Strip away the flattery and the F-35 headlines from this week’s Ankara summit, and a narrower, more concrete objective sits underneath everything Trump is offering Erdogan: unblocking the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline. The jet talk is the part that makes headlines. The pipeline is the part that actually protects Trump from a repeat of the Hormuz shock that nearly cost him the midterms. The blockade Trump cannot afford to relive Iran’s closure of the Strait at the outset of the February war sent oil prices spiking more than 70 percent, and the fear of that blockade dragging into November is what pushed Trump toward a ceasefire in the first place.

The TACO trade has gone kinetic. Trump Always Chickens Out began as a Wall Street acronym for tariff threats that evaporated on contact with the bond market. It now describes American Gulf policy. On Tuesday, President Trump struck Iran to “restore leverage.” On Thursday, he canceled the follow-on strikes, announced that Iran’s leadership had “approved” a draft agreement, and began planning a signing ceremony for the weekend. Iran’s foreign ministry responded that Tehran had “not yet reached a final decision.

The 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz has confirmed what energy strategists long warned: a single narrow waterway carrying one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil trade represents a systemic vulnerability no amount of diplomatic goodwill can insure against. But the crisis has also accelerated something the MarketWatch framing captured before the shooting started — the conditions under which Hormuz matters less are now being built in real time, under duress.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that President Trump has told aides he is prepared to wind down the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran while leaving the Strait of Hormuz largely closed — deferring what he views as an operationally complex reopening mission to a later phase, or to allies. The calculation is blunt: forcing the strait open would push the conflict past his stated four-to-six-week timeline, and Trump has decided that isn’t a price he’s willing to pay.