The United States is on its seventh night of strikes against Iran this weekend, and the repercussions of that campaign are starting to cascade back into nearly all of the other fault lines in world politics, ranging from the U.S. obsession with China to the prolonged issue of Saudi-Israeli normalization. This original joint American-Israeli strike, which has been responsible for the death of Iran's supreme leader, has evolved into an open-ended war of attrition and the repercussions are now being felt in oil prices, the price of bitcoins, and Asian equity markets, as well as on the battlefield.

On Friday, US Central Command confirmed that its forces have targeted Iranian surveillance bases, military logistics facilities, underground weapons depots and maritime assets across the country, including in ports, late Friday, while maintaining a naval blockade on Iranian ports. At least 50 people have been killed and over 500 wounded since the attacks began on July 6, a figure disputed by Tehran, according to the country's Health Ministry. Iran is in the midst of a crisis that could result in what a senior adviser to Iran's supreme leader called a full-scale offensive if the Americans continue their strikes for two or three more days, he said Friday, which has shaken markets already nervous about the Strait of Hormuz. Bitcoin tumbled to under $63,000, while Japan's Nikkei shed almost 3 percent, as investors took into account new risks of escalation.Meanwhile, crude has maintained an unusually stable price around $79 a barrel in the midst of the fighting, and bitcoin fell below $63,000 as investors incorporated fresh escalation risk. A small, but telling, figure: Indian shipping companies have been advised to avoid sending Indian crew members through the Iranian waters of the Hormuz Strait after a seafarer was killed onboard a ship passing through the strait.

This week, however, President Trump decided to take this powder and add salt to the wound. He released Thursday a document he claims reveals that in 2020, China gained access to approximately 220 million American voter records, a possible record-breaking hack of election records. Beijing's foreign ministry denounced the allegations as "entirely fabricated" and Chinese authorities have always denied any interference in U.S. elections. But the timing is crucial: Trump and Xi Jinping agreed to a fragile trade truce in South Korea last fall that centered on rare earth exports, a soybean deal and a tariff truce, and Trump's own trade negotiators privately believe Beijing is quietly dragging its feet on the rare earths, with little appetite from Washington to retaliate. The reactivation of 2020 election-fraud complaints just months before the midterms and the threat of tariffs on goods he still needs to cooperate with China on vital to EVs and fighter jet production sounds more like a president trying to appease two audiences than a coherent China strategy. The upcoming trip to the US, which Xi had hoped to make early this year, now appears much shakier, analysts who follow the relationship point out.

However, Pakistan is dealing with a crisis of its own, albeit without the thunderous impact of a Tehran or a Beijing headline. Balochistan has just witnessed one of its bloodiest forays in years, as at least 42 security personnel were killed by Baloch separatist forces in four days of the beginning of July, which led the army to conduct an Operation Shaban, a huge air and ground counterinsurgency that Islamabad claims to have targeted more than a hundred militants, while separatist groups claimed the army was being bogus with inflated figures to hide the loss of life and justify its extrajudicial killings of civilians. At the same time, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, weeks of demonstrations against economic woes and the alleged oppression of women have now been followed by a prolonged march in Muzaffarabad, in which local security forces have reportedly stepped up their preparations for clashes while mobilizing more troops. None of it amounts to the kind of institutional upheaval which is always headlines for headlines' sake, but it does highlight an army overstretched on two fronts at the same time, one facing an ethnic insurgency in the south and the other a fight to keep the peace in the north a combination that has always been expensive for the Pakistani economy and ability to ensure stability for foreign investors and lenders already nervous about Pakistan's debt situation.

Then there's the fourth thread: the ever-returning issue of Israeli-Saudi normalisation, which has slipped back under the radar this week with Israeli President Isaac Herzog's rare interview on Saudi state TV platform Al Arabiya, which included a discussion of his desire for reconciliation with Riyadh and a display of respect for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Saudi Arabia pulled out of the normalization process in 2023 following the outbreak of the Gaza war; and throughout the process, Saudi officials have repeatedly insisted on a credible prospect for Palestinian statehood, which the incumbent Israeli government has kept rejecting. Senator Lindsey Graham, who was reported to have been in the final stages of pursuing a new Saudi-Israeli framework, was recently killed a sad ending to a diplomatic pathway that Washington still considers the crowning achievement of its Middle East strategy and would have profound implications for defense budgets, arms sales and energy politics throughout the Gulf if it is to ever come to fruition.

The four stories tell of a single structural moment in American foreign policy: a war in the Gulf, an old ally in South Asia under stress from within, the growing economic and political tensions with China, and a never-ending search for a grand Middle East realignment that is always just beyond reach. It is to be expected that the economic price of all this in oil, in crypto, in stocks, in stalled trade agreements will be paid long before all these stories are resolved.