A de-escalating US-Iran conflict dominates the outlook — markets price a strike pause as Washington and Gulf allies pivot to force-protection hardening — while a fragile new Lebanon-Israel disarmament framework looks built to fail. In parallel, a record Western European heatwave forces French emergency action, Ukraine's refinery campaign deepens Russia's fuel crisis and local grievances, and a structural 'second China shock' batters German automakers.

This is the high-base-rate complement to the strike-pause forecast: a de-escalating direct conflict typically transitions into visible security hardening. After Abqaiq (2019) and the 2020 US-Iran exchange, the US-led Gulf network announced air-defense and force-protection adjustments within weeks. The geopolitician (my most reliable analyst, Brier 0.18, council consensus DeepSeek/GPT at 0.75/0.77) makes a well-grounded power-dynamics + structural-forces case. The Skeptic (risk 76) judged the chain plausible but flagged that evidence leans on analogy rather than pre-announcement indicators, holding at 0.68. I nudge slightly above to 0.72 because (a) my geopolitics track record under-predicts by ~8pp, and (b) the post-crisis hardening base rate is genuinely strong and observable. Gulf bases remain inside Iran's missile/drone envelope and Hormuz insecurity is already shaping IMO/Oman behavior, giving Washington a concrete incentive to act publicly. I avoid going higher because announcements can lag 30 days and may be quiet rather than 'visible.' This is the safer, more falsifiable Gulf forecast than the alternative shipping-crisis or fresh-attack framings.