Six months of on-off war has turned Gulf interruption into a line item, not a scenario

A plant destroyed once is a capital loss with a claim number attached. A plant that stops, restarts and stops again is an availability problem, and it lands in throughput, contract penalties and working capital rather than in a damage assessment. Foreign Affairs describes the second pattern: airports and oil refineries repeatedly pausing operations ^[3], desalination plants among the targets of drone and missile cycles ^[2], and ports sitting idle at times because of Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz ^[4].

Count the asset categories the article names as hit or halted and you get six: military bases, energy infrastructure, desalination plants, airports, refineries and ports ^[16]. That spread matters more than any individual strike, because it removes the trick of routing around one bottleneck. Water, fuel, air freight and sea freight do not fail independently when the same drone inventory reaches all of them.

The clock is the other half of the pricing problem. The war began on February 28 according to Foreign Affairs ^[1], the disrupted stretch it describes runs the length of the war, and both Tehran and Washington look content to keep fighting on and off to wear down the other's materiel and willpower ^[5][15]. Intermittent is the operative word for anyone writing next year's budget: the missing input is not an end date but a duty cycle nobody has published.

The affected ground has already widened past the Gulf. A port in Egypt was hit by drones, with no country claiming responsibility and the United States blaming Iran ^[7], and the Houthis and Iranian-aligned Iraqi militias have joined the fighting ^[6]. Contingency plans built around avoiding Hormuz are working with a smaller safe area than they were in February ^[20].

Then the coordination problem, which is the part operators tend to underprice. The UAE resents how muted the condemnations from Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were over Iranian strikes on Emirati infrastructure ^[8], and Foreign Affairs argues those rifts are frustrating the region's own efforts to adapt to the war ^[9]. There is no single regional counterparty to negotiate restart priority with, and the states that share a coastline are not sharing a position.

The guarantor question closes it. Gulf capitals pledged trillions of dollars of spending in the United States, raised oil output, funnelled investment deals to the president's family, and in Qatar's case gifted him a private jet ^[11]; the article's assessment is that Trump then launched two wars against Iran anyway, putting Israel's aim of debilitating the Islamic Republic ahead of Arab states' preference for stability, and that this showed Washington cannot be trusted ^[10]. The hedges are real: a Saudi mutual defence pact with Pakistan and Turkey this month ^[12], and weapons bought from Europe, South Korea, Turkey and Ukraine ^[13]. The same piece concedes there is no alternative security partner, with China unwilling to convert economic weight into military help, Russia consumed by its own war and Europe unable to coordinate on defence ^[17]. Changing suppliers does not change the interruption rate.

What remains is the shock absorber. OPEC+ could itself come under extreme stress, and uneven economic damage could unsettle Gulf politics that buyers have long treated as a constant ^[18][19]. If the institution that smooths supply is straining while the assets that deliver it keep pausing, price risk and availability risk stop being separable.