Threat Analysis

Ten days after a US-Iran deal, two tanker attacks have exposed the gap between market confidence and operational reality.

Iran has threatened to attack or tax the undersea cables running through the Strait of Hormuz. No body of international law has the tools to stop it.

Beijing has sent no ships into combat, lost no soldiers, and taken no side. It is also emerging from six weeks of war as one of its principal beneficiaries.

The Iraq war remains the standard against which US military adventurism gets measured. The Iran war may be on course to surpass it — not in US casualties, but in the breadth of its global consequences.