The U.S. has joined the open conflict with Iran by dropping a barrage of dozens of bombs on the Revolutionary Guard's positions in the Middle East overnight as a response to an attempt to fire a barrage of ballistic missiles at American troops. The strikes, which US Central Command described as a “forceful response” to Tehran's aggression, are the most intense in the Gulf in weeks and could reignite an already tense and volatile conflict between the two sides.

The aim of central command's aircraft was to disrupt the network's ability to threaten American personnel, commercial shipping lanes and the Gulf Arab states that surround the Persian Gulf, it said. The attack on what officials described as a wide-ranging list of targets was not a symbolic bomb but rather a bombing run that lasted two hours late Wednesday into Thursday.

The events of that night were more personal and less hopeful in Tehran. One strike killed a mother, father and their two-year-old son while two children were reportedly injured, according to the state media, in the Iranian territory of Qeshm Island, which lies within the Strait of Hormuz. There was no immediate independent confirmation of that and a medical professional's description of a "command center" versus a family who lost their home in the conflict seems a perfect example of what has long been the problem in this war: conflicting information.

The Iranian missile launch Tuesday aimed to hit US troops in Jordan, five that Jordanian forces say they intercepted before they hit their targets, is what started the American response. President Trump had been hinting, in his Oval Office interview with reporters, that it was Washington's turn to take a shot and that Iranian officials were asking him not to do so. He also said he had been briefed on a second drone attack on tankers off Egypt's coast, indicating that the conflict is getting far more complicated than it is between just two main players.

That trickle-down effect is already altering the landscape of this conflict in the region. Meanwhile, American and Saudi warplanes in the same timeframe attacked sites of Iranian-backed militias in the eastern Iraq, a joint attack Riyadh publicly called an act of self-defense under the United Nations charter, in response to Iranian-backed militants allegedly launching over 30 attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure and U.S. forces over three days. The Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq claimed that at least 20 of its members were killed and dozens wounded as a result of the strikes and condemned them as "dangerous" that would further widen a war most of the region has refused to join. Iran's own navy, meanwhile, attacked tankers in the Strait of Hormuz earlier in the week, and by Thursday morning Iranian authorities said that two additional tankers had turned back from the strait after one of them had caught fire.

The markets were brisk and rough. Brent crude, the world's main benchmark that fetches about two-thirds of global oil prices, rose as high as eight percent in one day and ended at nearly ninety dollars a barrel when the first bombings subsided. WTI prices also marched higher, topping eighty-four dollars. Days after a brutal three-day decline in crude prices, which lost around sixteen percent, the swing came on the heels of the biggest such decline since 2020, when traders had made an out-and-back bet that the ceasefire might stick. The bet is no longer there and shippers are being rerouted around the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, where transits are down over 20% since last year, as transits at Hormuz are sparse. The insurance companies are real-time pricing risk on the Gulf routes, and any action Tehran took to seriously close the Hormuz straits a choke point for a fifth of the world's oil and gas would soon push prices to one hundred and twenty dollars a barrel, according to some trading-desk estimates, which would directly impact the pump price and inflation in import-dependent economies from Europe to South Asia.

The facade of resolve in the strikes on Thursday is a much dirtier picture in the White House. The president was "exasperated" over the lack of a viable plan, his aides "have not been able to find a viable plan" this week, the report said. He was shocked at how long the campaign had gone on and at the absence of any serious strategy on how much bombing Iran had to be subjected to before it would acquiesce, one of his associates said. But administration officials, who described the tension, have been met with stiff resistance from the Pentagon, which has stated that the U.S. defense secretary, the commander of U.S. Central Command and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have "full agreement" on strategy, whether it is to remove Iran's nuclear force, to keep Hormuz open for shipping, or to eliminate Iran's arsenal of missiles and drones.

This uncertainty comes at a price. The war so far has been avoided from becoming the regional conflict that oil markets dread, due to war-risk premiums on Gulf shipping insurance, freight rates from rerouted tankers and a Revolutionary Guard willingness to target American bases instead of Israeli cities. Iran has repeatedly threatened that a strike on Tehran or its vital facilities would alter that equation, and place missiles on Tel Aviv's doorstep a threshold it has so far not reached, despite its repeated attacks on US facilities in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Iraq. Whether that's the case will depend not so much on rhetoric in Washington, as on what is going on in the coming days over the skies of Iran, and whether either side will be able to find a door they would still prefer to walk through one that both sides insist, at least publicly, that they would still like to walk through.