If you watched today’s video, you already know three things: first, the eleven-night bombing campaign is aimed squarely at the Strait of Hormuz, rather than attempting to overthrow the Iranian regime; second, Bandar Abbas is currently being isolated from the rest of Iran instead of being systematically leveled; and third, the two most valuable targets in the entire country, meaning the oil infrastructure on Kharg Island and the capital city of Tehran, haven’t been touched at all. That was the state of the board as of this morning, but now we need to talk about what was left out of that video.
This week, Iran was bombed for the eleventh consecutive night in a war that officially began over uranium enrichment, while simultaneously, the White House approved a thirty-year nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could place a full-scale uranium-enrichment facility on Saudi soil, built and operated entirely by American companies. Mohammed bin Salman has been chasing this exact prize for a decade, and Trump just handed him the signed paperwork without including the one mandatory condition attached to every previous draft: Saudi Arabia no longer has to normalize relations with Israel.
If you trace that domino chain, the picture gets wild, because if Riyadh can secure centrifuges simply by signing a commercial contract with Washington, the cost of enrichment in the Middle East has ceased to be peace with Israel, turning instead into basic geopolitical alignment with the United States. For fifteen years, the absolute gold standard for these deals was the UAE model, under which Abu Dhabi built the Barakah nuclear power plant—the only operating nuclear plant in the Arab world—by agreeing to some of the absolute strictest nonproliferation constraints on the planet. This week, Washington threw out that playbook and started writing contracts under entirely different terms, and the second those rules become flexible, governments in Ankara and Cairo start doing the math, just as a post-war Tehran will the moment the dust settles. Which brings us to the core mystery here: why on earth is Washington passing out centrifuges like party favors in the middle of a war allegedly fought to stop the spread of centrifuges?
The answer isn’t hiding in Riyadh, nor is it sitting in Tehran; it lives in Washington, where the three men managing this war are actually fighting three entirely different conflicts:
