The fire that engulfed two liquefied natural gas tankers at a port in Egypt's Damietta area on Wednesday evening only burned for a few hours. Nobody died. By nightfall, the emergency crews had it contained and work resumed on cargo at nearby berths within 24 hours. Taken on its own merits, it is hardly significant given five months of missile firings, refinery strikes and tanker seizures in the region. But the strike had nothing to do with Damietta, according to two Iranian officials who spoke to the New York Times on the condition of anonymity. It was meant in their words to show that global shipping and energy trade can be disrupted much more severely if Tehran decides to escalate, which wasn't a message directed at Cairo, but at all shipowners, insurers and finance ministries who are presently factoring risk into the Middle East.

It was almost too obvious to be coincidental to have the target itself. The map of possible targets for retaliation had been shown by Iranian state television two days before the strike on an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea by an Israeli-backed Ukrainian aircraft that killed one of its sailors, according to Tehran. On that map Damietta was shown with its production data: 5.2 million tons of liquefied gas a year, put simply as Europe's 'gate' to exporting gas from Egypt. Egypt's petroleum ministry only confirmed a fire, saying there was no cause or culprit, and the match-up between the leaked list of targets and the Wednesday's attack on the floating storage vessel Energos Winter while a second tanker, Gaslog Salem, was moored nearby and also burned was not lost on maritime analysts, nor on Cairo itself.

The episode is significant because this is the first time in this war that Egyptian land has been targeted in any way. None of Iran's regional proxies would bother travelling hundreds or more than a thousand miles to attack a nation not directly involved in the conflict, have puzzled maritime security experts monitoring the attack in Egypt. Several have suggested this was never “proxy business as usual,” but a strategy of Tehran's own to prove distance to prove the war “can be moved to the new geography” with a mere rap on the government's door.

Compounds the timing of the signal. The strike came hours after Iran fired some of its ballistic missiles at U.S. bases in the Kingdom of Jordan, which Trump said the Americans "completely" intercepted, and as he was telling reporters that the U.S. would "beat the fing st out" of Iran in response. Trump went on to say that the Damietta incident was "Iran-related," and that Tehran was already aware of the retaliation and had made a private "request" to Washington to delay it. Iran's foreign ministry, on the other hand, has blamed the United States and Israel for escalating the conflict and a pro-Iran group in Iraq has threatened America and Saudi Arabia with "a heavy price" for recent counterstrikes against militia positions.

By now the economic consequences of this cycle of escalation have become a story in their own right, and not just on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the Jordan and Damietta strikes ended the relatively quiet period since June's ceasefire memorandum, sending Brent crude into a rally that pushed the price to more than $89 a barrel a 7 percent increase in a single session this week and continuing a monthly gain of over 18 percent. The war has moved into "a decidedly more dangerous phase," said analysts at RBC Capital Markets, while Qatar's energy minister has previously said he feared the conflict could lead Gulf oil producers to completely cease production, and oil prices could rise to $150 a barrel.

The shipping insurance market is a bleaker picture than the crude markets. War-risk premiums on tankers have at various times this year risen to as much as 10 percent of a vessel's value, up from around a quarter of a percent of value pre-war, and run by a $100 million tanker cost in the millions of dollars in the war of today, but only a few hundred thousand dollars in peacetime. The cost of shipping crude from the Gulf to China has also risen to a record high, above $420,000 a day for the largest supertankers, as both ship owners and underwriters factor in the threat of an attack on any ship passing through the strait. Shipping industry estimates say about 6,000 seafarers are still effectively stuck in the area while the International Maritime Organisation attempts to get ships through safer lanes.

In that context, the Damietta strike could be interpreted more as a trial than an explosion, one that Iran was using to warn markets, if not to prove the existence of the Chinese drone, that the machinery of global trade is alive and well, as much as anyone else's. In the days ahead, it may become more clear whether the incident on Wednesday was a foreshadowing or an afterthought in a precarious relationship between Gulf security and the rest of the world's energy supply, as well as whether the promised American response becomes a reality or just a footnote.