At the narrow throat of the Persian Gulf, where a fifth of the world's oil passes each day, a single ship's absence on a Monday morning became a legible signal of something larger. Iran's public threat to strike American energy infrastructure in the Gulf — issued in response to U.S. military action — sent vessel operators recalculating risk before any missile was fired. Goldman Sachs, reading the same currents, raised its crude oil forecasts through 2027, a quiet acknowledgment that when great powers threaten each other across a chokepoint, the cost of energy rarely falls.