Three unrelated stories this week point at the same shift. In the Gulf, a war Washington and Tehran had kept narrow for a month broke its banks in days. In Brussels, governments moved to strip out the unanimity rule that lets one state block EU foreign policy. And from Amsterdam to Riyadh, allies quietly built fallback options against the guarantor they can no longer take for granted.

A contained war stops being contained

The Hormuz war's week

  1. SundayUS warplanes strike Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz — Washington's first action against Iran in about a month, targeting rockets it says were converted to fire sea mines.
  2. Days laterCENTCOM accuses Iran of targeting Gulf shipping and US troops; Washington strikes again.
  3. TuesdayThe US bombards Iranian sites directly; Iran claims retaliatory strikes on US bases in Bahrain, Jordan and Iraq, ending a brief lull.
  4. ThursdayIran hits Kuwait, the fifth US-aligned country struck since Tuesday; a Saudi-flagged tanker is hit in the strait, killing two Filipino crew — the campaign's first confirmed deaths.
  5. This weekOil holds above $90 a barrel, bonds sell off worldwide, and Trump claims — without evidence — that Iran's Kharg Island terminal, source of most of its oil exports, has been "blown to smithereens."
Nunissum coverage this week

The financial contagion is outrunning any diplomacy: the oil shock is already showing up in bond sell-offs worldwide and in Britain's autumn budget arithmetic, which the Chancellor blames on the war without yet explaining the mechanism. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says pressure will only build — a new Iran-linked bank sanctioned every week from here — even as the Wall Street Journal reports billions in Iranian money still moving through US banks, the same system Washington wants European regulators to police strictly. The US, UK, France and Germany have drafted a resolution referring Iran to the UN Security Council, but the IAEA board hasn't voted — the multilateral track is still theoretical while the unilateral one is already live.

When the committee stalls, the executive moves alone

The same instinct shows up in how the West handles Russia. A Senate bill for sweeping new Russia sanctions is stalling behind midterm politics, with even the House Minority Leader now skeptical. Bessent is filling the gap from Treasury, telling Moscow directly there will be no relief until the war ends — sanctions by executive letter, not by vote. Brussels has the mirror problem: any of 27 states can veto foreign policy, so eleven governments, now including France and Germany, want to activate the treaty's passerelle clause and move to majority voting. The catch is exact: ending unanimity itself requires unanimity, and Viktor Orbán's past vetoes, including one that blocked a €90 billion Ukraine loan, are the reform's explicit trigger.

Hedging against the guarantor, not just the adversary

Some of the hedging still points at Moscow. Germany closed Russia's Bonn consulate and added sanctions after formally blaming Moscow for a drone-bomb plot at Leipzig airport; a suspect with years of residence in Russia has since surfaced, and Dmitry Medvedev has threatened German arms plants in response, while Norway absorbed its largest-ever hacking attack regardless. NATO's answer remains the calibrated non-response — frozen assets, not counter-strikes — that our earlier analysis flagged as a template other powers are watching for how cheaply it tests an alliance's patience.

But some of the hedging points at Washington. The Dutch central bank has moved gold reserves out of North America, citing crisis preparedness. European allies are building independent intelligence capacity rather than relying on US sharing. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a Mecca deterrence pact aimed, per our reporting, less at Iran than at unpredictable Israeli action Washington has struggled to restrain. And Finland quietly extended a decade-long defence pact with Israel the same week its own government called Israel's conduct in Gaza genocide — the kind of contradiction that only survives by not being announced.

Hypothesis: this is a broad, uncoordinated repricing of US reliability as guarantor, not a string of unrelated diversification moves. Supporting it: the gold shift, the intelligence pivot and the Gulf pact all surfaced in the same week, independently, each citing unpredictability rather than a named grievance. Against it: each has a narrower explanation that needs no reference to Washington at all — routine reserve management, standard defence hedging, a Gulf response aimed at Iran rather than Israel — and no government has said openly that it is hedging against its own ally. Confidence: low to moderate; a second G7 central bank following the Dutch move would raise it considerably.

What to watch next week

  • Sachsen-Anhalt's result, due this weekend: whether the AfD tops the poll and whether Merz's CDU holds its firewall regardless.
  • Whether the IAEA board votes on referring Iran, and whether Iran's strike list gains a sixth.
  • Whether Hungary blocks the EU's Article 31 passerelle push at the European Council, and whether the emergency Patriot funding for Ukraine, needing the same unanimity, clears anyway.