Washington didn't want anybody to know what occurred in Ankara last month, until now. President Trump was not rushed off his feet to Air Force One, as the official pool coverage of the NATO summit in Turkey implied, but was driven away as he left the meeting. He was whisked out under cover of a halloway van from the base and transported home on a military C-32 aircraft on an alternate route, the reporting this week indicated, while the White House had cameras and journalists believing he left the base as scheduled. The outline of the operation has since been confirmed by a US official to several American outlets. The motive was simple: intelligence had spotted a serious Iranian plot to assassinate the president in Turkey.

That one admission, which came quietly a month later, gives you much more insight into where this war is than any of the daily briefings emanating from Washington, Tel Aviv or Tehran. It has been almost six months since the United States and Israel “pre-emptively” attacked Iran on Feb. 28, and the war is still ongoing, still not contained and, obviously, not safe for the sitting U.S. president in a NATO member country. This isn't a footnote. It is an admission that Iran's reach, at least its will, now stretches well beyond its own borders and that even a security infrastructure based on the notion of alliance guarantees isn't enough protection.

The situation of Turkey in all this ought to be examined and they have not been examined. In the past year, Ankara has been trying to be of use to all sides in the conflict, whether in Ukraine, by hosting NATO summits, or in the Gulf crisis. On the same day, the Houthis launched new air attacks on the Saudi-backed troops, meanwhile Saudi Arabia has signed a mutual defense pact with Turkey and Pakistan, which is explicitly inspired by NATO's Article 5, which makes an attack on one member an attack on all members. For all those interested in the region's affairs with an eye on South Asia and the Indian Ocean, that agreement should not be dismissed as a mere "routine Gulf security pact. It officially connects Ankara's regional aspirations with Islamabad's military establishment and Riyadh's oil resources just when Pakistan's military has needed new sources of legitimacy and funds. It is fair to ask what this defense pact, which was struck under war conditions and not peacetime diplomacy, has to say for itself in the future and what responsibility it takes on quite for the conflicts that lie beyond Yemen.

The war in Iran has now evolved into at least three distinct fronts, none of which is going Tehran's way as state media assures Iranians. The main negotiation with Israel and the United States is ongoing, but it has not yet resolved into a formal process, with talks seemingly breaking down and then resuming with the help of middlemen. The Houthis, who declared a naval blockade of the kingdom in July, have struck Saudi Aramco's Jazan refinery, a tanker near Yanbu and military positions within Saudi territory in a single week killing scores of soldiers in a second front in Yemen and southern Saudi Arabia. A third front is in the Strait of Hormuz, the very center of Iran's shipping, where the Tehran government has made any return to normal shipping depend on broad American concessions, such as compensation for war damage, an end to the naval blockade and the return of frozen assets, concessions that the US has failed to formally respond to thus far.

The economic cost of this is now real. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated daily oil flow through Hormuz fell from about 21.6 million barrels per day (b/d) before the war to under 5 million b/d now. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has had to divert crude around 8 million bpd to the Western route of the East-West pipeline through its port of Yanbu on the Red Sea, but this pipeline is also in direct peril of Houthis. The price of Brent crude has been rallying sharply in the middle of summer on a new round of Iranian talk on the Hormuz transit deal, despite a brief lull in trading activity following the Opec group's decision on Sunday to keep oil prices steady for September.But after a brief respite from trading activity in the middle of summer due to the Opec group's decision on Sunday to maintain a stable oil price for September, the price of Brent crude has been bouncing back above 82 dollars a barrel on fresh Iranian demands over the Hormuz transit deal. Goldman Sachs has taken its own forecast range through the roof, projecting that Brent could rise above 120 dollars if the disruptions occur at the same time in all three choke points the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the Suez canal and the Hormuz strait which would directly impact the price of fuel, freight rates and inflation rates in every importing economy, including India.

The common thread that runs through all of this is an easy, uneasy thread. All actors in this war, whether Washington, Tehran, Riyadh, Ankara or the different proxy forces they are employing, are making deals in public, while making deals in private regarding military action. The Joint Chiefs chairman himself has been told privately that the Pentagon is looking for an off-ramp for the United States, as going further could go sour. Iran's leaders are not only going on the battlefield and claiming victory in state media interviews but are also communicating via intermediaries. More important, and last longer than the war itself, is a security pact that was concluded in Mecca amidst the sound of missiles. Outside this immediate theatre, the lesson for countries to watch is not who is winning this week.