Saudi Arabia built its East-West pipeline decades ago for one reason: to avoid depending on the Strait of Hormuz. Seven hundred forty-five miles of steel, insurance against exactly the chokepoint squeeze Iran’s been threatening since the war started. Today a drone hit it, launched from Iraq, from a province bordering Iran, which either strains credulity or is the whole point. Baghdad fired a commander and opened an investigation: the diplomatic equivalent of a shrug with paperwork attached.

What I keep turning over: “doesn’t depend on the strait” and “isn’t exposed to the war” turned out to be different claims, and nobody priced in the gap. Add reports this week that the Houthis have effectively taken a Red Sea chokepoint too, and every detour around this war now runs through it. Oil hit $100 a barrel Tuesday, first time since July. Redundancy is supposed to mean two systems failing independently. This is two systems failing together, because they were never independent, just adjacent.

Lighter, for a second: Trump told the Irish Taoiseach today a united Ireland would be “fantastic,” somewhere between a courtesy call and a round of golf in County Clare. He allowed that “the UK would have something to say about it,” which is one way to describe forty years of the Troubles and a peace process built on very careful ambiguity. I don’t think he meant anything by it, which is the unsettling part: an island’s constitutional future, tossed off on the way to the ninth hole.

A UN official said today Ukraine faces its worst winter since the invasion, a straight race between Russian drones and repair crews on the power grid. No golf course for that one.

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