The United States is now on its fifth consecutive day of airstrikes against Iran, a ceasefire that lasted less than a month is dead in the water, and the president of the United States stood in Pennsylvania and told reporters he was still deciding whether to make a deal with Iran or just 'finish it off.' That's not a negotiating strategy. That's a man at a diner deciding between the soup and the sandwich while the kitchen is on fire.
Two Waves, One Day, Zero Chill
Wednesday was not a slow news day. CBS News reports that the U.S. military's Central Command launched two separate waves of airstrikes against Iran within a single 24-hour period, marking the fifth straight day of American attacks. CENTCOM said the strikes were "targeting Iranian military capabilities used to threaten vessels freely transiting through the Strait of Hormuz."
Iran, predictably, did not take this lying down. Kuwait reported detecting four cruise missiles and 21 drones since the start of Wednesday alone. Air raid sirens sounded in Bahrain. Jordan reported incoming attacks. Iranian state media said explosions were audible near the port city of Bandar Abbas in southern Iran. The entire Persian Gulf region is essentially a very large, very dangerous pinball machine right now.
An Iranian health official told CBS News that the latest round of overnight U.S. airstrikes wounded more than 260 people. A government spokesperson said at least 30 people have been killed by U.S. attacks in "recent days." These are Iranian government figures, so take them with appropriate skepticism, but there are real human beings absorbing Hellfire missiles on both sides of this thing.
The Tanker That Found Out
Here is a sentence that would have sounded absolutely deranged five years ago: on Wednesday, a U.S. aircraft fired Hellfire missiles into an oil tanker's smokestack to stop it from sailing to Iran.
According to CBS News, CENTCOM confirmed it disabled the Curacao-flagged M/T Belma after the vessel "ignored multiple warnings" while heading toward Kharg Island, which serves as the main export terminal for most of Iran's oil. CENTCOM posted video of the strike on X, because of course they did. The ship, CENTCOM noted with admirably dry precision, "is no longer transiting to Iran."
This is the first known vessel disabled since Trump reinstated the blockade on Iranian ports on Tuesday. The blockade is part of the broader American strategy to strangle Iran's oil revenues, which Tehran considers an existential threat. Iran's Revolutionary Guard reportedly threatened Wednesday to halt all energy exports entirely in response. We are now in a situation where two countries are competing to see who can more thoroughly destroy the global oil supply.
JD Vance Explains It All on Joe Rogan
Where do you go when you want to explain an active war in the Middle East to the American public? A congressional briefing? A formal press conference? A Sunday morning news show? No. You go on Joe Rogan.
Vice President JD Vance, who CBS News reports has helped lead diplomacy with Iran, appeared on Rogan's podcast and described what he called a "delicate diplomatic dance." He explained there are "pragmatists" inside Iran who want to keep talking, and "hardliners" who are panicking about losing control of Strait of Hormuz oil revenues. "The hardliners have really, really reacted strongly to all the oil that's coming out of the Strait of Hormuz," Vance said.
Vance also said the now-collapsed memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran was "misrepresented more than almost anything that I've ever worked on," and insisted the administration is still "on the right trajectory." His description of that trajectory: "It's just going to be really messy, and there's going to be a lot of stops and starts." Good. Great. Extremely reassuring. The vice president of the United States described an active shooting war as having "a lot of stops and starts" on a podcast famous for three-hour conversations about elk meat and DMT.
The Ceasefire That Wasn't
To understand how we got here, a quick recap. Last month, the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding, a ceasefire of sorts that included sanctions waivers allowing Iran to export oil. Trump declared it "over." Iran started hitting commercial ships. The U.S. reinstated the port blockade and rescinded the sanctions waiver. Now we're on day five of airstrikes.
Iran's parliament speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf was not subtle about his country's position on Wednesday. "A memorandum of understanding is meaningful only when its clauses are valid and in effect," he wrote on Telegram. "If Iran is not going to benefit from the memorandum of understanding, we have no reason to adhere to such an understanding. Our armed forces, as always, have complete freedom of action to confront enemy aggression."
In plain English: both sides signed something, both sides think the other side broke it first, and now the region is on fire. The Trump administration rescinded a sanctions waiver that was central to Iran's willingness to participate in any deal. Iran then struck commercial ships. The sequence matters, and it doesn't reflect particularly well on anyone involved.
Your Portfolio Is Fine, Probably
While all of this was happening, CBS News reports that U.S. stocks were "drifting" on Wednesday. The S&P 500 was mostly unchanged. The Dow was up 43 points. The Nasdaq rose 0.1%. So there's that.
Analysts noted upward pressure on inflation from the ongoing conflict, which makes sense because any disruption to Strait of Hormuz traffic is a disruption to roughly 20 percent of the world's oil supply. The market appears to be operating on the theory that this war will stay contained to the Gulf region and not metastasize into something that breaks the global energy supply chain. Whether that theory holds is, at this point, anybody's guess.
The Dingo Take
Here is the actual situation: the United States is in an active shooting war with Iran, now entering its sixth day. The president is publicly musing about whether to negotiate or "finish off" a sovereign nation of 90 million people. The vice president is conducting war diplomacy analysis on a podcast. A ceasefire collapsed in under a month. An oil tanker got Hellfire missiles fired into its smokestack. Kuwait is tracking 21 drones at once. And the S&P 500 is basically flat.
There is no coherent endgame being communicated here. Trump refuses to give Iran a deadline on infrastructure strikes, which sounds like restraint until you realize it just means Iran can't predict what happens next. Vance's "pragmatists vs. hardliners" framing might be accurate, but it also describes a situation the U.S. has zero ability to control from the outside. You don't get to decide which Iranian faction wins an internal argument by dropping more bombs. History has tried to teach us this lesson approximately forty times.
The darkest version of where this goes is obvious, and nobody in this administration seems particularly interested in spelling it out. The optimistic version, according to the vice president of the United States, is that it will be "really messy" with "a lot of stops and starts." Cool. Write that on the memorial.
