The truce collapsed on schedule. Donald Trump's declaration that the ceasefire with Iran is "over" followed a pattern that has held since the first round of strikes: American forces do not initiate escalation, they respond to it, and the response arrives disproportionate to the trigger. Three tankers, Qatari and Saudi, were hit transiting the Strait of Hormuz. US Central Command answered with strikes on multiple Iranian cities within the same news cycle, not a single retaliatory target. That ratio, three ships to multiple cities, is the actual policy. It was not announced as doctrine. It is legible anyway.

The mechanism to watch is not Hormuz, it is Wuhan. Special forces sighted in a Chinese city under a nominally civilian designation is not a Taiwan Strait story or a Gulf story; it is confirmation that Washington now treats simultaneous, multi-theater posture as the baseline rather than the exception. Beijing's own signaling ran parallel this week: a Pacific submarine missile test, framed by state media as routine, and Taipei's warning on July 8 that Beijing's incremental pressure risks manufacturing a new status quo without a formal declaration of one. None of these three theaters, Gulf, Strait, Pacific, are coordinated by treaty. They are coordinated by calendar. The next test is whether Beijing reads the reopened Iran conflict as bandwidth Washington cannot spare elsewhere, and whether the Pacific submarine test was the answer to that question before it was asked.