UNITED STATES PERSPECTIVE

Washington, June 7. The Pentagon released two near-clinical CENTCOM bulletins over the weekend: six of seven ballistic missiles fired by Iran at Kuwait and Bahrain were intercepted, the seventh "did not reach its intended target," two more Iranian attack drones were shot down over the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday. No American casualties, no damage to the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama — Washington formally denies Tehran's claims. The Washington Post titles soberly, Bloomberg counts, The Hill lines up the numbers: this is the language of a dashboard, not of a nation at war. CNBC takes a step the political establishment rarely owns aloud: since the Israeli-American strikes of February 28, the global economy has been operating in slow motion because of Hormuz, and Ember strategist Kingsmill Bond turns the 1973-1979 mirror back on Washington at the Eurelectric Power Summit in Helsinki. This time, he says, the alternative to hydrocarbons exists — solar, wind, batteries — and it is fossil fuels that have become "intermittent and uncertain." The Hill recalls that Donald Trump had promised a conflict of "four to six weeks": we are at day 100, fuel prices up, and the U.S. President has never accepted a withdrawal timeline. Bloomberg Politics reveals another figure Washington prefers to repeat rather than comment on: since the April 8 ceasefire, nearly 1,000 tanker crossings have been escorted by the U.S. Navy through Hormuz — it is the American maritime service alone that sustains the fiction of normalcy. The word "negotiation" appears in the dispatches but with no schedule, no visible mediator on the American side. Trump said Friday in Wisconsin that "the situation with Iran seems to be going quite well." The line, quoted in The Independent, reads like the unintended epitaph of a ceasefire.