Jared Malson

And for those Gulf countries who, by the way, diplomatically for weeks now have been pushing behind the scenes very hard to try to de-escalate, to try to find a diplomatic off-ramp from this crisis, because they were worried about precisely this scenario.

There's obviously still questions about how long the Iranians themselves can sustain their own response.

Their supply of missiles is depleted after the 12-day war with Syria.

Israel last summer, and their military sites, we presume, are also under attack right now.

Nonetheless, it is already a very disruptive event for the region and for the global economy because obviously the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz being perhaps the world's most important energy shipping lane that's now in the line of fire.

Those are cards that they can still play, and we haven't seen that yet, obviously.

But even with this initial response, we've already seen that they can inflict damage and they can cause casualties across the region.

I think we need to be closely watching the reaction from the Gulf states, especially.

I cannot stress enough this block of countries, along with Egypt and Turkey, so a broad array of US allies in the region, all lobbied the Trump administration not to do this ahead of time.

The context in the region is that this is happening in the middle of Ramadan, which is

a holy month in Islam.

It's a time when practicing Muslims are fasting from sunup to sundown, and it's a time of quiet religious reflection.

And of course, it's a time of a massive religious pilgrimage in which more than a million pilgrims travel to Saudi Arabia

to go to Mecca.

And now you have a huge disruption where the airspace is closed, no one's able to travel, and that's obviously a huge problem for them.

And then in addition to that, they're also under fire from these Iranian missiles that are happening.

So it is a huge test of the U.S.

partnership with those countries who also

as a group decided to disallow the U.S.

from using their bases to launch strikes on Iran.