The US-Iran deal is not a market mover in the usual sense. It is a rotation. Two premiums that had been pricing the same war collapsed at once — the energy premium embedded in crude and the geopolitical risk premium embedded in equities — and they unwound in the same session. For everything except one sector, the two forces pulled in the same direction, and the result was one of the sharpest risk-on moves of the year.

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.

Time is the real battlefield here. That is the core of the argument, and once you see it that way, a lot of Iran’s behavior starts to look less reactive and more deliberate. Iran does not need to defeat the United States in a conventional military sense to achieve a strategic result. It needs to drag the confrontation into a shape that the United States, and especially Donald Trump, finds politically, psychologically, and economically unsustainable.

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.

The tone coming out of Washington is shifting, and not in a subtle way. A group of Democratic members on the House Armed Services Committee, led by Congressman John Garamendi, is openly pressing for immediate public testimony from the Department of Defense regarding the ongoing U.S. military actions tied to Iran. The request, directed to committee chairman Mike Rogers, signals growing unease not just about the conflict itself, but about how little clarity Congress feels it has over its scope, objectives, and trajectory.