a military campaign that has already cost nearly 37 billion dollars twelve nights of American strikes against Iranian targets, that is that may finally break out into an irreversible conflict. As week's end neared, President Trump restated almost verbatim a threat he has been making for almost a month: that the United States will strike Pickaxe Mountain, the fortified, still-under-construction site buried next to the remains of the Natanz nuclear plant, "pretty soon, and very heavily.

Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan were targeted in June last year by American bombers, which the White House at the time claimed had "obliterated" Iran's enrichment program. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has other images taken since then, and they tell a different story. Despite the rest of the construction, Pickaxe Mountain continues to build in a hurry, with new security perimeters and entrances to the tunnels cut into the hillside from three directions. In intelligence shared with Washington by the newly appointed Mossad chief, Roman Gofman, on a two-week visit to the American capital two weeks ago, Israel intelligence agencies reportedly have evidence Iran clandestinely placed uranium-enrichment centrifuges in the mountain's tunnels last year, moving the most sensitive aspect of its nuclear program to a shell that American and Israeli planners are still grappling to understand.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified this week before the Senate Appropriations Committee, but he didn't specify whether American bombers can complete the mission. Many of our abilities are classified," he told lawmakers, but added immediately, "If anybody on earth can make it to a target in the middle of a mountain, it's the United States military. Very few people in the room were happy with that answer. Nuclear-security experts note that even the bunker-busting bombs that were fired at Fordow were unable to ensure that it was completely destroyed, and Pickaxe Mountain was constructed, from the initial shovels of earth, to be more impenetrable than its predecessor.

This war has become a story on Capitol Hill. The total cost to date is 37.5 billion dollars, a significant increase from a Pentagon official's May estimate of 29 billion and an increase from what Hegseth calls “modernization shortfalls” from the previous administration that he wants filled. Both sides of the aisle responded to the countdown, not because they are skeptical of the costliness of the conflict but because no one in that hearing room could say when it will end.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has tried to craft a different picture, suggesting that Washington is ready to negotiate, but Tehran isn't. He has additionally threatened more acutely that allowing Iran to de facto control the Strait of Hormuz will be an example no administration would accept not just because roughly one-fifth of the world's seaborne crude still passes through the strait, but because if Iran proves capable of controlling it, so could others. The strait's woes have already spread to budgets far from the Gulf. Prior to the renewed conflict, Brent crude was trading in the seventies and earlier this year, the price of the oil had been above one hundred dollars per barrel for weeks. American pump prices rose from under three dollars per gallon to well over three-seventy in a few weeks. On several nights when Hormuz traffic dwindled to a few ships, markets opened down in Asia.

It is in this climate that Beijing and Moscow have been able to play their cards without much action. As the Peterson Institute and Bruegel economists have pointed out, clearly, China is a stealth winner of this war, not because it desires the Gulf to be destabilized but because Iranian crude continues its flow eastward, whether or not the U.S. dollar is involved, and has been deposited in Chinese hands via its own cross-border payment system, which the dollar-driven payment system Washington can monitor has not been able to handle. Russia, meanwhile, has taken advantage of the distraction to expand its influence in Europe even as some of its sanctioned sea-stranded oil has been able to reach buyers via a temporary US Treasury license. There have been very few public statements by either government. Both seem happy to see Washington's money and time go on a war they are not at.

The Houthis are imposing a further challenge on Yemen's security, threatening to close the Red Sea to Saudi-fleets in solidarity with Tehran, and which Trump has already warned will have “direct military consequences” if it is implemented. Iran's own Khatam al-Anbiya joint command, which supervises the activities of the armed forces including the Revolutionary Guard, has assured that "any attack on the country's nuclear and sensitive sites will be regarded as a declaration of formal extension of the war," a claim Tehran has repeated nearly every day since the bombing reignited.

In all this, an unplanned economic door has opened up for Pakistan. The Islamabad finance minister has requested $10 billion in stabilization funds from the US Treasury, a stablecoin payments agreement linked to the crypto venture of the Trump family and US financing for the Reko Diq mining project, having helped bring the two sides together indirectly with Tehran. In Washington, analysts are increasingly drawing parallels to the currency swap line that Argentina was able to obtain last year, and pointing to signs of diplomatic goodwill in this conflict being directly translated to balance-sheet relief for a cash strapped economy far removed from the conflict.

What it has become is a war that is no longer a contained military operation and is turning into a gradual shift of global power in which the nation that is dropping the bombs is paying for with an ever-heavier bill, while the nations sitting quietly on the sidelines, China and Russia being the primary beneficiaries, are claiming the strategic spoils.