Saudi Arabia's Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman told JD Vance this week that Riyadh favours de-escalation with Iran. That sentence requires a moment. Saudi Arabia has conducted joint strikes with the United States on Iranian proxy militias in Iraq. It has absorbed Houthi drone attacks on its oil facilities for months. Its Red Sea shipping workaround — built specifically because Hormuz was closed in February — has been destroyed by the Houthi maritime blockade. It is a country fighting on multiple fronts in a conflict it did not start and cannot stop unilaterally. And it told Washington's vice president: de-escalate. Prince Khalid also told Vance that Netanyahu was pushing for escalation while Saudi Arabia wanted de-escalation — the clearest public articulation yet of the gap between Washington's two most important regional partners on the question of how this war ends.
Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called it 'an unwinnable war' on CNN on Thursday — specifically that the US was 'locked into an unwinnable war' with Iran. He said this because the strategic geometry is precisely as unwinnable as it appears: the bombing cannot permanently destroy Iran's nuclear infrastructure because Iran rebuilds what is bombed, as satellite images confirmed this week. A ground war is impossible at current force levels and political will. Recognising Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz is politically unacceptable. Leaving achieves nothing. The word 'unwinnable' is not hyperbole. It is the precise military-strategic description of a situation in which no available path leads to the stated objective.
Neither of these assessments — from a former defense secretary or from the country most exposed to the regional consequences of the war — will change the immediate trajectory of the conflict. The IRGC struck a Kuwaiti air base in the early hours of Friday morning. US forces have completed another overnight wave. The cycle continues its pattern: bombing, pause, bilateral statement, resumed bombing. What changes is the accumulation of voices outside that cycle declaring it cannot produce the result it was supposed to produce.
The war reached Egypt on Thursday. Two ships caught fire in the Egyptian port of Damietta, including a US-owned gas storage tanker, after what Egyptian authorities said appeared to be a drone attack. No party claimed responsibility. Trump said Iran was responsible. Egypt is not a combatant. It is a country of 104 million people through whose canal approximately 12 per cent of global trade passes. Hormuz was the first chokepoint closed by this war. The Red Sea was the second, targeted by Houthi missiles and drones. If Egypt's Damietta and the Suez Canal enter the conflict's targeting logic, the war will have closed or threatened three of the world's four most significant maritime corridors. The ship fires may have been incidental. They may be something else. Nobody knows yet. That uncertainty is itself the expansion.
On Thursday, Shell reported adjusted earnings of $9.84 billion for the second quarter — its second-highest quarterly profit on record, surpassed only by Q2 2022 when the Russia-Ukraine energy crisis sent prices higher. The Brent crude price has risen by nearly a third since February 28. The war that has killed 18 Americans and thousands of Iranians, pushed six million people in Somalia, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka toward acute food insecurity, burned a child and her parents on Qeshm Island on Wednesday, and cost the Pentagon $37.5 billion in five months has been, for the oil industry, an exceptional quarter. The market records this without moral commentary. It is not wrong. The disruption of energy supply is profitable for those who supply energy. Shell's shareholders are not responsible for the war. The war is responsible for Shell's profits.
Pakistan is 'doing the utmost' to revive US-Iran negotiations, Islamabad's Foreign Ministry said this week. Qatari mediators are still working. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says it is unwinnable. Saudi Arabia says de-escalate. The CENTCOM commander recommended stopping because the campaign had reached the limit of its effectiveness. The bombing doubled. Kuwait's air base was struck again this morning. Shell's profits are its second-highest ever.
Unwinnable. Profitable. Expanding. These are the three adjectives that describe the Iran war on the morning of its 154th day. In April, Trump said it would be over in two to three weeks. The people who ran America's Pentagon have since supplied their own word. One of them said it on CNN. It has not appeared in any official statement. It has not needed to.
