The de-facto ceasefire has been broken in the fall. The strikes were among the biggest since the Iran war flared up in late February, and included more than 100 targets in the vicinity of the Strait of Hormuz, including air defence batteries, radar installations, mine-laying equipment, communications centres and for the first time, two Iranian government-owned tankers. Washington's justification was a mining attempt in the strait and a missile fired at an American base in Jordan.

Tehran responded almost immediately, launching missiles and drones at American forces and bases in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq and the UAE and alleging that two commercial tankers had been attacked and disabled with sea mines as they travelled along the route. A wedding hall located in the southern city of Sirik was caught in the crossfire, which will not help the clean and surgical campaign narrative of the Americans.

In its own rhetoric, the White House has described this as the use of "overwhelming force" and has said any response from Iran will be met with "something much harder and higher than what has gone before. Such rhetoric goes down well at home. It performs much less well in Amman, Manama and Kuwait City, where governments hosting American troops are taking in Iranian missiles for a battle they didn't ask for.

It plays even worse in Islamabad and Kabul, where a bitter war between Pakistan and Afghanistan that erupted yesterday, just days before the American-Israeli campaign against Iran in February, has largely been forgotten by the world not because the fighting ceased, but because a more vocal war erupted across the border. That imbalance of coverage is significant, too: a regional dispute between nuclear-armed Pakistan receives a footnote, whereas oil infrastructure in the Gulf receives constant news coverage – that's a clear statement of where the world's priorities lie.

Remove the military showmanship and what emerges is an economic story. Over the last 2 weeks, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been laying the groundwork to what his department has described as an "economic onslaught" against Tehran, through a web of brokers, shell companies and shadow-fleet ships operating in the UAE, Hong Kong, Singapore and Switzerland to ensure Iranian oil revenue reaches the Revolutionary Guard.

He has not been so bold as to call China by its name, but the numbers do; Beijing accounts for around ninety percent of Iran's exports and Bessent has openly stated that he is not ready to "blow up the global financial system" yet by taking a shot at the Chinese banks. What's the reluctance, that's the story. Washington is seeking complete financial seclusion of Tehran without sparking a confrontation with its biggest creditor and trade partner, and hasn't yet come up with a way to get both.

All of this comes to a head on the oil market, where people far from the Gulf, see it become real. Both prices finished above ninety dollars a barrel and hit their biggest single-week gains in more than a month after the new strike, with Brent rising this week to his highest level in the year since late July. A total of seventeen million barrels passed through Hormuz on the day before the attacks restarted, the Energy Department said, which was the highest daily flow since the war began, so to calm worries in the markets about the chokepoint's return.

Seventeen million barrels out of the roughly twenty or twenty-one that were in transit before the war began seems like recovery rather than a peace that's tenuous, fragile, and is vulnerable to a single mine or missile that can unravel it in hours and that's exactly what happened. The EIA already had to scoot its price forecasts significantly higher this year, and it's not hard to see why traders are valuing the high probability of another such adjustment to come soon.

That void is filled by Moscow. The two leaders met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek and pledged to "continue supplying the necessary goods," while admitting that the previous ceasefire was not substantial enough to have had much significance. He was met by Iran's president who thanked him publicly and said they have a strategic partnership which has only strengthened during the fighting.

China's leadership was also at that same summit, as was the PM of India which is a good reason for anyone who still believes Iran is diplomatically isolated to sweat. It is not a rogue state playing by itself against Western pressure, but a shaky economic and political structur Russia, China and an expanding group of SCO members to sustain Tehran's income streams just because Washington's sanctions are likely harming all of them in a dollar-based economy.

Buried, too, is the one question that nobody in Washington can answer straight-faced: Where did Iran's enriched uranium go. The inspectors from around the world have not concluded that Iran's stockpile, which includes material enriched to sixty percent, is still in the country, and Iranian officials have said some of the enriched material is "probably buried under the ruins of the American strikes on Isfahan.

Add to that the decades of work Tehran has been putting into its underground missile sites and they were built just for this kind of attack to come, and the "ahead of schedule" victory story starts to seem a lot less secure than the press briefings make it seem.

This is not an easy equation of nuclear weapons with terrorism though. It's a battle for who will determine the price of energy for the next 10 years, who will control the chokepoints that transport energy, and who will call the financial shots that the rest of the world must follow.