The arithmetic behind that 25 percent deserves to be done slowly. If Brent above $90 is roughly a quarter above where it sat before the fighting began, the pre-war reference was near $72, which leaves about $18 a barrel of the current price attributable to the war itself [7][14]. That is what six months of a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz has already done to a route that in peacetime carried a fifth of the world's traded oil and has since been slowed to a trickle [6][21].
The instrument that was supposed to end this has already been marked down by a government that wanted it to work. Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE's president, called for a political solution restoring normal navigation and said the state of neither war nor peace cannot be a sustainable solution [9]; in the same breath he asked for a more realistic approach than the June memo of understanding between Iran and the United States, which he said failed to outline a practical and acceptable road map [10]. When the nearest Gulf party to the shipping lane describes the only existing document as inadequate, the reopening scenario loses its paperwork.
Look at where each side is spending, rather than what each side says. Washington's effort is going into enforcement: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hosted G20 finance ministers in North Carolina while pressing other countries to isolate Iran economically, on a strategy built around punishing any country or entity that keeps trading with Tehran [12][13], and Bessent has suggested it was that pressure which produced the UAE's suspension of all trade with Iran two weeks ago [11][19]. Trump, meanwhile, said last week he is not in a hurry to get Iran back to the table [15]. Tehran is spending its diplomacy elsewhere too, with President Masoud Pezeshkian at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Kyrgyzstan, a grouping billed as a counterweight to US influence, and a scheduled meeting with Vladimir Putin [18].
Three readings emerge from this. A negotiated reopening pulls the $18 out quickly, and the drone that was dealt with over UAE waters without damage becomes a footnote [1][14]. Open conflict with actual damage puts the price somewhere none of us can usefully model. The third, which is the one this desk would underwrite, is that neither war nor peace persists: traffic stays slow, the premium stays roughly where it is, and nothing generates a headline for weeks at a time until the next interception. This is probably wrong in its timing, but the structural point holds either way, which is that a lull is a pause in escalation, not a restoration of volumes.
What would prove it wrong: Brent back under $80 while ship traffic remains at a trickle. That combination would say the premium was pricing escalation risk rather than lost barrels, and the budget rebuild should follow the risk rather than the route. Watch attribution too, since Iran's army claimed Al Minhad Air Base in Dubai was targeted and the UAE Defense Ministry called that false [5].
