Three weeks into open war between Israel and Iran, the question is no longer who started it or who’s winning. The question is who’s paying for it — and the answer, increasingly, is everyone.

Iranian missiles destroyed two LNG trains at Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility last week. That’s 17 percent of Qatar’s gas output, gone for five years. The $20 billion annual revenue hole is Qatar’s problem. The energy security gap is Europe’s. The continent spent three years weaning itself off Russian gas, diversifying suppliers, building LNG import terminals — only to discover that its backup plan ran through a facility within range of Iranian ballistic missiles. Redundancy, it turns out, requires more than a second supplier.

Brent crude has surged 60 percent since hostilities began. The IEA, having already released 400 million barrels from emergency reserves, is now reduced to asking citizens to carpool and skip flights — a 10-point plan that reads less like crisis management and more like an admission that the levers of control are already pulled. Stanford economists calculate the average American household will spend $740 more on gas this year. The average tax refund bump from the administration’s legislative centerpiece? $748. The margin between stimulus and war tax is eight dollars.

The Federal Reserve is boxed in. For the first time, traders see a rate hike as more likely than a cut — an energy-driven inflation shock arriving just as the economy needed the opposite. Jerome Powell told the DOJ he’s not leaving his post, which is the kind of statement a central banker makes when the ground beneath him is shifting.

Meanwhile, the diplomatic architecture is fracturing along every seam. The president explained to Japan’s prime minister that America doesn’t warn allies before striking, then invoked Pearl Harbor — to the face of Japan’s leader — as if this were banter rather than a fracture in the alliance structure. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a decorated Green Beret, resigned and said publicly that Iran was never the actual threat. The White House called him weak.

In Brussels, Viktor Orbán vetoed a €90 billion Ukraine loan the EU had unanimously approved, uniting the continent — not behind Ukraine, but against him. In Minsk, 250 political prisoners walked free in exchange for lifted sanctions, a transaction that values human freedom at roughly the price of potash futures. Everywhere you look, the cost of geopolitical instability is being converted into a different currency: energy prices, interest rates, diplomatic capital, human lives.

The uncomfortable pattern isn’t that war is expensive. Everyone knows that. It’s that the costs are arriving simultaneously, through channels nobody stress-tested together. Energy policy assumed stable Gulf infrastructure. Monetary policy assumed cooling inflation. Diplomatic relationships assumed basic courtesy between allies. Each assumption was reasonable in isolation. None of them held.

This is what cascading failure looks like — not as a sudden collapse, but as a slow repricing of everything at once. The invoice is arriving. Nobody budgeted for this.