US to Send Third Aircraft Carrier, Up to 10,000 More Troops to Middle East

The scale of this buildup — a third carrier group plus Marine vessels and thousands of troops — signals that Washington is positioning for a sustained, not episodic, posture in the region, even as the timing of any renewed strikes is explicitly tied to a domestic political calendar. That linkage is the part markets tend to underprice: military escalation that waits on an election is escalation with a visible clock, which changes how risk is distributed across the interim. Whether the force presence itself becomes the trigger for the confrontation it is meant to deter is the open question.