Karex, the Malaysian company that makes roughly one in five of the world's condoms -- about five billion a year, supplying Durex and Trojan among others -- announced this week that it is raising prices by up to 30 percent.
The reason is the Strait of Hormuz.
Key Points
- Infographic highlights hidden war dynamics, showing conflict shifting from frontlines to global systems like energy, shipping, and food supply chains.
- Trump admits blocking Hormuz reopening deal, raising questions about US policy intent and lack of clearly defined end objectives.
- Global disruptions intensify, with fuel shortages, supply stress in Gulf nations, and emergency economic measures in countries like South Korea.
- Iran’s power structure dominated by IRGC generals limits diplomatic flexibility, complicating US expectations of unified negotiation outcomes.
- War costs escalate sharply, impacting military inventories, global inflation risks, and even supply chains like condom manufacturing in Malaysia.
University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape posted this infographic (external link) on his X stream:
The image captures something that is easy to miss when the frontlines go quiet: The war is still moving, just not where we are looking.
This is not a complete picture. Over the past few weeks, this blog has tracked a wider set of second- and third-order effects rippling outward, through energy markets, shipping routes, food systems.
But as a snapshot, this is useful. It shows the pressure points, and how far they extend.
In Washington, meanwhile, there is little clarity on how, or when, this ends. US President Donald Trump, speaking at the White House on Thursday, declined to offer any timeline for resolving the conflict.
'Don't rush me,' he told reporters, blaming what he described as a lack of clear leadership in Tehran for holding up talks.
That account, however, was complicated by an unscripted moment. In a clip (external link) that has since gone viral, Trump acknowledged that Iran had agreed to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and that his own team was prepared to accept it.
He overruled them.
'I'm the one who kept it closed,' he said, adding that he did not want Iran earning $500 million a day "until they settle this thing."
What 'settle this thing' entails is unclear. The administration has yet to articulate a concrete end-state, and the one attempt at finding a solution, via talks in Islamabad, was abandoned by the US side, citing no reason, even as Tehran signaled willingness to engage.
Taken together, the picture is less one of stalled diplomacy than of undefined objectives.
The consequences are already visible, and they are global. Fuel shortages are beginning to hit airlines and shipping. Gulf states like Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE are facing grocery supply stress.
South Korea has moved to emergency stockpiling. The Philippines has shifted to a four-day work week in response to energy constraints.
If Trump's account is accurate, then at least part of this disruption is not accidental.
It is a policy choice. And if it is a policy choice, then the question is not when the disruption ends, but when the policy changes, and on whose terms.
Elsewhere the conflict continues to move in fragments.
Lebanon and Israel have agreed to extend their ceasefire (external link) by three weeks after US-mediated talks.
US forces have boarded (external link) an Iranian oil tanker in the Gulf even as Washington continues to float the possibility of mining the Strait.
Iran, for its part, is leaning further into asymmetric tactics, deploying swarms (external link) of fast boats in Hormuz and thus raising the risk profile for commercial shipping.
For what it is worth, there is now an open-ended ceasefire in place.
But the absence of fighting is not the same as the absence of pressure. The system is still under strain -- energy, shipping, food -- and those stresses are accumulating far from the battlefield.
Wars do not always escalate in straight lines. Sometimes they stall at the centre and spread at the edges. And that is what this moment looks like.
This post opened with a simple observation: The war is still moving, just not in the direction we are looking.
The reading list today tries to show exactly where it is moving.
It starts on the streets of Tehran, where the human cost of the conflict has begun to reshape how ordinary Iranians think about war and peace, then moves to the command structure that is actually making Iran's decisions, surfaces the split inside the Trump administration over whether to talk or squeeze, tracks the legal architecture Washington has built to justify what it is doing, and ends with two pieces on what the standoff is costing in weapons, in treasure, and in the price of a condom in Kuala Lumpur.
The city that wants the war back
The BBC's Lyse Doucet spent a day on Sanaei Ghaznavi Street in central Tehran -- shoe shops, corner stores, a cafe still doing brisk trade in grilled sandwiches -- and found something that complicates the easy narrative of a population yearning for peace.
Mohammad, a 27-year-old shoe salesman watching his father's 40-year-old business empty out, told her he hopes the war starts again.
His reasoning is not ideology but exhaustion: The economy has been getting worse for so long that some Iranians now believe only a rupture, however violent, could force a reset.
An unofficial estimate cited by one Iranian web site suggests up to four million jobs may have been lost or affected.
Bread prices have tripled. The Internet has been shut down for more than 50 days -- even Iran's communications minister has called for the ban to be lifted.
The street-level portrait Doucet assembles is of a people not choosing between war and peace but between two different kinds of despair. [BBC]
The generals who are actually in charge
The most important piece of reported journalism in today's list is Farnaz Fassihi's New York Times reconstruction of Iran's new power structure, based on interviews with 23 people inside Iran, including senior officials and members of the Revolutionary Guards.
The picture that emerges reframes almost everything else in this crisis.
Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, is in hiding, recovering from serious injuries, communicating via handwritten notes passed through a human chain of couriers.
He is mentally engaged but physically incapacitated and, more importantly, politically dependent on the generals who backed his succession.
It is the IRGC -- specifically Commander-in-Chief Ahmad Vahidi, security council head Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr and parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf -- who are the real decision-makers on war, diplomacy, and the strait.
It was Vahidi who pulled the plug on the second round of Islamabad talks, over the objections of President Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Araghchi, both of whom wanted to continue negotiating.
The reformist voices exist. They simply do not prevail.
Understanding this is essential to understanding why Trump's demand that Iran's 'fractured leaders' produce a unified proposal may be asking for something the current structure cannot deliver. [New York Times] (external link)
The split on the other side
Bloomberg's account of the impasse inside the Trump administration is the necessary companion piece to the Fassihi report.
While one camp of advisers wants to keep the blockade running, arguing Iran is weeks away from an oil storage crisis that will force bigger concessions, while another warns that the Hormuz disruption is already feeding US inflation and threatens Republican prospects in the midterms.
Trump's social media posts, Iranian negotiators have told mediators, are read in Tehran not as pressure tactics but as deliberate humiliation, making it politically impossible for the generals to return to the table.
The Bloomberg piece also surfaces a detail worth pondering: Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were expected to join Vance in Islamabad before the talks collapsed.
The dealmaking apparatus was assembled and ready. It had nowhere to go. [Bloomberg] (external link)
The fog of dealmaking
The New Yorker's Susan Glasser steps back from the daily torrent and asks the question that the crisis keeps deferring: Why would anyone make a deal with this man? Her answer is not rhetorical.
She traces the list of agreements Trump has exited across two terms -- the Paris climate accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the WHO, the INF Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, the original Iran nuclear deal -- and argues that the credibility problem runs in both directions.
Iran cannot trust that a Trump deal will survive Trump, let alone a successor.
The Atlantic's Jonathan Chait, reading the same evidence, arrives at the same place from a different angle: The binge-posting, the all-caps denials of pressure, the repeated comparisons to Obama's "worst deal ever" -- all of it, he argues, reads less like a negotiating strategy than like a man narrating his own anxiety in real time.
Taken together, Glasser and Chait describe a diplomatic environment in which the signal and the noise have become indistinguishable, and the person generating most of the noise is the one who needs to close the deal. And his mouth. [New Yorker (external link), The Atlantic] (external link)
The legal architecture, and its holes
The US State Department's office of the legal adviser published a formal justification for Operation Epic Fury this week, and it repays careful reading -- not for what it establishes, but for what it concedes.
The document argues that the US and Israel were already in an ongoing armed conflict with Iran and therefore did not need to demonstrate an imminent attack to justify the February 28 strikes.
The argument is built on a chain of Iranian actions stretching back to 2019, or perhaps 2024, or perhaps June 2025 -- the document is usefully vague on when exactly the conflict began.
A careful legal critique (external link) circulating on social media identifies the central flaw: the document conflates two distinct bodies of law.
International humanitarian law governs conduct during an armed conflict.
The UN Charter governs when force may be used in the first place. The US concedes there was no ongoing or imminent Iranian attack on February 28.
That concession, the critique argues, is the ballgame.
What Washington has produced is a sophisticated legal brief for a war it had already decided to fight. [US State Department] (external link)
The bill, coming due
Two pieces put numbers to the cost of the war that the opening riff gestured at.
The New York Times reports that the US has burned through roughly 1,100 JASSM-ER long-range cruise missiles -- close to the total remaining stockpile -- along with more than 1,000 Tomahawks and 1,200 Patriot interceptors.
Independent estimates put the total cost of the conflict so far at between $28 billion and $35 billion, or roughly $1 billion a day.
To reconstitute what has been expended, one senator notes, could take years at current production rates.
The Pacific has already felt the drain: The Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group was pulled from the South China Sea before the war began; THAAD interceptors have been moved from South Korea; two Marine Expeditionary Units have shipped out from the Pacific.
A companion New York Times piece on the standoff in the Strait captures where this leaves the administration: caught between the economic pain of keeping the Strait closed and the military risk of trying to force it open.
'He's stuck with this,' says Brookings Iran specialist Suzanne Maloney, 'for as long as the Strait remains closed.'
The speed with which this became a quagmire, she adds, has been stunning even to those who expected it. [New York Times (external link); New York Times] (external link)
The condom at the end of the supply chain
The reading list closes, as today's post opened, with the war moving somewhere unexpected.
Karex, the Malaysian company that makes roughly one in five of the world's condoms -- about five billion a year, supplying Durex and Trojan among others -- announced this week that it is raising prices by up to 30 percent.
The reason is the Strait of Hormuz. Nitrile, synthetic rubber, silicone oil, aluminum foil, packaging materials: More than a hundred raw materials, many of them petrochemical derivatives, have surged in price or become scarce.
Some inputs have doubled in cost. If a single item runs out, the chief executive warns, production stops entirely.
Karex also supplies condoms to government-funded AIDS prevention and family planning programmes -- programmes already weakened by Trump's USAID cuts earlier this year.
The story is, on one level, almost absurdly specific, but that is precisely the point.
The war in the Strait has reached a condom factory in Malaysia.
The second and third-order effects this blog has been tracking are no longer abstractions.
They are production lines, and they are breaking, in both expected and unexpected ways. [New York Times] (external link)
In closing...
The Pape infographic that opened today's post showed a war still moving, still spreading, even on a day when the frontlines were quiet.
The reading list underlined it -- from a shoe shop in Tehran to a condom factory in Kuala Lumpur, the pressure is diffuse now, systemic, and no longer organised around dramatic events.
That, in a way, is the problem with covering this moment.
Wars have a rhythm that journalism is built to track. Strikes, casualties, deadlines, breakthroughs.
This one, for now, has entered a different register -- the slow grind of a blockade, the accumulation of economic pain, a standoff in which both sides have concluded that waiting costs the other side more.
Trump is running out the clock. The IRGC generals in Tehran are running out a clock of their own.
The world's oil markets, airline schedules, and rubber supply chains are caught in between, paying a daily toll for a stalemate that neither side has any urgent reason to end.
This blog will be pausing after today. The story itself seems to be entering a phase that rewards patience over daily commentary.
Unless something breaks -- a resumption of strikes, a diplomatic breakthrough, a miscalculation in the Strait -- the next chapter is likely to be written in slow increments: An oil storage crisis in Iran, a Republican senator deciding that May 1 (more on that in yesterday's post) (external link) actually means something, a market event that forces someone's hand.
When that happens, this blog will be here.
Until then, the Strait stays nearly closed. The clock that organises this crisis is in an oil tank in Khuzestan, in a Patriot missile battery that no longer exists, in a midterm election that is still six months away.
Until next time...
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
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