In what is already a battle that seems to be drawing to a close, Monday felt like a battle that was taking root. In just a few hours, air-defence forces in four different countries – Israel, Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia – were scrambling to catch drones as both Washington and Tehran spoke of “good talks” and traders pushed oil prices lower on the assumption that the region had finally settled down. The paradox is the story. The truce President Donald Trump imposed after almost two weeks of American airstrikes on Iran has done nothing to halt the shooting. It is no more and no less than a change in its doers and its location.

Israeli military forces are still trying to determine the source of the drones that were destroyed early on Monday near the Jordanian border by the Dead Sea, the army said, noting the aircraft did not penetrate Israeli airspace. Jordan said it knocked down two of its own. Iraqi security forces said yesterday that they had witnessed a series of drone attacks against camps housing Iranian Kurdish opposition forces in the northern part of the country, where four U.S. military personnel were killed during the recent bombing raid. None of the three governments has identified a culprit, a testament to how complex the battlefield has become: This isn't just a two-sided affair between Israel and Iran, but also a web of proxies, militias and unclaimed strikes that nobody wants to claim publicly.

Saudi Arabia had the least successful day of the four. The defense ministry in Riyadh claimed that drones were deliberately targeting Iraq's capital and the Eastern Province petroleum installations, with the militants suspected of being from Iran, and stated that they prevented the attacks. Widespread social media footage of smoke rising over the Abqaiq processing complex, the same site that was targeted by a devastating strike in 2019, was spread around. The kingdom indicated it would respond, a step which has typically been taken before, not after, a response from the kingdom.

It was no one-off occurrence. It was two days after Yemen's pro-Qadiani Houthi movement attacked Saudi Aramco's Jizan refining complex directly, the first attack by the group on core Saudi oil infrastructure in four years, confirmed independently by NASA's satellite fire-detection system that detected a "sharp thermal spike" at the site before dawn. On Monday, the Houthis expanded their attacks to include transit points supplying crude from the Eastern Province to the Red Sea export terminal at Yanbu, the pipeline corridor that Saudi Arabia had made the backbone of its export plan after the fall of the Houthi capital, Sanaa. That's not a subtle logic. Since February, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively shut to normal shipping so that Yanbu is the kingdom's remaining major petro-export route. Press that, and you press the one alternative that Riyadh created for itself.

The Houthis spin all this as a follow-up to Saudi drone attacks on Yemeni airspace, which also disrupted the truce, albeit in a less perfect manner than in 2022. Egypt condemned the strikes as an "endangering threat" to regional stability and promised to support Riyadh, which is another way of saying that Gulf oil security is not a Saudi issue but is considered a shared strategic interest across the Arab world.

But then, the oil market didn't bat an eye. Despite the attacks on tankers and refineries in three nations, Brent crude actually fell by about $86.50 a barrel Tuesday, the third consecutive day of declines. It isn't actually because of anything physical Trump has been touting progress in talks with Tehran, Iranian and Omani officials met over the weekend to discuss reviving normal transit through Hormuz, and the Kazakh crude loadings have resumed at the Caspian Pipeline Consortium's terminal in the Black Sea, which was briefly shut down by Ukrainian drone strikes as well. In other words, markets are reacting sooner to the potential of peace than the drones on the ground are on the ground. That disconnect is worth contemplating because it is the type of disconnect that has bitten traders in this war before: Brent surged above $140 a barrel when the fighting was at its peak in March before falling just as fast when negotiations began.

Iran, meanwhile, denies it has requested to rejoin talks. Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei Monday confirmed that “reports of Tehran's request for talks are false,” but admitted that “the messages are still moving through the mediators.” Iran further claims it still has control of the Strait of Hormuz, which was home to about one-fifth of the world's seaborne oil until now.

The current lull is actually very fragile, and that's what Monday made abundantly clear. Trump suspended the bombing campaign against advice that it has been successful so far in its military efforts, but not because either side had exhausted their reason for fighting. Iran says it will only keep its powder dry until the American "halt" lasts. The rest of the neighbourhood Riyadh, Amman, Baghdad, Jerusalem are all eating the consequences of a battle they did not initiate and cannot command entirely. And the world's energy markets are continuing to see the calm side prevail over the fight.