Iran has weighed attacking US military targets in Europe if US President Trump escalates the war, according to people close to the regime cited by FT

Iran has weighed attacking US military targets in Europe if US President Trump escalates the war, according to people close to the regime cited by FT.

Threats of this kind, attribution to unnamed officials via a major outlet rather than an on-record statement, fit the established pattern of signalling through calibrated leaks: Tehran has historically used conditional warnings of this sort to raise the prospective cost of escalation without crossing a line that would trigger it. The distinction worth drawing is between horizontal escalation (widening the conflict to bases and personnel outside the immediate theatre) and vertical escalation (intensity within it); threatening the former is typically a deterrent move, since actually striking assets of a third-party geography invites a materially broader response. The transmission channel in comparable episodes has run through crude first, freight and insurance premia on Gulf-linked routes, then haven demand in duration and gold, with the move tending to fade when the warning is not followed by action. What is worth watching is whether the threat is repeated on record by senior figures, whether force posture at the named geography changes, and whether shipping and insurance pricing begins to embed the wider theatre. As an unattributed conditional threat, it sits at the lower end of the credibility ladder until corroborated.