Refresh: the week the cycle broke
Three days after the last pass, the ceasefire cycle stopped cycling: three consecutive nights of US strikes across Iran, retaliation on six Gulf and Levant states, and a reinstated naval blockade with a transit toll the UN's maritime agency calls baseless. Around it, the EU formally opened Ukraine's and Moldova's next accession cluster the same week its Russia sanctions package failed, Colombia's rupture reached the inauguration itself, Venezuela's constitutional clock ran out unanswered, and Washington extended a military deployment in its own capital through the next inauguration. Forty countries moved.
Abstract
The last pass described a ceasefire that collapses and re-announces itself on a roughly weekly rhythm, and scored Iran's conflict as intense but intermittent on that basis. This pass records the window in which the rhythm broke. Between 11 and 14 July the United States struck targets across Iran on three consecutive nights, Iran retaliated against six Gulf and Levant states and hit two UAE-flagged tankers inside Omani waters, and Washington reinstated a naval blockade of Iranian ports - adding a proposed twenty percent toll on all Hormuz cargo that the UN's International Maritime Organization says has no legal basis. The sweep stayed discovery-first: every region, every category, everything material dated 11 to 14 July, keeping every source we could verify. The result: 62 sub-factors across 40 countries, and a news store that grew by 74 records. Confidence was set from corroboration, not gut, and state self-reports were used for direction only.
The week the cycle broke
We resisted flooring Iran's conflict score last pass because the oscillation kept producing exits, and marking the trough of a cycle as permanent would be whipsaw. What happened this window is different in kind, not just degree: a sustained multi-night air campaign, retaliation that reached six states and killed a sailor on a commercial tanker, and a blockade - a standing structure of confrontation rather than a strike exchange. The near-term conflict score moved down another step, and the sanctions score reached the floor, because a naval blockade layered on a revoked oil waiver is the far end of the isolation scale; the wind-down license expires on 17 July with nothing behind it.
Two things did not move. Iran's conflict score still is not floored: talks nominally continue, and a blockade is a lever built to be traded away. And the positive skew survives, strained - the war still has to end, and every prior trough has produced an attempted exit. The chokepoint priced the difference: Hormuz traffic has virtually halted at war-risk premiums near five percent of hull value, Qatar's LNG lifeline is carrying roughly a fifth of global supply risk, and Brent jumped nine percent to the mid-eighties. Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan and Oman all took direct hits or hosted them; all six moved.
The belligerent moved too. The United States is now running a sustained air campaign with its own bases under fire, and this pass scores it as such. Its alliance picture worsened separately: at the same summit that pledged seventy billion euros to Ukraine, Washington renewed its claim that Greenland should be under American control and threatened to pull troops from Europe - answered by a Danish vow to defend every inch of NATO and an eight-country solidarity statement. At home, the June inflation print genuinely improved - and was scored with the partial-entanglement discount and a market cross-check, not taken on faith - while the National Guard deployment in the capital was extended through Inauguration Day 2029 and nearly doubled, over the elected city government's objection. That pre-commitment moved the institutional score; civil liberties were again deliberately held above the line that would falsely label the country opaque, because the reporting contesting all of this flows freely.
Where else the board moved
Ukraine and Moldova banked the thing the last pass refused to pre-score: the EU formally opened accession Cluster 6 for both on 14 July, unanimously, while a 37-leader Paris summit pledged air-defense batteries and sixteen Rafale jets. The same week, the EU failed to pass its 21st Russia sanctions package over Greek and Austrian objections, leaving the oil price cap set to lapse - we did not pre-score the lapse. Russia's war economy tightened anyway: Ukraine's Azov drone campaign forced Moscow to halt Kerch Strait and Don-Azov Canal shipping outright, a quarter of its wheat exports transit that sea, and the five-month deficit doubled year on year with the stock market at a three-year low. A genuine Poland-Ukraine rift opened mid-war over historical memory, with Warsaw's services warning that Russia is working to inflame exactly that seam.
Colombia's rupture escalated from recognition to the handover itself - the outgoing president barred military installations from hosting the inauguration, and the president-elect says he will be sworn in at a garrison anyway. Venezuela's constitutional clock ran out: the 180-day cap on a caretaker presidency passed with no election called and a court-invented category standing in for the constitution, as the earthquake toll passed 4,490. Pakistan's Balochistan wave killed more than forty in a week. South Africa's deportation campaign doubled inside two weeks to over fifty-three thousand people. DR Congo's Ebola outbreak became the third-largest on record while its eastern war ignored the peace deal. El Salvador's president was proclaimed a 2027 candidate under rules rewritten for indefinite re-election. China's Vanke passed quietly into state hands - a bailout, not a default - and its record June exports were scored as tariff front-running, not strength. North Korea resumed ballistic testing. Bangladesh's transition kept its culture of political violence.
Not everything was worse. Jamaica's homicides fell twenty-two percent on independently cross-checked figures. Zambia executed the world's first debt-for-energy swap. Australia signed a Pacific defense treaty with Fiji within days of China's missile test. The UK is producing its seventh prime minister in a decade through an orderly, uncontested succession - churn, but churn inside functioning institutions. And Ethiopia-Eritrea, last pass's most alarming line, stayed frozen at mobilization: nothing verified moved, so nothing moved.
The discipline
The exclusions carried the pass, as usual. Junta and Africa Corps casualty claims out of Mali were excluded outright; Nigerian military claims about foreign facilitators were flagged as self-report; Cuba's state utility saying the grid is back was taken as direction while the independently corroborated fact remained a third total national blackout this year; Chinese customs data was read through independent framing as pull-forward; and the one unlinkable primary source in the store - a UN experts' tally on settler violence - was kept for provenance but withheld from the public wall rather than shown as a card that cannot be checked. Where only a single domestic outlet carried a story, the note says so and the confidence stayed put. The wall below carries the corroborating and score-held coverage alongside the movers; each country page draws its related coverage from the same store.