US military has drafted options for three days of strikes as President Trump hesitates, according to NYT

Drafted strike options sitting unsigned is a familiar staging point in US military escalations: the planning is done at the Pentagon regardless, and the tradable event is the decision, not the preparation. In past episodes of this kind, markets have tended to price the risk premium at the headline and then fade it if the strike window passes unused, with the pattern being a knee-jerk bid in crude, gold and the franc and yen, and pressure on equities, which reverses sharply once strikes occur and prove limited rather than open-ended. The distinction that matters is between a discrete, time-boxed strike package and a campaign that draws retaliation against shipping or energy infrastructure: the former has historically been a short-lived risk event, the latter feeds freight, insurance and the Brent curve more durably. The 'hesitates' framing is the operative detail, since hesitation signals the options are leverage as much as intent, and headline-driven whipsaw in both directions is the established pattern in that phase. Follow-ons worth watching are carrier and tanker movements, official signalling from the counterpart state, and whether other outlets corroborate the timeline, since single-source NYT security stories have a mixed record of front-running actual action. The immediate market tells are the WTI/Brent front spread and gold's behaviour into any weekend gap risk.