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Eight weeks after the United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on February 28, the conflict has settled into precisely the kind of grinding, expensive impasse that Donald Trump once boasted he would never tolerate. American aircraft carriers patrol the Persian Gulf. Iranian ports are under naval blockade. The Strait of Hormuz — the narrow throat through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas once moved — is contested by both sides. Oil prices remain roughly 40 percent above prewar levels. Supply chains for fertilizer, petrochemicals, plastics, and agricultural goods are snarled from Asia to Europe. And this weekend, in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, the two governments are once again circling each other through intermediaries, each insisting it is negotiating from strength while privately acknowledging that neither can prevail on the battlefield or in the marketplace.

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The war the United States and Israel launched against Iran in February was sold as a limited operation to degrade a nuclear threat. It has become something far more consequential: a wrecking ball swung through the fragile security architecture of the Persian Gulf. For the six monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the conflict did not simply interrupt their carefully calibrated balancing act between Washington, Tehran, and their own divergent interests. It exposed the act itself as unsustainable. The economic damage is already staggering and grotesquely uneven. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz — the conduit for roughly one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas — produced what the International Energy Agency called the largest supply shock in the history of the energy market. More than 12 million barrels a day were shut in. Some 40 energy facilities were damaged or forced offline. Brent crude jumped 60 percent in March, the largest monthly increase on record. But the windfall did not flow evenly. Iran’s oil revenues rose 37 percent. Oman’s climbed 26 percent. Saudi Arabia eked out a 4.3 percent gain, thanks to the 1,200-kilometer East-West pipeline constructed during the Iran-Iraq War, now running at full 5-million-barrel-a-day capacity to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. The United Arab Emirates found partial shelter in its Habshan-Fujairah bypass. Iraq and Kuwait, with no viable alternatives, watched export revenues collapse by roughly three-quarters. Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex, a cornerstone of global LNG supply, suffered strikes that could require years of repairs. Non-oil sectors — aviation, tourism, logistics, even the desalination plants that turn seawater into drinking water — were hit directly. Food imports that normally move through the strait were thrown into crisis. The International Monetary Fund has now slashed its growth forecast for the Gulf Cooperation Council to 2 percent this year, down from 4.3 percent before the fighting began. For the broader Middle East and North Africa, the outlook is even grimmer: 1.1 percent growth, 2.8 percentage points below prewar projections. IMF Middle East director Jihad Azour noted that the shock extends beyond crude: fertilizer exports, specialty chemicals, and the region’s role as a logistics and aviation hub have all been disrupted. These are not temporary price spikes. They are structural scars on economies that have spent years trying to reduce their dependence on oil.

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