For the first time in nearly two weeks, no American bombs fell on Iran over the weekend. The pause, which Pentagon sources confirmed to CNN, came after US President Donald Trump declined to authorise a planned fourteenth consecutive night of strikes — choosing instead to press for negotiations. The silence over Iranian skies was matched by an absence of retaliatory Iranian strikes on US military assets across the region, creating a fragile, unannounced ceasefire that neither side has formally acknowledged. The reasons for Washington's restraint appear to be as much logistical as diplomatic.

The New York Times, citing two individuals briefed on the matter, reported that dwindling supplies of Patriot interceptor missiles and other defensive munitions have become a significant constraint on further escalation. Vice President JD Vance and the top US general, Dan Caine, both raised concerns about the risks of widening the conflict at a White House meeting on Friday. General Caine reportedly told Trump that available military options could be executed successfully, but cautioned that their broader consequences deserved careful consideration. Trump, for his part, presented the pause in characteristically transactional terms.

"We're talking to them right now — I think they're getting more and more serious," he told journalists on Friday, while simultaneously warning that Iran faced a choice between a negotiated deal and strikes at "a much higher level." The war, which Trump once predicted would last four or five weeks, is now approaching its fifth month — a timeline that is beginning to weigh on Republican approval ratings ahead of November's midterm elections. The conflict has already spread well beyond its original theatre. Yemen's Houthi rebels, aligned with Tehran, claimed strikes on Saudi Aramco facilities in Jizan and Yanbu, threatening the Gulf's energy infrastructure and pulling regional powers deeper into a confrontation that began over the Strait of Hormuz.