Even as missiles flew between American and Iranian forces and drones struck tankers in Egyptian waters, the oil markets on Wednesday offered a quiet rebuke to the logic of panic. Prices slipped rather than surged, because traders were watching not the flames but the ships — thirty-nine commodity carriers still threading through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, carrying crude out of a region at war with itself. The market was not ignoring the violence; it was making a wager that human ingenuity, in the form of rerouted tankers and diversified export channels, would outlast the disruption — a bet whose