A mystery drone hit a US-owned liquefied natural gas carrier at Egypt's Mediterranean port of Damietta on July 29, set it alight, and spread the fire to a second ship.

Cairo took until the following morning to report the incident, likely from being in a flap about being sucked into the wider war with Iran, like Ukraine. That the incident was caused by a drone, and nobody has claimed it surprisingly, but we could assume it didn’t come from Iran as it would have likely been shot down before getting past Israel and Palestine. Later, Yemeni sources denied it was them on July 30, Egyptian media reported.

That strike went well into Egyptian territory and was the first since the war between the United States and Iran began on February 28, and it lands a war that started in the Persian Gulf on the shore of the Mediterranean, one canal transit away from Europe and a direct challenge to the international shipping system.

On the same day the IRGC fired ballistic missiles at US forces in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United States struck Iran-linked militia sites across Iraq, and Yemen's Houthis declared a maritime embargo against Saudi shipping. Later, on July 29, the US pummelled Qeshm island in the Gulf blowing up houses, according to the Iranians, making the targeting even more suspect.

Four days earlier to the latest flare up, Ukrainian drones had reached across the Caspian to kill an Iranian sailor.

Draw those points on a globe and a shape appears that did not exist in the spring. A single conflict now touches three continents. It runs from the Caspian in the north to the Gulf of Aden in the south, from the Iraqi plains in the east to the Egyptian coast in the west, with a European supply chain feeding one belligerent and European navies escorting the tankers of another. The question is no longer whether the war is spreading. It is whether the thing spreading is still one war, or several that have grown into each other until the seams no longer hold.

Consider what has already merged. When Ukraine struck the sanctioned cargo ships Port Olya 2 and Begey in the Caspian, it was hitting the supply line that carries Shahed components and, by several accounts, Fath-360 ballistic missiles from Iran to Russia. As we asked at the time, Kyiv did not think it had picked a fight with Tehran. It thought it had interdicted a logistics route. But interdiction is a matter of intent, and a dead sailor is a matter of fact, and Iran now demands full compensation for a strike it says cannot go unanswered. Attacking Iran widens the war, and for Kyiv, that is the point, because it means Ukraine is at war with Trump's enemy. Two conflicts that a foreign ministry could keep in separate files in June share a casualty list in July. The recent funeral of former pro-Ukraine, pro-Iran-regime-change and pro-Israel Lindsay Graham saw the worlds collide in HD this week, even raising eyebrows with exiled and former prince Reza Pahlavi waiting to chat with the Saudi officials sat in front of him.

The mechanism is the same everywhere you look. And it is worth naming because it explains why the map keeps growing. Every belligerent in this war has a reason to attack a target that belongs to somebody else's fight. And every one of those attacks recruits a new party. Ukraine hits Russia's Iranian supply line and acquires Iran as an aggrieved party. The Houthis blockade Saudi shipping to pressure Iran's enemies and turn a Yemeni civil war into a Red Sea energy crisis. Saudi Arabia strikes militia sites in Iraq and makes Baghdad a theatre. Whoever hit Damietta, and the geography of a one-way drone flight narrows the suspect list considerably, has pulled Egypt, a declared non-combatant (but good friend of Russia’s), that has kept lines open to both Washington and Tehran, into a war it spent five months avoiding. Each move is locally rational. The sum is a widening that no single participant chose and none can now stop.

But that is all part of this stochastic war. And it is typical of the interregnum of the post Pax Americana end-of-empire-era. But now we have reached the runaway train part of the story.

The chokepoints tell the same story in the language of freight rates. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively shut since February 28. The Bab al-Mandeb has been under a Houthi blockade of Saudi-linked shipping since July 20. That is the first time in history both have closed at once. It puts a quarter of the world's seaborne oil and gas at risk of being priced off the water. Markets should look more disturbed.

The Saudi bypass pipeline that terminates at Yanbu on the Red Sea was the workaround for the loss of Hormuz. It now empties directly into the second blockade. When we asked in March which straits would close next, the question was still hypothetical. It is now a matter of the shipping schedule. Damietta adds a third pressure point, because a canal that already lost most of its traffic to the Red Sea diversion cannot afford the impression that its own approaches are now a target.

None of this yet amounts to the great-power collision that the phrase "mega war" is meant to summon, and it is worth being precise about why not. The United States is bombing Iran but is not at war with Russia. Russia arms Iran but has committed no forces to its defence. Israel and Iran trade strikes but through proxies and airpower, not armies in the field. The ceasefire brokered by Pakistan in April collapsed, but the diplomatic scaffolding it left behind, the Oman channel, the intermittent US signalling, the fact that Iran and Ukraine's foreign ministers spoke directly for the first time since 2022, has not been dismantled. The war is wide, but it is not yet deep. It sprawls across the map without any two nuclear-armed states firing on each other.

It is thinner because widening is itself a form of escalation, even when no red line is crossed. Every new front is a new place where an accident can happen: a new government that must now calculate retaliation, a new stretch of water where a misidentified hull can produce a dead sailor and a demand for compensation. The Caspian strike did not intend to bring Iran into the Ukraine war. The Damietta drone, whoever launched it, may not have intended to bring Egypt into anything. Intent is the first casualty of a conflict this crowded. The more belligerents share the same map, the smaller the mistake required to connect two of them who had managed, until that morning, to stay out of each other's war.

So, has this become a three-continent war? On the evidence of a single week, yes, in the literal sense that fighting tied to one conflict now spans Africa, Asia and the edge of Europe. Whether it becomes the mega war depends on a variable no analyst can price, which is how many more locally rational strikes the system can absorb before one of them lands somewhere that cannot be managed at the diplomatic level. See Russia striking into a Polish field on July 29, the war is getting bigger and the catalyst was lit months ago.

The participants are still, for now, choosing their targets and there are some checks and balances still in the balance of things. The worry is the moment the map starts choosing for them. Damietta is a long way from Hormuz. On July 29 that stopped being a comfort for the El Sisi administration.