Oil price spikes on Israel war. Here’s what a wider conflict might mean

The United States, aware of the vulnerability of the trading route, has kept an “extensive military presence in the Gulf,” said Tobias Borck, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. It is far too early to speculate on an outcome as dramatic as this, Borck added. The current Israeli-Hamas conflict would need to expand “very far outside the Israeli geographic area” to provoke such a move by Iran or Iranian-linked groups.