Just before something snaps, there's a certain quietness that can descend upon the Middle East, and Wednesday morning it rained down on the Middle East. An Israeli engineering vehicle was blown up in the hills of southern Lebanon in about 12 hours, Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired ballistic missiles for the first time in days at American troops and Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters back home that his meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office was one of the best that the two leaders have ever had. All of these events did not occur solely in isolation. They together outline an area that is never disarming but keeps proscribing peace.

Start with the drone. The Israeli military said on Saturday it was hit by an unmanned engineering vehicle overnight in the Ali Taher Ridge area inside Israel's buffer zone under its ceasefire deal with Hezbollah. Israeli military officials are viewing it as a “deliberate violation” and are saying the Lebanese outfit launched it while trying to disrupt Israel’s ground operations that they wanted to scale back. In Lebanese media, it's an effort to stop Israeli engineering, not to restart the greater war. There were no casualties in the battle. However, the incident comes on top of a trend which had set itself in place in Lebanon for months: Hezbollah has been quietly developing a first-person-view drone capability, in some cases with the help of fiber-optic cables which are difficult to jam, while Israeli commanders have been unable to come up with an effective countermeasure. Both sides openly acknowledge the ceasefire as having helped defuse the north, yet neither side has stopped testing the ceasefire.

The same dread of testing instead of trusting was evident throughout the entire theater a day earlier. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired a handful of ballistic missiles, perhaps as many as four, initially estimated by US Central Command, at US forces in the region in a "surprise attack," as the CAC put it. All of them were picked up. Saudi Arabia followed in quick fashion with what it dubbed "limited, targeted" strikes against Iran-backed militias in Iraq, whose attacks on its oil facilities came earlier, and sources close to the groups in Iraq claimed that they killed about twenty fighters. It was the most pointed-after almost two weeks since Washington and Tehran were seen making progress toward developing a framework, with Oman brokering a plan for a joint inspection regime of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. The discussions went on, but Iran refused the same plan.

The value of that one waterway is too hard to calculate. The Strait of Hormuz is the pathway for about a quarter of the world's seaborne crude and a significant portion of the world's LNG, and prices have been factored in for each flare-up this year. Brent crude, which has been edging back toward pre-war levels on the strength of a potential for a sustainable ceasefire, has several times jumped several percentage points in one session since the conflict in February. ING analysts have suggested prices in the low eighties up to one hundred and forty dollars a barrel if the strait was to close for a longer period, while prices for gas benchmarks in Europe are set for an even higher rise as the Gulf is the heart of the world's LNG supply. Shipping insurers have already tweaked the insurance rates for the route more than once this year, and container lines have shifted their ships without putting their fingers in their mouths.

In that context, the Netanyahu-Trump meeting seemed more of a well orchestrated public relations exercise for both sides than a diplomatic success. The Israeli leader walked in through a back entrance and was shielded from the cameras, and left after about two hours claiming the session was a "triumph. Trump had roughed him up earlier, on Fox news, for allegedly leaking information that Iran was reviving its weapons work at the fortified Pickaxe Mountain plant, and suggested that he didn't need Netanyahu's intelligence and that it was "not a big problem. Israeli aides have since denied that the facility was ever raised behind closed doors and that discussions were never held about Turkey's pending purchase of F-35s or reconstruction plans for Gaza or a Syria withdrawal. That account is not a deciding factor on whether either is going to stand up to the test; it merely underscores a fact that neither government wants to be seen by the public in either country as pushing the other to a war that both populations have become tired of, particularly as Netanyahu is heading towards an October election and Trump is dealing with his own domestic pressures stemming from ongoing entanglements overseas.

The Drama Queen in Lebanon, the missiles in the Gulf and the smiles in the Oval Office have one thing in common: a simple and uncomfortable truth. All the protagonists of this story, Israelis, Americans, Iranians, and Lebanese, have an incentive to claim victory and de-escalate publicly, but keep all options on the table. It's almost as if they say that the ceasefires are historic the same week that they're violated. Nuclear facilities are notified hours ahead of time before they become targets for destruction. For markets, the other side of the coin, it's not settled, and they're likely the most honest measure in the room. So long as those incentives remain the same, between good looks and an actual commitment, the region will continue to generate just this type of week: a photo of a handshake in one country, and the wreckage of an engineering vehicle in another, under the same fragile peace.