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Attack for Attack
There is a ceasefire operating in the Gulf that nobody signed. Tehran published the rule, passed it to Washington through channels and both capitals are now observing it.
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What Stopped and What Didn't
The American bombing of Iran stopped on Friday for the first time in thirteen nights, and the naval blockade kept running. That gap is the most informative thing to happen in this war in a week.
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The Easy Part
A ceasefire reached Tehran this week and did not survive the day. The offer was a ten-day halt in the strikes and the reopening of both shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran turned it down. A pause in the bombing was always the easy thing to arrange.
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Two Standards on One Gulf
In the same week American aircraft entered a twelfth night of strikes on Iran, Washington signed a nuclear cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia that could open a uranium enrichment path on Saudi soil. The terms it reportedly leaves out are the ones the United States spent fifteen years insisting on.
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The Bypass Under Fire
Saudi Arabia's answer to a blocked Strait of Hormuz was always the same. Move the oil west by pipeline, load it at Yanbu on the Red Sea and sail it out past the Bab al Mandeb while the Gulf burns. For a year that escape sat untested.
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What They Promised to Spare
In March Iran promised to spare the countries that host American forces and to strike only the bases themselves. By late July it was bombing Kuwait's water and power for the fourth day running and putting ordnance into the arms depots of the one Kurdish faction that had always been its friend.
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The One Who Closed It
The United States commands the Gulf and cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz. It can strike Iran daily, blockade its ports and sail warships beside the tankers, and the ships still will not go, because whether a captain sails is a judgement about danger and not about the navy at his side.
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The Guardian's Cut
For a month Washington told the world that no nation may charge for passage through the Strait of Hormuz. The week its war with Iran reopened, it named itself the strait's Guardian and claimed a fifth of every cargo crossing the water.
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The Siege That Picks a Side
A naval blockade is a blunt object, and it does not choose a target inside the government it squeezes. Yet the siege Washington restarts against Iran this week did exactly that the last time it ran, and the faction it strengthened is the one now left holding a failed deal.
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The Off-Ramp They Refused
Iran spent this month being handed a way out of the Hormuz crisis, and it refused. The offer on the table dropped the tolls Iran wanted gone and preserved an Iranian say over its own waters, then Iran rejected it and fired missiles at the Gulf states that brokered it.
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The Direction of the Money
European defence budgets are rising, and the destination of the new money is the story. It is flowing toward American suppliers and Washington's approval rather than toward the capabilities that would let Europe defend itself without the United States.
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The Friendly Rate
Iran has begun charging for passage through the Strait of Hormuz by political alignment. China, named a friendly country, is offered a discount. Everyone outside the friendly list pays full mandatory fees and risks attack for using any route Iran does not authorize.