Eleanor Danby 
Start with a number that reframes the week: Brent crude is up roughly 10% since US-Iran talks collapsed, according to our reporting. That figure is not really about oil. It is the market's estimate of how much it now costs to move a barrel through a strait that one party can close and another wants to charge for. The rest of this week — a stalled sanctions package, a dead senator, a new British prime minister nobody elected, a South African deportation drive — reads at first as a scatter of unrelated crises. It reads better as a single question: when the guarantors of open systems start behaving like gatekeepers, who pays the premium, and who collects it?
The chokepoint becomes a business model
The Gulf dominated the week not by volume of casualties but by what it revealed about intent. Over seven consecutive nights the United States struck Iran, moving from military targets to bridges, railways and airports and, by the seventh night, to civilian infrastructure on both sides. Iran widened its own arc, adding Oman as a sixth Gulf target and striking US bases across the region. Neither side has closed the strait outright, but shipping firms began refusing even US-military-guided transits, per Reuters — the risk is now priced into ordinary commercial decisions.
The distinctive move of the week was rhetorical, and it matters. President Trump did not merely threaten to blockade Hormuz; he proposed to monetise it, first calling the US the "guardian" of the passage, then floating tolls said to raise nearly $200 billion a year, then declaring the blockade reinstated with a fee for safe passage. Having spent months rejecting Iran's own post-war toll idea, Washington adopted the logic and inverted the collector. The IMO's objection — that no state should charge for straits used for international navigation — captures the stakes precisely: this is a bid to convert a public good into a rent.
The security premium is now the through-line, not the exception
Our own analysts converged on this all week, and it is worth stating plainly. As we argued in The price of protection and again in The security premium, three stories that look separate — Hormuz, France's Rafale sale to Ukraine, Russia's army expansion — are one story about pricing risk. States are now securing energy, arms and deterrence as controllable supply chains rather than trusting open markets to deliver them. The evidence is quantitative, not just thematic:
| Signal this week | What it prices |
|---|---|
| Brent up ~10% since talks collapsed | The cost of an insecure chokepoint |
| US Air Force planning 11,200 JASSM/LRASM missiles via Lockheed | Long-run demand for stand-off strike capacity |
| Saab results beat expectations; CEO urges governments to rethink arms buying | Defence as a seller's market |
| Germany urging the EU to fund 2-3 competing weapons programmes at once | Redundancy bought as insurance against single points of failure |
| Ukraine presenting its war-hardened grid as a model to copy | Resilience itself as an exportable product |
The unifying claim: security has become the precondition for every other supply chain, and states — not markets — are writing the terms. That is why the same week that produced strikes on Iranian power plants also produced Chancellor Merz warning that Russia is already waging hybrid war, and the EU and UK jointly sanctioning 33 FSB-linked cyber targets. Different theatres, one accounting principle.
Europe wants to act and cannot agree how
Against that demand for control sits Europe's structural problem: it is deadlocked on the instruments it most needs. The EU's 21st Russia sanctions package — roughly 250 listings — failed again this week, held hostage by a single Bulgarian veto over adding Patriarch Kirill to the blacklist, as we detailed in One Vote, One Package and the standoff explainer. Because the comprehensive package needs unanimity, one capital freezes 27; because targeted cyber and torture listings need only a qualified majority, they passed the same day. Europe has, in effect, two speeds of foreign policy running side by side.
The same pattern repeated on Israel. EU foreign ministers met in Brussels weighing curbs on settlement goods, with Germany isolated as the chief obstacle and the Commission holding three ready options but no qualified majority. And where the bloc froze, Belgium acted alone, becoming the first member state to legally ban settlement imports because that trade sits partly in national hands.
Hypothesis: unanimity is quietly being abandoned as Europe's operating mode, replaced by a hybrid of qualified-majority measures plus national unilateralism. Supporting this: cyber and torture sanctions passed by QMV the day the unanimous package failed; Belgium moved without Brussels; member states are increasingly "pre-empting" a common line the bloc cannot reach. Against this: the headline package still requires unanimity and everyone still fights over it, which means the veto retains real leverage — Bulgaria extracted the removal of Kirill and oligarch Vagit Alekperov as its price. Confidence: moderate. The workarounds are real but they are second-best, and they fragment exactly the leverage that a single 27-state front would concentrate. The open question our coverage keeps returning to — whether trading substance for unanimity becomes the template for every future round — now has an early answer: increasingly, capitals are choosing not to wait for unanimity at all.
The people who hold the West's system together are thinning out
The most under-noticed thread of the week is a series of vacancies at the exact moment the machinery is under maximum load. Senator Lindsey Graham — the Russia sanctions bill's chief author and Kyiv's most vocal Republican ally — died the night his "sanctions from hell" finally won a White House green light, a day after pitching it in Kyiv. In the same window, Ukraine's Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko resigned in a wider Zelensky reshuffle, with tech-minded defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov pushed out after clashing with the army's old guard. Kyiv needs new contacts in both its own government and in Washington precisely as a hard-won sanctions deal reaches the line.
There is a partial counter-current: the bill has since gained its two most powerful backers — Trump now supports it and Majority Leader John Thune frames passage as Graham's legacy. But posthumous consensus is fragile, and it has yet to survive contact with the details of what the sanctions would actually do.
Britain fits the same shape. Andy Burnham is walking into No 10 unopposed after Keir Starmer's resignation, with no leadership contest, no foreign-policy record, and allies who say he would do the "bare minimum" abroad. As we noted, his arrival puts Westminster's turmoil on display for Washington, Moscow and Brussels just as an early crisis with Russia is being predicted. Even the smaller stories rhyme: the Czech opposition cannot convert government stumbles into support for want of a unifying leader, and Germany's coalition faces its first real nerve test over child-support cuts. The common denominator is leadership capacity — not policy — running short.
The order's guarantors are being re-rated
Zoom out and the reputational data lines up with the behaviour. A Pew survey this week found China now viewed more favourably than the United States in 25 of 36 countries, with Canada and Mexico tipping toward Beijing — a reversal Pew partly attributes to strains between Washington and its allies. The same administration opened a 25% tariff front against Brazil, a G20 economy, while proposing to charge the world to use Hormuz. Meanwhile the actors trying to enter the system are pressing their case: South Korea is bidding for a seat in NATO's arms market, and India has opened a Security Council campaign aimed at the Global South. The demand for institutional standing is rising even as the institutions' anchor tenant loses favour.
Two more threads belong to the same ledger without being reducible to it. South Africa's deportation of over 53,000 migrants and Europe's politicised fire season are both cases of borders hardening around a shared problem — labour flows, a warming climate — that stops at no border. And Brussels demonstrated it still has one instrument that works at full pan-market force: its binding order telling Google exactly what to build under the DMA, imposed across the single market at once without a court. Where the EU owns exclusive competence, it can still set terms unilaterally. Where it must persuade 27, it cannot. That contrast is the whole story of European power this week.
What to watch next week
- Hormuz de-escalation or a floor: whether Washington and Tehran move from strikes-and-tolls back toward talks, and whether the strait's traffic recovers — the single variable that resets the security premium everywhere else. Watch whether any Gulf host state is drawn in beyond hosting bases.
- The sanctions bill's first real vote: who steps into Graham's Senate role and whether Trump-plus-Thune backing survives the moment senators read what the bill actually does. If it stalls again, posthumous consensus was sentiment, not momentum.
- The Kirill veto's resolution: whether Sofia narrows or lifts its objection, or whether the EU simply drops Kirill to save the 21st package — the clearest test of whether unanimity still governs European sanctions or has become optional.
- Burnham's opening fortnight: the first foreign-policy demand placed on a domestically-focused, untested PM, and how markets and Brussels price the risk that he cannot hold a tax-and-energy agenda pulling in opposite directions.
