The guns have stopped and started again almost in the same breath, six months after the United States and Israel launched a war that claimed Iran's supreme leader in its opening hours in the first few minutes of the Strait of Hormuz. The biggest exchange in a month happened Tuesday night when American forces struck what officials say were about 100 targets in Iran's southern coast and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded with ballistic missiles fired at a US base along the Gulf of Aqaba in Jordan. In Bahrain and Kuwait, they heard the air raid sirens and recorded drone intercepts by Wednesday morning, and a war Washington had been pushing the summer to stall through sanctions was again on the move.

The difference here is not so much the scale as the confusion as to its purpose. President Trump provided three different explanations in just 24 hours. On the social network, Truth Social, he stated that the strikes responded to Iran's "failed attempt" to lay mines in the strait. In a Fox interview he explained that they focused on Iran's attempts to rebuild its radar system that Israel and the U.S. had destroyed in the war. Meanwhile, US Central Command linked the operation to attacks on commercial tankers and American forces in Iraq by the Iranians. All three reasons might be correct but the changing justification is a story all by itself, and is part of a narrative in Tehran about Washington's improvisation rather than a plan.

In this war, as they do everywhere, the human price is questioned. A house in the coastal town of Kuhestak in the province of Hormozgan was hit by the explosion during a wedding, killing four and injuring over fifty people, the Red Crescent and foreign ministry officials stated. A regional deputy governor told state television that the death toll was lower, at two. Iran's embassy in foreign countries said the bride's dress was stained with blood and the incident will not remain unanswered.

American officials have not challenged the existence of a strike near Kuhestak, but neither confirmed the casualty toll, and it is difficult to verify, in view of the restrictions on Iranian reporting. The actual costs will be whatever they are, but the optics have cemented the opinions of a nation with six months of war marring morale and infrastructure.

It's no longer a regional story; economically speaking. Figures compiled by the Congressional Research Service show that the Strait of Hormuz transports nearly a quarter of the world's sea-borne crude oil and almost 10% of traded liquefied natural gas. The latest strike pushed Brent crude into the high seventies, just under pre-war prices, from where it has been trending over the last week, and more than three percent in the last few days. Brent has risen to well over a hundred dollars a barrel several times since the war started in February due to fears of a surge in world oil stocks and tanker attacks, but fallen back when peace has briefly returned.

There has been enough of this back-and-forth to make every ceasefire rumour a cause for suspicion among traders and more.The knock-on effects can be seen far from the Gulf. Average prices of $4.10 per gallon for regular gasoline are nearly thirty percent higher than a year ago and in the middle of a midterm election that has proven to be tough on the party in power, according to AAA. But Iran, which has lost about 4.7 million barrels a day of production capacity that once powered a shadow trade to Chinese refiners, will not be shut down by the tanker-for-tanker policy that Washington unveiled this week, which aims to make the shadow trade more expensive.

Analysts monitoring the shipping information are seeing the plan not as a move towards an eventual ban on Iranian oil sales, but as a way to make it more costly for buyers to deal with Tehran, to the point where it would alter Iran's calculations, but not cause the kind of supply shock that would drive up prices beyond political tolerance in Washington. This is a less ambitious and more practical objective than either side would like to make it sound and is why either side continues to talk past one another while the missiles are in the air.

Diplomatically, the door is not closed completely. Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian, who attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Kyrgyzstan hours before the new attacks, said Tehran was prepared to return to the ceasefire agreement it previously achieved with Washington in June, if the US followed suit. The memorandum had required a 60-day negotiating period, and it was short-lived in the months after it was signed, while few in the region suspect that a new offer will be much more successful without a shift in the motivation.

While the U.S. threatens further sanctions linked to China buying Iranian crude, Chinese President Xi Jinping is in Egypt this week, bearing in mind that the economic battle of the war is as much in the hands of Asian oil refiners as it is in the hands of the Persian Gulf navies. Jordan claimed to have taken 10 of Iran's total of 13 missiles, while the remaining two were dropped in open desert, and two U.S. officials declined to confirm any U.S. casualties despite Iranian reports of a heavy toll, Jordan said.

All of this is in the direction of a crisis. It leads to a war that knows how to stop without actually stopping, exploding when it seems one side has wriggled into the leverage, and retreating when the economic and political cost becomes too high. Oil traders, Gulf shippers and voters filling up their tanks on opposite sides of the world now see the same signals from Washington and Tehran: a constantly changing message, an inexplicable strike and a strait neither can dominate but both will not abandon.