Closed Until Further Notice: Five Paths From the Blown Deadline

Washington's deadline expired Saturday night into silence from Muscat, and the silence lasted only hours. On deadline day itself the IRGC struck the Cyprus-flagged container ship GFS Galaxy over what it called an "unauthorized route"; CENTCOM attributes the strike to the IRGC and reports significant engine-room damage with one crew member missing. Hours later came the war's first formal declaration that the Strait of Hormuz is "closed until further notice and until the end of the American interventions." CENTCOM answered Saturday night with a third strike wave of ~140 targets, taking three nights past 300 aimpoints, and Iran answered that on Sunday morning with the widest salvo of the war: Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait simultaneously, with Jordan reporting three missiles separately. Yesterday's brief gave the escalation fork 30% and specified it as "no statement, third wave inside 24-72 hours"; the weekend delivered that plus a closure declaration, an enforcement strike with a probable casualty, and a four-country barrage. Crude futures reopen ~6pm ET tonight against a $76.01 Friday close that predates every one of those events. This report supersedes the July 8 tree and models the next 7-14 days.

The Weekend, In Order

Muscat produced nothing. Araghchi met Oman's foreign minister on deadline day to discuss safe-transit mechanisms, and no statement followed; NBC put the deadline at 8pm ET (single-outlet timing, immaterial to the tree). Full terms of the ultimatum, a public declaration that the strait is open, all channels, toll-free, plus a no-attacks pledge, are in Saturday's alert. Its design mattered: no private-compliance option existed and the US delegation was withheld pending the statement, so a hedged "mechanisms" statement would have scored as failure anyway. Our geopolitical panel's read is that once Tehran concluded the deadline would blow regardless, blowing it deliberately was the higher-value play, converting compliance failure into chosen defiance.

CENTCOM's third wave hit ~140 targets Saturday night: missile and drone sites, naval capabilities, ammunition storage, communications, and coastal surveillance, with explosions reported in Bushehr province, Qeshm, and Bandar Abbas. One geography discipline to hold: Bushehr province, not the nuclear plant. Nothing in the reporting places ordnance near the reactor.

Sunday's barrage wounded three people in Qatar, including a child hit by falling shrapnel, and has killed nobody by any report so far. Doha saw two interception waves; Al Udeid was among the targets. Tehran claims hits on a command center there, on a US radar site in Kuwait, and on command infrastructure at a US base in Jordan; none of that carries US confirmation, and the UAE's own statement that threats stayed "outside its borders" cuts directly against the Iranian targeting claims. Iranian state media reports one army officer killed in the CENTCOM waves, the lone against-interest admission in Tehran's account. Every GCC state except Saudi Arabia reported intercepting ordnance, the third consecutive cycle in which Riyadh was spared.

Three more same-day facts shape this tree. JMIC, the US Navy-overseen information center, publicly contested the closure, stating the southern route along the Omani coast "remains open for two-way traffic." Officials committed to continuing "technical and political talks" (Al Jazeera, unattributed officials: the thinnest-sourced item in the overnight set and the most load-bearing for any de-escalation case). And Oman has a drafted two-corridor proposal in hand, southern corridor free navigation, northern corridor requiring Iranian approval, while Qatar condemned the attacks and stayed at the table.

Two Voices, One Strait

Friday, Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf reiterated that tolls start ~August 17, a framework in which the strait stays open on Iranian terms. Saturday, the IRGC declared it closed to everyone. Sunday, Ghalibaf posted the 14-point June agreement with the line "the era of one-sided deals is OVER. We told you: keep your word or pay the price." Tehran now holds two incompatible positions on the books. The declaration came in the IRGC's own name, not the government's, and it was issued while the foreign minister sat in Muscat negotiating safe transit. Either the IRGC had the authority to kill Araghchi's options, or it was permitted to. That is the vacant-veto mechanism from the July 8 tree, realized in a single afternoon.

Our geopolitical panel scores the declaration 60/40 toward instrumental maximalism over genuine strategic shift, for four reasons. First, the text is conditional: "until the end of the American interventions" builds in its own off-ramp, since any US pause or corridor arrangement lets Tehran declare the condition satisfied. Conditional closure is reversible closure. Second, total closure supersedes Iran's own toll framework, and the Strait Authority earns revenue only if traffic moves; Iran's own economics argue the closure is posture. Third, two incompatible positions are a designed ambiguity that lets the government later walk back the IRGC's declaration without eating the concession itself. Fourth, you cannot trade concessions from your floor; the toll regime was the floor, so total closure manufactures something to give away. The 40% residual is real: if strait policy has genuinely passed to the organization being bombed nightly, the bid logic weakens with each wave.

Succession is the multiplier behind all of it. Mojtaba Khamenei is weeks into the leadership, his power base is the IRGC, OFAC designated his banker on July 10, and he chose deadline day for a written revenge vow. A new Supreme Leader whose legitimacy rests on IRGC backing does not open his tenure by submitting to an American ultimatum on live television. Fighting while talking, both of which Tehran did inside the same 24 hours, is the standard grammar of coercive bargaining; the Tanker War of 1987-88 ran exactly that way, months of US-Iran exchanges of fire alongside UN ceasefire diplomacy.

Saudi Arabia is the cleanest calibration tell on the board. Every US-hosting Gulf state has now taken Iranian fire except the one that also hosts US forces and anchors Iran's post-war reintegration through the Beijing-brokered normalization track. Sparing Riyadh three consecutive cycles is a choice, and after Sunday it reads as a message: targeting remains discriminate and centrally controlled. If the exemption breaks, it means either a regime-level decision that bargaining is over, or loss of central targeting control. Either reading is alert-level, and it is the single cleanest indicator that Tehran has shifted from coercion to spasm.

The Blockade Runs Through London

Underwriters price stated intent plus demonstrated capability, and since Saturday they have both: a formal "no vessels will pass" declaration and a same-day enforcement strike with a crew casualty. War-risk cover carries seven-day cancellation notice; expect blanket cancellation notices across the Gulf listed areas within 24-72 hours and per-voyage quotes for anything Hormuz-touching either pulled or priced at decline-by-quote levels (panel estimate, direction high confidence). Unquotable means uninsurable, uninsurable means no mortgagee consent, and no financed vessel can legally sail without it. For comparison, the 2019 Gulf attacks moved premiums ~10x and cover stayed available; Tanker War pricing peaked ~7.5% of hull per voyage for Kharg runs and cover stayed available. Neither episode had a formal state declaration of total closure plus demonstrated enforcement. For the first time in this crisis, unquotable is the base case for the northern and central lanes. Iran does not need to sink ships; it needs Lloyd's to stop answering the phone, and Saturday probably did it.

A missing crew member converts hull risk into crew liability. Masters and designated persons ashore who order a transit after a declared closure and a documented crew casualty face foreseeable-risk-to-life exposure; standard war-risk clauses in charter parties give owners the right to refuse voyage orders on reasonable judgment, and under a declared closure with an enforcement strike that judgment is close to uncontestable (panel assessment). Expect flag-state do-not-transit advisories, with Cyprus, the struck vessel's flag, positioned to move first, and ITF pressure for a warlike-operations designation giving crews a right of refusal with doubled compensation; both are expected, neither confirmed as of this writing. With 14-plus seafarers already killed in this war and ~6,000 stranded, even an owner with cover and nerve may not be able to crew the ship.

Container tonnage is the wider break. Box lines had stayed out of this crisis; striking a boxship for a route violation universalizes the threat to every segment: containers, car carriers, grain into the Gulf, LPG, chemicals. Expect mainline operators to suspend Gulf port calls and shift to transshipment at Salalah, Duqm, Jeddah, and Colombo with overland bridging into the GCC (panel estimate, high confidence). GCC food and consumer-goods security becomes a story within a week if that holds.

Set against all this, physical capability is almost beside the point. Our defense panel's core judgment: after 300-plus aimpoints in three nights, Iran cannot stop all vessels; it can only make each transit a priced risk, and the market, not the IRGC, is what is actually closing the strait. Traffic of all types was still running ~34 transits a day as of July 5, against an assessed Iranian capacity of low single-digit anti-ship engagements per day sustained. Enforcing "no vessels at all" would take dozens of engagements daily and expose every surviving launcher to a fourth wave. What GFS Galaxy shows is the actual doctrine: occasional demonstrative kills that keep the insurance market doing the blockading. One asymmetry to hold onto: cover exits in seven days and returns over months, so a declaration rescinded tomorrow does not restore last Tuesday's insurance market.

What is not known about GFS Galaxy matters as much as what is. Confirmed: Cyprus flag, container ship, IRGC strike per CENTCOM, engine-room damage, one crew member missing. Not confirmed: where in the strait it was hit, which route it was on, the weapon, or the operator. Position is the single most important unresolved fact of the next 72 hours: a hit on the southern Omani-coast route would collapse JMIC's "open" line the moment it was issued, while a mid-channel hit is consistent with permit-regime enforcement. Note the internal tension in Tehran's own framing: "unauthorized route" implies an authorized route exists, yet the total-closure declaration hours later says no vessel passes. That sequence reads like permit enforcement first, framework replaced by total closure after, a hint of command-level improvisation. Missing is not dead; the crew member's status is a live branch variable across this tree.

Five Paths From the Blown Deadline

Path 1: Paper Blockade | 28%

Trigger conditions. No successful Iranian interdiction for five to seven days after the barrage. Dark and LNG transits continue or climb. US response to Sunday stays capability-for-capability (launch sites, remaining naval assets) with no ladder jump. Iranian language softens toward the conditional ("vessels coordinating with Iran may pass") within a week, and no second barrage flies.

Sequence. 300-plus targets in three nights, concentrated on naval capability and coastal surveillance, is exactly the tool set needed to police the strait; the IRGC may have declared a closure it can no longer enforce. JMIC's "southern route open two-way" line is a standing invitation to test it. Dark crossings, the Greek supertanker pattern of July 9-10, resume first; AIS-on traffic follows. Talks grind on technically without breakthrough, and GL X1 lapses July 17 with no successor, hardening collapse structurally even as the shooting fades.

Deal-collapse odds: 65-72%.

Reopening: formal reopening slips to Q1 2027; de facto partial flow (LNG plus dark crude plus the southern corridor) rebuilds toward 30-45% of pre-war transit counts by the end of the window. The ~80 mines stay untouched.

Price effect: $76-82.

Key indicator. Three consecutive days of unmolested 10,000-plus dwt transits, AIS on, in the southern corridor, AND insurers still quoting them. Cover withdrawal, a war-risk category break rather than the current ~5%-of-hull norm, kills this path commercially without a shot fired.

Path 2: The Omani Partition | 22%

Trigger conditions. Washington engages the Omani two-corridor draft, meaning anything short of rejection within ~72 hours. A dated Muscat session with named US attendees lands before July 17. Iran suspends enforcement while keeping the declaration nominally alive, and a US gesture on GL X1 (extension or successor license) emerges as the tradeable deliverable.

Sequence. Sunday's barrage killed nobody, Saudi Arabia was spared a third time, and both sides committed to continuing talks the same day the missiles flew; per the June 2025 Al Udeid precedent and Day 121, a casualty-free multi-front salvo is how Iran ends a cycle, not how it starts one. Oman tables the draft; Washington accepts phase one, southern corridor free navigation, as an interim technical arrangement while deferring the northern-corridor and toll questions; Tehran claims its declaration forced the world onto Iranian terms in the north, and its closure ends because "American interventions" in Iranian waters end. JMIC and UKMTO issue a corridor advisory; insured transits resume the southern lane in 7-21 days. State the obstacle plainly: this requires Washington to walk back "all channels, toll-free" days after enforcing an ultimatum on exactly those words, and it partially institutionalizes the Iranian control the IMO Council just told member states not to recognize. Expect it dressed as a humanitarian and technical arrangement, never as a deal.

Deal-collapse odds: falls to 45-55%.

Reopening: partial insured reopening in two to four weeks; full reopening (northern channel, mine clearance, JWC zone revision) still Q4 at minimum. Mines are the binding constraint under every path in this tree.

Price effect: $71-76.

Key indicator. Any US official response to the two-corridor draft that is not rejection; a scheduled Muscat session with American attendance.

Path 3: Bridges and Power Plants | 20%

Trigger conditions. The GFS Galaxy crew member is confirmed dead, the first fatality of the declared-closure phase with CENTCOM attribution attached. Or another vessel interdiction, a Gulf civilian death from barrage debris, or simple follow-through on Trump's "no bridges, no power plants" line (a single-outlet quote, but consistent with the pattern). The tell is the fourth wave's target set: Kharg Island terminals, refineries, the power grid, or IRGC leadership nodes instead of a fourth round of missile sites.

Sequence. A confirmed fatality removes the "contained and proportionate" framing both capitals have used all war, the prior tree's Casualty Cascade logic with a live candidate already in the water. Talks formally suspend. Iran's remaining menu is the ~80 emplaced mines, residual missiles, and proxies; Israel's declared readiness to join (Defense Minister Katz's "blue and white" line) is live on this branch.

Deal-collapse odds: 85-95%.

Reopening: Q1-Q2 2027 at best; mine clearance frozen indefinitely.

Price effect: $88-100. Scaling anchor: Abqaiq 2019 printed +19.5% intraday, which maps to ~$91 from a $76 base. Iranian legal exports are already near zero post-X1, so the move is contagion premium rather than lost barrels, and it partially retraces only if the wave is sharp and bounded.

Key indicator. CENTCOM release language naming economic or infrastructure targets, or strikes geolocated to Kharg, refinery, or power assets.

Path 4: Convoy Collision | 18%

Trigger conditions. A Fifth Fleet or CENTCOM convoy announcement, or an observed warship-accompanied merchant transit, the Operation Earnest Will analog from 1987. Flag-state protection requests after GFS Galaxy; Cyprus is an EU flag, so watch for an EU or EUNAVFOR dimension. Iran attempts interdiction of escorted tonnage.

Sequence. An escort decision forces Iran's choice. Backing down converges this path into Paths 1-2; firing near or at an escort produces an Operation Praying Mantis-style destruction of Iran's remaining naval assets inside days, and a mine hit on an escort, the Samuel B. Roberts analog, is the alternate tripwire. One constraint carries over from the July 8 tree: US surface combatants have effectively no spare escort capacity, so surge deployments (additional destroyers, mine-countermeasures hulls entering theater) are the leading tell, visible before any announcement. Our defense panel's requirement math: 12-15 destroyers and frigates on the line plus 2-4 Aegis pickets that are also needed for base defense, with the first escorted convoy ~2-3 weeks from decision. A footnote worth carrying: Praying Mantis in April 1988 preceded Iran accepting a ceasefire within months. Destroying the navy can force the endgame, but outside this window.

Deal-collapse odds: 80-90% in-window.

Reopening: bimodal. Escorted partial flow under military protection within one to three weeks, convoyed tonnage insured at differential rates; full commercial normalization Q1 2027 or later.

Price effect: $84-92 spike on first engagement, with a partial retrace if US naval dominance is quick and clean.

Key indicator. A convoy announcement, or AIS and imagery of an escorted merchant transit; upstream of that, escort and MCM surge into theater.

Path 5: The Saudi Exception Ends | 12%

Trigger conditions. Iranian ordnance confirmed at Saudi territory or Aramco facilities, ending the three-cycle sparing pattern that has been the most disciplined targeting decision of the war. A Houthi Red Sea surge with explicitly Hormuz-linked terms, or Hezbollah activation. UKMTO advisories for mining in the Gulf of Oman approaches, extending the exclusion zone past the chokepoint.

Sequence. The likeliest sub-trigger is leakage rather than intent: debris, malfunction, or the errant-faction dynamic CBS reported (single-outlet) in its "mistake" back-channel item. Saudi entry pulls Aramco into the target set and the GCC toward collective response. Structurally, realistically deployable OPEC spare capacity, 1.5-2.5M bpd per Energy Aspects and Rapidan estimates, is mostly Saudi and mostly exports through the Gulf; the world's shock absorber sits inside the blast radius. Red Sea plus Hormuz simultaneously doubles the chokepoint failure.

Deal-collapse odds: 90%-plus.

Reopening: indefinite.

Price effect: $90-105+, higher if Aramco processing is hit: Abqaiq-plus, with a Red Sea rerouting premium stacked on top.

Key indicator. Any Saudi MoD interception or impact statement; a Houthi declaration naming Hormuz; Gulf of Oman mining advisories.

Two Models, One Direction

Weighting the five paths by probability against their midpoints puts expected Brent at ~$84.60 over the window, call it $84-85, which is ~$8.60 and about 11% above the $76.01 Friday close. Our energy desk ran its own branch set independently, with a third of its weight on a sustained enforced closure, and landed at ~$89, a $12-14 dislocation and the widest EV-versus-spot gap of the crisis (the July 8 tree's was $5.65). Resist averaging the two into one number. Both models put fair value $8-13 above the tape; the disagreement between them is about how much escalation to price, not about direction, and the honest statement is a range, not a midpoint.

Tonight's open is the first test. Our energy desk's base case: Brent opens $85-88, with first prints of $87-92 plausible in thin Sunday liquidity, and holds rather than fades (60-65% on gap-and-hold), settling $84-90 into Friday. June 2025's gap-then-fade precedent does not transfer, because its fade mechanism was that supply never stopped; supply has been near zero for five days and is now declared stopped, with a merchant vessel hit to enforce it. A fade to $79-83 by midweek (25-30%) requires all three of: no fourth wave inside 72 hours, JMIC-confirmed corridor transits continuing unmolested, and the two-corridor proposal surfacing as near-agreed. Even then the floor is ~$79-80, not $76, because Friday's print embedded a ~25% genuine-reopening probability that is now dead. One caveat the scenario desk insists on carrying: oil's failure to reprice this crisis has been the standing outlier for a week (tracked crude transits near zero, Brent up only ~5% on the week), so the open may print $80-84 rather than the model. Tonight's shape is itself evidence about which half of the tree the market is weighting, and a print above ~$79.80, a 5%-plus move, trips our standing alert criterion.

Insurance is a floor under every branch, not a sentiment premium. Each 1% of hull value on a $90-100M VLCC works out to ~$0.45-0.50 per barrel on a 2M-barrel cargo; at 8% of hull, where quotes could land if they are offered at all, that is ~$3.60-4.00 per barrel before freight, which itself likely doubles (panel pass-through estimates). Those costs survive any fade. Behind them sits the inventory math: ~12-14M bpd of Gulf exports have no pipeline bypass, and ~3 weeks of pre-closure loadings still on the water are the hard cushion. A week of held closure draws ~60-80M barrels net (panel estimate), a draw on the scale of the full 2022 IEA coordinated release compressed into a week; a month would consume the equivalent of the entire US SPR and is logistically undrawable at that rate. Somewhere in weeks two to four of a verified enforced closure, the market stops trading inventory cover and starts trading demand destruction, the $110-130 regime.

OPEC+ cannot plug the hole, and the reason loops back to Path 5. Deployable spare capacity of 1.5-2.5M bpd sits 85-90% behind the same chokepoint; the binding constraint is bypass exit capacity, ~1.5-2M bpd of incremental headroom at Yanbu and Fujairah. Watch loading data at those two ports, not OPEC statements. Note what the Saudi exemption buys Tehran here: sparing Riyadh reads as tacit permission for the 4-4.5M bpd bypass to keep running, which means the world's only working relief valve operates at Iranian sufferance.

LNG carries the sharper edge. The Ras Laffan recovery rested on an inferred Iranian carve-out for Qatar's cargoes, an inference that was never confirmed and that Sunday's barrage on the host country removes. The LNG exemption's end on July 7 was the first crack; a declared total closure plus a barraged load port finishes the recovery for this window. Fourteen carriers anchored at Ras Laffan flip from bullish signal to trapped-tonnage risk, nobody ballasts into a declared-closed strait toward a country under missile attack, and our energy desk re-rates European gas beta to 4-6x Brent's move, which puts TTF up 25-40% on Monday if Brent opens up 12-14%. QatarEnergy force majeure, resisted through the functional closure, is now a named watch item on a 7-14 day fuse; none has been declared as of this writing, and whether Ras Laffan facilities were themselves targeted is not established.

GL X1 expires Friday, and the two clocks now interact. Physically the expiry is near-moot under a declared closure; whether Kharg loadings are even operating after the Bandar Abbas-area strikes is unknown, and if they continue while everyone else is blocked, that is both a market tell and an obvious fourth-wave predicate. Diplomatically it is load-bearing: an extension announced before Friday is the cleanest available de-escalation signal, while a silent lapse means every restart barrel in any future branch needs new paper from Washington, adding weeks between any reopening and normalized flows. Downstream, US retail gasoline at $3.88 a gallon, up ~50% since May, runs toward $4.20-4.40 within two to three weeks at $85-plus Brent (~2.4 cents per gallon per dollar of crude, panel estimate); an SPR release announcement is near-certain within days of a confirmed sustained closure and is worth $3-5 off flat price for a few days, optics rather than math against a 12-14M bpd hole. China, which takes ~90% of Iran's residual ~720k bpd, stops spot buying, bridges on stocks for two to three months, and quietly becomes the strongest external lobbyist for the corridor mechanism, a soft de-escalation vector this tree otherwise underweights.

The Military Reality

After 300-plus aimpoints in three nights, what Iran retains is enough to price transits, not stop them. Our defense panel assesses 40-60% of shore-based anti-ship missile launch capability surviving: mobile launchers dispersed along ~2,000 km of coast historically survive air campaigns, the Desert Storm Scud hunt produced zero confirmed mobile-launcher kills, and per-transit missile risk persisted through months of strikes on the Houthis in 2024-25. The real damage is to the kill chain: communications and coastal-surveillance strikes push Iran from coordinated over-the-horizon engagements toward opportunistic, close-in attacks, and GFS Galaxy fits that profile exactly. Fast-boat attrition is assessed at 30-40% of the armed fleet, enough to rule out a persistent picket line but not swarm attacks on single ships. Submarine status after the Bandar Abbas strikes is an open intelligence gap. The ~80 mines in the central channel degrade only with clearance, never with strikes, and one-way attack drones are the least-degraded arm. All of those percentages are panel assessments; no independent battle-damage assessment exists, US target counts are self-reported, and Iranian claims are Tehran-sourced.

Sunday's barrage reads as calibrated and probably also thinner, and those readings are not exclusive. Breadth over mass, six or seven countries in one morning rather than saturation of one point, is a messaging choice; Doha saw two interception waves, not a hundred-missile salvo. Salvo weight looks like tens of munitions against the 100-300 munition raids Iran demonstrated in 2024-25. One raid cannot distinguish restraint from constraint, but the trend line, declining salvo density with breadth substituting for mass, is consistent with both a political ceiling and a thinning magazine. A caveat that matters: wave three hit communications networks, so some of Sunday's pattern may be pre-set response packages executing rather than a war cabinet fine-tuning. Calibration produced by standing orders is more brittle than calibration produced by live command judgment; it holds until a unit deviates.

Force structure is the quiet constraint on Washington's side. USS Ford departed ~July 6 and no replacement carrier group is confirmed in our holdings (flagged as a gap), which implies three ~100-140 aimpoint nights ran on land-based air from GCC fields, long-range bombers, and cruise missiles. Basing consent therefore becomes the target: Iran's Sunday set is aimed at the hosts underwriting US sortie generation, militarily rational even at zero hits, because it forces them to price their exposure nightly. Both sides have a magazine problem, cruise missiles drawing from the same launch cells needed for air defense on one side, interceptor stocks burning against known production constraints on the other. Our defense panel's second load-bearing judgment follows from that: the US Navy cannot simultaneously defend the bases, sustain the strike tempo, and escort commerce with the hulls now on station, so the next two weeks are about which of those three missions gets cut. Assessed resolution: a shift from mass nightly waves to targeted re-strikes while pivoting toward the corridor-and-convoy construct. Casualty risk is being sampled nightly meanwhile; the panel puts 25-40% odds on a confirmed US service-member fatality inside 14 days if exchanges continue at this tempo.

Two disciplines and two wild cards close the picture. Saturday's explosions were in Bushehr province; nothing places ordnance near the nuclear plant, and only an IAEA statement, satellite corroboration, or Tier 1/2 confirmation would count, in either direction (ABC's report of a "nuclear dust" precondition remains single-outlet). Mojtaba's written revenge vow and Trump's "1,000 missiles" post sit off-tree: any attempt on US leadership converts posture into predicate and is unbounded. Watch, too, for signs the two-track state becomes three or more tracks, units acting without central authorization, because every calibration argument above assumes someone is calibrating.

Watch List

1. The southern-corridor transit test. The fate of the next tracked 10,000-plus dwt merchant transit through the JMIC southern corridor, observable within 24-72 hours since dark crossings were already happening July 9-10. Unmolested with AIS on: the closure is rhetoric, and Paths 1-2 (50% combined) are running. Interdicted or struck: enforcement is real, and Path 1 collapses into Paths 3-4. Escorted by a US warship: Path 4 is live. No statement from Tehran or Washington resolves as much as fast. Just as decisive is whether underwriters will still quote that transit; cover withdrawal closes the strait commercially without a shot.

2. The fourth-wave target set. A repeat capability package versus bridges, power plants, energy, or leadership. CENTCOM release language and strike geolocation are the discriminators between Path 1 and Path 3.

3. The GFS Galaxy crew member. Rescued versus confirmed dead, the nationality, and the Cyprus flag-state response. A first EU-flag fatality of this phase internationalizes the enforcement strike and feeds both Path 3 (predicate) and Path 4 (escort demand).

4. The Tehran two-track tell. Whether the civilian government, the foreign ministry, the SNSC, or Ghalibaf repeats and codifies the IRGC's closure declaration in its own name, or dilutes it. "Vessels coordinating with Iran may pass" is the erosion tell; formal government endorsement is the enforcement tell. If the government never repeats the total-closure language, the walk-back lane is being kept open.

5. The Omani draft against the July 17 clock. Any US engagement short of rejection, a dated Muscat session with named American attendees, or a GL X1 extension or successor license. If July 17 passes with none of these, Path 2's window narrows sharply and its probability redistributes mostly to Path 1.

6. Horizontal tripwires. Anything at Saudi territory or Aramco; Houthi Red Sea activity with Hormuz-linked terms; UKMTO mining advisories beyond the strait; and US escort or MCM surge deployments into theater, the leading tell for Path 4, visible days before any announcement.

TankerBrief scenario analysis reflects synthesis of panel inputs as of July 12, 2026. Probabilities are judgment-based estimates derived from observable trigger conditions, not quantitative models. All price figures are scenario ranges against the $76.01 Friday close, not forecasts of tonight's open.