Forty-eight hours ago, a nuclear accord between Washington and Tehran was on the verge of being achieved. In classic Trump fashion, he had said to reporters that the two countries were in "the final throes" of an agreement that would, he said, "be very, very good for everybody. Within a day or two, or three, he said. Signs were cautiously optimistic. Both sides had quietly been nudging at the process through diplomats. Oil markets have relaxed. But then the Apache came.

On Monday night, a US Army AH-64 Apache helicopter went down near the Strait of Hormuz. The US official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the plane crashed after colliding with an Iranian drone, but did not say if the act was intentional or not, a point that is still under official investigation. An unmanned boat was used to rescue the two pilots. They were unharmed. But a move that has ensued has pushed a region already on the precipice back into its most perilous period in months.

Trump moved fast. He announced on Truth Social that "the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache Helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz," and said the United States must respond. The rhetoric was typical Trump: crude, emphatic, and intended for an audience back home. The pilots were good and the planes very modern," he said. The US could not have done otherwise, he said. On Tuesday evening, that option was an air campaign.

Attacks started at 22:00 GMT on Tuesday and ended just before 01:00 GMT on Wednesday, US Central Command said, calling them "self-defense strikes" and "a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression. Explosions were reported on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz, and in the ports of Sirik, Jask and Bandar Abbas. The strikes were not random, CENTCOM said, noting that the targets included Iranian air defense, ground control and surveillance radar sites close to the strait. The targeting was precise and had its own message: these were not punitive slaps on the forehead to humiliate. They were surgical, designed to reduce Iran's capacity to threaten U.S. assets in the waterway.

But Tehran wasn't surgical in its response.

The Revolutionary Guards have attacked a US base in Jordan and 21 other targets in the Gulf with drones and missiles, including the Ali Al Salem base in Kuwait and the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Kuwait's air defenses fired on the aerial targets and residents were advised to take shelter. Warning sirens were heard in Bahrain. Egypt denounced Iran's actions in "the strongest terms" and Qatar called them a "flagrant breach of the rules of international law. The UAE termed it as "Iranian terrorist attacks". Even in the Islamic world, Iran came to be seen as an outcast in the court of regional opinion.

The IRGC-affiliated media claimed that Iran's overnight operation achieved 70% success against its targets while US initial assessment said that "almost all Iranian missiles and drones were intercepted". The difference between those two tells you all you need to know of the information war being waged alongside the military war.

The significance of this week is that it broke out in the context of the next. The standoff between the United States and Iran, which formally started with joint U.S.-Israeli strikes that reportedly killed Iran's Supreme Leader on Feb. 28, had seemed to be heading toward a negotiated conclusion. Trump had announced himself hours earlier that the U.S. and Iran were on the verge of a “a very, very good deal” that “in no way” would permit Iran to have nuclear weapons. The irony was too perfect: within twenty-four hours of being given the message that peace was at hand, the president ordered retaliatory strikes.

This whiplash isn't just a personality trait of Trump's. It's showing there's something structurally wrong with the way this war has been conducted. No single will to rule politically. On the other, Iran's president, who has been simultaneously seeking to bomb Israel and deal with the U.S. On the other, an Israeli prime minister who has been fighting his own war, sometimes in sync with Washington, sometimes defiantly against its wishes. If Israel re-enters a war with Iran, it could be a "solo effort," Trump said he told Netanyahu. This threat proved to be serious enough to cause Israel to cancel at least one major planned strike on Iran in the wake of Trump's signaling that U.S. support wouldn't follow, reports said.

However, the war that was raging around them went on. Israel struck Beirut. Iranian missiles were launched at Israeli soil. Rockets fired from the south of Lebanon by Hezbollah toward Israeli forces, one of which was intercepted in a Kiryat Shmona airspace just hours ago. This week alone, eleven people were killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon, primarily around Tyre.

This is not a vacuum. The economic impact has been tremendous, and it is far from any battlefront. Since the initial US-Israeli attacks in late February, prices for the benchmark crude, Brent, have risen 8% from $71.32 a barrel to $77.24. However, with the ongoing war, the prices have increased significantly even surpassing $100 for a period. Rystad Energy estimates that the cuts by the six Gulf producers totaling 11.8 million bpd are the worst oil supply shock in history, at 1 billion barrels so far. The consultancy estimates that each month of conflict leads to the loss of another 350 million bpd.

About 27% of the world's maritime crude oil and petroleum products pass through the Strait of Hormuz. It is not just a question of higher European or American gas prices. It works its way down the fertilizer supply chain (more than one-third of the world's urea is from the Persian Gulf); through food prices and through currencies in import-dependent economies. But the UN World Food Programme in March had predicted up to 45 million people could become acutely food insecure if oil prices stay close to $100 a barrel until June. This is now what is happening, Afghanistan could be impacted by 17.4 million people and Somalia around 6.5 million. Today, Middle East wars stay not in the Middle East.

The big question now is how this helicopter crash affects the nuclear talks, analysts from capitals are asking. As a result of the U.S. strikes, Iran's foreign ministry said it would "reassess" its stance at the negotiating table. For his part, Trump posted on Wednesday that Iran had "failed" to reach a deal "that would have been great for them," and thus would have to pay the price. Just this one sentence reveals how precariously close to the edge these talks now are. If the president is framing a diplomatic opportunity as a punitive threat, then he's not thinking a deal is in the offing.

Politically, the situation is no more stable in Israel. Netanyahu has been juggling both his ties to Washington and an existential military campaign, both of which his government spins as a single issue, at the same time. In an interview with ABC News, Trump mused about whether the Israeli prime minister whom he called a "wartime prime minister" with an "amazing career" even wants to continue in politics once the war ends. Though delivered casually, the comment is weighty. Trump has a knack for telegraphing intentions.

As it becomes more apparent to serious watchers of this conflict, the structure of the decision-making processes on all sides is very fragmented. The Americans seek a bargain, only to find themselves stumbling towards escalation. The Israelis are keen to complete the job militarily, but say they are no longer able to rely on American protection. The Iranians are negotiating, and they are firing test rounds on all military systems, to show that they still have the ability to hurt. Without being involved in the conflict, without being responsible for the war, and without having any interest in it, and the Gulf states Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan are now absorbing the Iranian attacks against the US bases on their territory.

The ceasefire which was in effect from April to the end of May was not a resolution of the underlying tensions. The issue of Iran's nuclear ambitions continues to be the main hurdle. The US wants Iran never to have a nuclear weapon and for any enriched uranium to be destroyed. On its part, Iran considers enrichment as a sovereign right. Both roles have been unchanged since February.

In that context, a drone-helicopter crash over the Strait of Hormuz is no accident. The kind of spark that can occur when two forces work side by side for months on a contested space with no rulebook to speak of. It likely may never be publicly established if the Iranian drone that collided with the Apache was flying under orders, autonomously or whether it simply drifted off course. But the repercussions have been felt literally with airstrikes, counterstrikes and a fraught diplomatic process now teetering.

The narrowest point of the Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide. At some level, all this was always to be. The issue was never if something would go wrong, when you park that much military equipment, that much ideological hostility and that many unresolved grievances in a channel that is barely wide enough to pass two tankers. It was only when.

The next question is whether the men tasked with managing this Trump, Netanyahu and Tehran's new leadership have the discipline to back down from a battle that no one, not even the generals, quite has a handle on anymore. The data is grim. Politics are divided. Somewhere in the Strait of Hormuz, an Apache helicopter carcass rests on the ocean floor as a reminder that things can go wrong quickly when the margin for error is measured in meters and the consequences in millions of lives.