After repeated threats and pullbacks from US President Trump, it has only reinforced a belief among the country's leadership Trump is not looking for a wider war, but for leverage in negotiations, reports CBS citing Iran sources

• They calculate that they can absorb the pressure and raise the cost to the U.S. through proxies – such as Yemen's Houthis – and threats to global shipping until Washington concludes there is no military way out of this conflict.

Reports sourced to adversary leadership about an American president's true intentions are a recurring feature of confrontations of this kind, and the analytical problem is always the same: the account reflects what the counterparty wants to believe or wants believed, not verified intent. In past episodes, leaderships that concluded Washington sought leverage rather than war have tended to sustain proxy pressure longer, treating shipping harassment and allied militia activity as a negotiating position rather than an escalatory step, which is the calculation described here. The transmission channel runs through the Gulf risk premium rather than through any direct supply loss: freight, insurance and tanker routing costs on Red Sea and Hormuz-adjacent lanes reprice first, with crude benchmarks following only when actual flows are threatened. The distinction that has historically mattered is between proxy attacks that are absorbable and those that force a direct response, since markets have tended to fade the former and reprice durably only on the latter. Worth watching are whether the posture described translates into measurable shipping disruption and whether Washington's rhetoric shifts from leverage-seeking to action-forcing, as that crossover has been the point at which the premium stops being faded. As a read on the counterparty's strategy rather than a policy decision, the signal is about duration of the standoff, not its resolution.