US President Trump says renewed campaign against Iran will not continue for too long; oil prices will come down

The pattern in comparable episodes is that crude's geopolitical premium, built into prompt spreads and freight and insurance costs on Gulf loadings, bleeds out only when rhetoric is matched by an observable pause in strikes and, critically, undisturbed transit through the Strait of Hormuz; words alone have tended to cap rallies rather than reverse them. The simultaneous threat of another attack cuts against the reassurance and is the tell to weigh: in past cycles of this kind, escalation risk has been underwritten by the options skew and the front of the crude curve long after headline prices eased. The distinction that matters is between disruption to Iranian supply, which is largely sanctioned already and so priced thinly, and any impairment to regional flows, which reprices the whole complex. The follow-ons are the sequencing of further strikes, any Iranian retaliation against shipping or regional infrastructure, and whether Gulf producers signal spare-capacity readiness. Gold and the dollar typically track the same de-escalation signal inversely to crude.