Refresh: the ceasefire that keeps collapsing, and a wider net
Four days after the last pass, the US-Iran ceasefire turned over again - the same announce-then-collapse cycle it runs almost weekly: Hormuz tanker strikes, OFAC revoking the oil waiver the same day, US strikes on ninety Iranian sites, Iranian retaliation on four Gulf states, and then talks resuming. Around it, a fuller sweep - Russia turned fuel importer, Colombia's transition ruptured, Syria came off the terror list, Ethiopia and Eritrea mobilized, and a European instability cluster surfaced. This pass widened the net past the prior watch-list and kept every source it could verify.
Abstract
This pass was deliberately discovery-first: rather than chase the prior pass's open watch-list, we swept the whole canon - every region and every category - for anything material dated 7 to 11 July, and kept every source we could verify and tie to a rating, not only the ones that moved a score. The result is a broader pass than a four-day window usually yields: 73 sub-factors across 39 countries, and a news store that grew by 70 records. Source discipline was applied uniformly, and confidence was set from corroboration, not gut: multiple independent-of-subject sources in agreement lift it, a lone entangled or state source cannot.
The ceasefire that keeps collapsing
It is tempting to write this week up as a dramatic collapse, but that would miss what is actually happening: this ceasefire is announced and falls apart on a roughly weekly rhythm. A remote memorandum (17 June) and a Burgenstock roadmap (21 June) had already come and gone before this window opened. So the July sequence is another turn of the cycle, not a singular breakdown. Tanker strikes hit the Strait of Hormuz on 7 July; the same day, OFAC revoked General License X, replacing it with a wind-down-only license expiring 17 July. The US then struck roughly eighty to ninety Iranian sites over 8 to 9 July, including the perimeter of the Bushehr power plant (the IAEA reported no radiation rise); Washington declared the memorandum "over"; Iran retaliated with missiles and drones on Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, which the Gulf Cooperation Council condemned; and then the talks resumed.
That rhythm is the reason we did not floor Iran's near-term conflict score. The methodology scores the integrated forward expectation, not the snapshot, and flooring the trough of an oscillation only to mark it back up when the next ceasefire is announced would be whipsaw. So the near-term moved to a deeply negative but not maximal level - intense intermittent conflict with live diplomacy, not a sustained total war. The sanctions score did give back the relief, because the waiver was genuinely revoked. And we retained the positive skew - the very fact that these ceasefires keep being re-announced is the mechanism of that skew: a war that keeps trying to end. The chokepoint re-priced around it - Hormuz war-risk insurance rose to about five percent of hull value with some underwriters advising pauses - dragging Saudi Arabia's and Qatar's trade exposure back down even as Brent's move stayed modest.
Where else the board moved
Russia crossed a line from exporter to importer: after Ukrainian strikes completed the campaign against its major refineries, Moscow banned diesel exports and began importing fuel, and its stock market hit a three-year low. Colombia's presidential transition ruptured when the outgoing president refused to recognize the certified winner and alleged fraud that technical experts debunked the same day. Syria came off the US state-sponsor-of-terrorism list, a real sanctions and investment opening, as Paris and Ankara moved to normalize. Ethiopia and Eritrea slid into reciprocal border mobilization, the most serious Horn escalation since 2022. A European instability cluster surfaced in one week - France's Le Pen cleared to run in 2027, Germany's AfD polling ahead of the governing party, the UK's Farage triggering a by-election under financial scrutiny. And a UN investigation found that Sudan's RSF had committed genocide, corroborating a score already at the floor.
Not everything was worse. Argentina's country risk hit an eight-year low on a clean debt payment; South Africa's grid extended a 413-day load-shedding-free streak; Hungary cleared the last hurdle to unlock ten billion euros of frozen EU funds; and NATO pledged seventy billion euros to Ukraine at Ankara.
The discipline, and the wider net
The load-bearing work, as always, was the exclusion and the corroboration, not the search. Iranian, Russian, Chinese and junta self-reports were used only for direction and cross-checked against independent data - exile Russian outlets on Moscow's deficit, market trackers on the rial, private indicators and rating actions on China's property stress, converged independent tallies on Venezuela's earthquake toll. US official statistics stayed partially-entangled rather than excluded. And US civil liberties were again held rather than pushed across the line that would falsely label the country opaque: the Houston shooting is contested precisely because independent reporting on it flows freely.
What changed in method this pass is the net. We stopped treating the previous pass's open questions as the scope and instead let the window define it, which is why the board moved in thirty-nine countries rather than a handful - and why the wall below carries corroborating and even score-held coverage, not just the leads. The related coverage on each country page is drawn from that store.