“America’s impatience in this war has brought the US into the conflict without coherent policy, without clear strategy, and without even trying to create a coalition to support the operation,” Dr. Lynette Nusbacher, a military historian and former head of the Strategic Horizons Unit in the UK Cabinet Office, told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday. Nusbacher spoke with the Post after Axios reported that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told foreign counterparts in recent days that "for the time being" the US was not expected to continue striking Iran, instead focusing on sanctions and economic pressure. "The Iranian economy is in free fall, and the regime's military has been decimated," State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott told Axios, "and we are cutting off every financial lifeline the regime has remaining." Iran’s currency plummeted earlier this week in response to Washington’s Operation Economic Outcast, hitting a record-low open-market rate of 2.02 million rials to the dollar. Numerous reports, despite the denial of Iran’s Central Bank Governor Abdolnasser Hemmati, have claimed Iran is in a state of severe or even hyperinflation. Despite the apparent success of the US’s blockade and sanctions campaign, Iranian officials have repeatedly expressed that they would not falter in their demand to maintain control over the vital Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee even advanced plans to charge fees to vessels crossing the waterway earlier this week. Assessment: Financial pressure not leading to compromise The Institute for the Study of War has repeatedly assessed that financial pressure was not convincing Iranian officials to compromise. With that assessment in mind, Nusbacher was asked whether the shift from kinetic action to financial pressure was part of a legitimate strategy or a way for the United States to quietly phase itself out of the war. Nusbacher was blunt in her assessment that Washington was “desperate” to leave the “quagmire,” a desperation she claimed the Islamic regime was very much aware of. The war has been largely a battle of patience, of whether the world’s economy could tolerate the interruption of 20% of its oil supply longer than the Islamic Republic could tolerate a blockade and airstrikes, she explained. Given that the Islamic regime is no stranger to war, she said it was obvious Tehran would persevere through the latest conflict, where Washington’s strategic aims and mechanisms were not fully conceived from the outset. “The Iranian regime was baptized in blood during the Iran-Iraq War, and from an Iranian point of view the desultory American missile attacks of the past few months have been a pale shadow,” she said. “This is why America is not winning its war against Iran.” According to the National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information, between 188,015 and 217,489 Iranians were killed during the Iran-Iraq War, around 70 people. The brutal eight-year war, starting only a year after the Islamic Revolution, has meant that short spouts of conflict with the US are bearable for the regime and its supporters, Nusbacher suggested. “The US has lavishly expended ordnance against Iran, and based on the lack of strategic aims achieved, they’ve been spraying it all up against a wall. Now that American stocks of missiles are so depleted, the White House has gone back to the drawing board,” she continued. Though Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told the Wall Street Journal last Wednesday that reports of a munitions shortage were false, multiple reports from Reuters and the Washington Post have claimed that the war against Iran has burned through supplies, including interceptors. Multiple sources told CNN earlier this month that the US military has exhausted nearly 80% of its THAAD missile inventory. Nusbacher said that the Trump administration had “finally figured out that the Iranians can’t be coerced without a significantly greater force package than the Americans are willing to send to the Gulf.” Trump may give Obama nuclear agreement 'a try' Though former US president Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran had been highly controversial, Nusbacher said that with the Kinetic failure, US President Donald Trump will “at last give it a try.” Nusbacher added that, “if the National Security shop in the White House hadn’t been gutted and sidelined,” the Trump administration would have tried economic means to rein in the regime “without firing a shot” and could have won. Asserting that the financial warfare should have been Trump’s first move, not the airstrikes, Nusbacher suggested he was spurred ”to shoot first and negotiate later” by the knowledge that neither Russia nor China were interested in putting intense pressure on Iran and by the unfounded belief that he could “depose the Iranian regime with a couple of weeks of attack from the air.” “As the US looks for a way out of its Iran quagmire, the Administration isn’t impatient: it’s desperate; and the Iranians can smell it,” she concluded. Professor Chuck Freilich, an expert on US Middle East policy, told the Post he also thought the shift to financial pressure was “very long overdue” and “should have preceded military action, [as] part of a phased approach.” “It is another example of Trump's utter lack of strategy. Having failed militarily and diplomatically and with the upcoming midterms weighing heavily, he finally realized that this was a highly effective mechanism at his disposal,” Freilich said, though he admitted Iranians have “learned to live with sanctions” and such a move would only increase pressure on the regime, not solve the problem entirely. “The pressure now is becoming very heavy and at some point it may bring the people back out into the streets,” he said. If nothing else, Freilich said that the financial strategy “buys time” for Trump, who will eventually have to face the decision of “whether to leave it just with sanctions and failure or to resume military action” to achieve the US’s objectives.
“America’s impatience in this war has brought the US into the conflict without coherent policy, without clear strategy, and without even trying to create a coalition to support the operation,” Dr. Lynette Nusbacher, a military historian and former head of the Strategic Horizons U…
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State media reported that U.S. strikes near Tehran and in Semnan province, where ballistic missile and space programs are located, were carried out early Thursday. These incidents followed daylight attacks on Wednesday, indicating a reported increase in the frequency of strikes.
Bahrain and Kuwait say they have engaged with Iranian air strikes, while Iran says it hit a U.S. air base in Jordan.
WTI Rises After Big Product Draws, Tiny Crude Build, SPR Nears 'Tank Bottoms'
Oil prices extended their declines for a third straight day after the US plan to ramp up economic pressure on Iran spared the country’s trading partners from harsher measures for now, while mediators said they were continuing efforts to end the conflict.
“There was a lot of buildup around the announcement but what we got was more a warning about where policy is heading than an immediate shock to physical supply,” said Haris Khurshid, chief investment officer at Chicago-based Karobaar Capital LP. “Until secondary sanctions start changing who can buy, ship or even finance Iranian crude, I don’t think traders have much reason to add another geopolitical premium.”
Oman and Iran said the countries' foreign ministers discussed an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz under a temporary framework.
Negotiations between the two countries will continue "with a view to agreeing on a permanent navigational corridor and future administration of the strait," the joint statement said.
While positive, an agreement between Oman and Iran wouldn't result in oil flows through the strait returning to prewar levels, ING analysts Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey said.
"We would likely need to see the U.S. lift its blockade on Iranian ports and ease sanctions on Iran before we see any move towards normalization."
All eyes on domestic supply (and demand) for the next tactical leg...
API
Crude +4.2mm
Cushing +1.0mm
Gasoline -3.2mm
Distillates -459k
DOE
Crude +95k (+500k exp)
Cushing +1.18mm
Gasoline -2.54mm
Distillates -2.23mm
Crude stocks rose for the 4th straight week (but it was a tiny 95k increase) while Cushing saw a modest build off tank bottoms. Product inventories saw large drawdowns..
The Trump admin drained another 3.6mm barrels from the SPR to 289.7 million barrels (1983 lows), approaching the minimum operational level for storage facilities, which ranges between 250 and 300 million barrels.
The combination of a tiny commercial crude build and sizable SPR drain created the biggest net crude drawdown in over a month...
Cushing stocks remain very near 'tank bottoms'
Distillates stocks fell back near 25 year lows and the lowest seasonally on record...
US crude imports from Saudi Arabia picked up recently (but remain well below peak war levels). Crude exports fell below 4 million barrels a day, a threshold closely watched by the market to gauge demand.
US Crude production remains near record highs and while the rig count dipped last week, it is still trending higher overall...
Refining utilization rates are at the highest seasonal level since 1998. That is, in part, due to a shrinking US refining fleet in recent years. But it’s also evidence of how hard fuel-makers are running their plants right now to capture wide margins. They plan to keep that up into the fall, with some companies even deferring maintenance.
WTI was hovering around $81.50 (off the overnight lows) ahead of the official data (down from almost $88 last week)...
Crude is still up about 50% this year as the war - now in its sixth month - continues to disrupt the shipping of crude and refined fuels out of the Middle East.
The impact has been particularly acute in fuel markets, which have also faced a hit from Ukrainian attacks on Russian refiners. That’s helped push premiums over crude to stratospheric levels (but the crack spread is starting to decline)...
At the same time, large volumes of crude supplies continue to transit Hormuz with their satellite signals turned off.
Those volumes are in millions of barrels a day and have helped generally keep a lid on prices that had been expected to soar at the outset of the conflict.
Tyler Durden Wed, 08/26/2026 - 10:40
U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA said it has observed cyberattacks targeting over 100 internet-exposed systems across the U.S. water and wastewater sector, amid a wave of hacks targeting American critical infrastructure. The number of affected systems provides new context to the scale of the ongoing cyberattacks targeting water providers in Michigan, Minnesota, and at least five other states.
The federal agency, which oversees cybersecurity defense and critical infrastructure protections, said in an advisory that the attacks have largely targeted programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which are used to control physical systems and machinery across water providers, energy systems, and other parts of critical infrastructure.
In recent weeks, hackers have targeted PLCs made by several manufacturers, including Rockwell, Schneider Electric, and more recently, Siemens. CISA previously said that the cyberattacks are relying in part on AI tools that rely on public information to develop scripts capable of targeting vulnerable Siemens PLCs.
The intrusions have had little effect on water or waste water supplies to local communities, but have resulted in outages and disruption as incident responders investigate the breaches. CISA previously reported that some of the intrusions allowed hackers to modify affected PLCs to disable shutdown processes and alarms, potentially creating “unsafe conditions” without notifying the affected operators.
Many of the affected communities are in rural or isolated areas, where disruption to critical infrastructure systems can affect a large area of people. Reports citing senior American officials say that U.S. intelligence believes Iran is likely behind the largely opportunistic attacks on water providers, likely in response to the U.
S. and Israel-led war against Iran, but officials have fallen short of a concrete attribution. The intrusions have sparked broader concerns about the cybersecurity and resiliency of critical infrastructure across the United States. U.S. officials have warned in recent years that hackers working for China have been planting destructive malware on critical infrastructure ready to activate as a distraction in the event of an anticipated Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Russia has also been linked to several cyberattacks on water providers, and power and energy grids, across Europe as part of a growing campaign seen as aimed at testing the NATO alliance.