US Central Command said its forces had launched a series of attacks on Iranian military forces they believed Tehran has been targeting tankers in their passage through the Strait of Hormuz, "beginning to strike Iran," were the words used. CENTCOM announced in a couple of hours, that the operation was finished, and the wave hit coastal defense systems and missile and drone facilities along Iran's southern coastline. For the fourth night in a row, the U.S. has been bombing in the region, and as the numbers are emerging from the region, the latest round of bombing according to Iran has claimed over 30 civilian lives, significantly more than the civilian death toll in earlier rounds of the bombing.

This is not the war of February that began when Washington and Jerusalem started a joint campaign against Iran's nuclear and military infrastructure. It's a smaller and meaner sequel and its battlefield is water, not territory. Both have come up with the same point of contention that was raised back in mid-June in a shaky memorandum of understanding: who really owns the mouth of the Persian Gulf? Since early July, Iran has been shooting at commercial ships passing through the strait, following the attack with an American mission within 24 hours. The pattern has been so reliable that any statement by CENTCOM now reads like a script and this includes a warning shot, a closure of the strait, and American aircraft and drones deploy the following night or morning.

Tehran responded to the new protests quickly. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed it attacked American military targets in Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan, while Jordan's armed forces confirmed that it downed three ballistic missiles that entered its airspace before dawn. Air raid sirens were sounded in Bahrain. Qatar reported intercepting a missile shot at it. None of this is really about Jordan and Bahrain, of course those countries are under attack because they are home to American bases and have a waterway that both Washington and Tehran are claiming as their own and see as too important to pass up the fight for.

As you might imagine, the money is where it gets interesting. Brent crude has risen for three consecutive sessions and was approaching $86 on Wednesday, after rising about 11 percent over the last two days. WTI was around $80. Vessels through the strait have dropped by over 50 percent from the level of approximately 130 vessels a day that passed through the strait prior to the war in February, according to shipping-data companies monitoring the route, which reversed the slight improvement that followed the June ceasefire. The danger is simple, one senior commodities analyst in Singapore said "There is a limit to the emergency reserves governments can draw on to buffer these shocks, and a sudden repricing cannot be ruled out if both sides continue to ratchet up the screws.

There is also a business component that is viewed as less significant than the geopolitics, but is very important to everyday households. Despite being slightly lower than they were a month ago, prices for gas in the U.S. are now up to about $3.87 per gallon, roughly eight cents more than a week ago. Refiners, on the other hand, are having some of their best margins in years, as crude prices have been somewhat soft in recent days while gasoline, diesel and jet fuel remain tight and high. An analysis of trade flows since the beginning of the war revealed that the two main beneficiaries of all this chaos have been the United States, which gained about $50 billion in extra export income because buyers sought out oil that doesn't need to pass through Hormuz, and Russia, which reaped more than $15 billion in additional gains without adjusting its own export volumes. Gulf producers who were able to ship around the strait – Saudi Arabia via its pipelines to the Red Sea and Oman by simple geography were also ahead. Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, which are more reliant on the strait, suffered a loss of revenue. Even oddly, Iran also won, as it was able to keep the waterway open even if it made it closed to the others.

This isn't a shipping fee anymore Trump doesn't play that game. He floated a temporary 20 percent toll on cargo moving through Hormuz (under American protection) and in less than 24 hours he came back around with a revised rate of 10 percent, assuring the Gulf states that they would invest in the US economy. Now, his message is different: he'll attack Iranian power plants and bridges next week if Tehran is not prepared to enter serious negotiations which has more the feel of a threat to make the campaign continue to expand than a means to put pressure on Iran. Iran's foreign minister, on the other hand, has gone to the extent of making public arguments that Iran should also be compensated for its security of the strait.

As Iran's stance grows more belligerent, more analysts say it is less interested in coming back to the negotiating table with Washington than in showing it can still shut off a vital choke point in world trade. There is also rumblings that Tehran could apply the same pressure to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, near Yemen, via the Houthis, a regional stand-off that could become a choke-hold on world trade, generally. If that occurs, insurance companies, shippers and importers around the world, not just in the Gulf, will be trading in a whole new risk category than they did just a month ago.

The strikes are ongoing, the tankers continue to divert and the oil market continues to do what it does when a chokepoint gets nervous, which is to price for the worst case scenario until someone is able to prove it wrong.