Donald Trump's response to Iran so far this week is a vacuum, and in the president's world of non-retractions, an emotional compromise. On August 2nd, he announced on social media site, Truth Social that he was canceling a series of strikes to be launched on Iranian soil due to pressure from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and surprisingly Tehran itself. Four days later he was again berating the Iranian leadership for being "unbelievably duplicitous. By Wednesday he was promising "soon" the Strait of Hormuz would reopen, or that Iran would "get hit very hard. This isn't the attitude of a man with leverage. It's a man's pose, but a late one, as he realizes on the verge of the end of the game that America's magazine is almost full.

This is no empty rhetoric. It is inventory. This week, CNN has reported, based on multiple sources with access to classified Pentagon assessments, that the United States has depleted nearly 80 per cent of its stockpile of missiles for the THAAD defense system since the war with Iran broke out in late February. Patriots, Israel and six Gulf allies' main layered air defense system, has been depleted by about half. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the pre-war THAAD inventory was at 452 and the advanced Patriot inventory was approximately 2,200. Subtract this and what is left is a country that fought a war that it felt it could end in a matter of months and now has no hardware to begin another war without risking the national and regional defense system of its own country. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has publicly challenged the figures, but the administration's budget request has something else to say: $95 billion for munitions procurement in FY27, plus a $21 billion supplemental, and orders for over 3,000 new Patriots, 800 THAAD interceptors, and orders that will take years to fulfill, not months. Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have reached contracts to expand manufacturing lines this week, and they've expanded them by a lot.Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have agreed to expand manufacturing lines by triple and quadruple this week. But none of that does help Trump when Iran calls his bluff next month.

Here's the original "last chance" ultimatum. It's not about how strong they are. It's a superpower that wants to make a deal on the Strait of Hormuz, where about a fifth of the world's oil continues to flow, before its opponent realizes its cupboard is empty. Brent crude, which had been trading around $72 a barrel prior to the war, surged above $140 in the most volatile period of the war, but has now returned to the $79 to $80 range as negotiations with Oman on an interim shipping agreement push forward. However, normal is a superficial appearance. This summer, war-risk insurance on tankers crossing the Gulf has risen to three to five per cent of the hull value, up from a pre-February low of a few per cent, and crisscrossing the fuel and freight bills from Rotterdam to Mumbai. For prolonged periods, traffic in the Hormuz port has remained at about a quarter of pre-war volume. Not all shipping lines which turned around the Cape of Good Hope have returned. In fact, a CNN poll this week revealed that 67 percent of Americans think the Iran war has been detrimental to the country, and a majority, 65 percent, feel it's made their own economic situation worse. Trump isn't only dealing with Tehran. He is running a household economy that is in a state of silent rage over gas prices, and a populace that's no longer buying it was ever going to be fast.

This void has been filled by Pakistan, and in particular by its army chief who has been hovering in and out of Islamabad, Tehran and Washington for months, and who has picked up some public plaudits from Trump for "requesting" a ceasefire in the stop-strike movement. Foreign Affairs even published an article this month that stated that Pakistan had “won” a war it did not actually fight albeit as a mediator, and as a result won a medal from the Saudi capital Riyadh. It was a stunning re-branding for a military establishment that just a year ago had been locked in a cross-border shooting war with India and earlier in the year, with Iran, of which it now takes credit for subduing. What is disturbing below the pretty faces is that Pakistan's whole diplomatic effort here is based on a ceasefire that has been broken and patched up several times since February. If Trump does resume strikes when the Hormuz deal goes belly-up, as seems likely in the next couple of months, the mediator narrative will be lost, and Islamabad will be left with a foreign-policy investment that produces no return and will be a load on a tenuous economy still reliant on IMF support and unable to afford the instability a broader regional war will bring next door.

Nor is Iran the only Arab nation where America's peace efforts are coming up against a brick wall. Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, publicly countered Tuesday the disarmament roadmap he was announced as a breakthrough on just the previous day by his patron in the White House, telling Israelis flatly "we did not agree to it. An agreement between Hamas and the Board of Peace and Egyptian, Qatar and Turkish mediators would see Israel withdraw to the October 2025 ceasefire line and Hamas surrender its arms. Netanyahu has expanded the Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip from a little more than 53 percent to more than 60 percent, which is the opposite of the deal Netanyahu wants, which calls for disarmament, first and foremost. Hamas, meanwhile, claims it has already signed on, and demands that Washington pressure Jerusalem.