When US and Iranian officials sit in separate rooms in Muscat, passing messages through Omani mediators, people in Iran do not wait for the communiqué. The quickest dispatch from Oman is never a carefully chosen diplomatic phrase. It is something more elemental — a shift in the atmosphere. And the atmosphere moves fast.

On 13th February, the USS Gerald R. Ford — the world’s largest aircraft carrier — received orders to leave the Caribbean and join the USS Abraham Lincoln already on station in the Middle East. In Washington, two carrier strike groups read as posture. In Tehran, the same fact lands as cost. A shopkeeper does not need a policy memo to know what a tougher American line can mean. He reads signals the way farmers read clouds: not for trivia, but for survival. By the time the headline circulates, a supplier has revised a quote, a landlord has recalculated a lease and a family’s plan for next month has turned into a question mark.

This is not simply pressure. What I call “governance by weather” (GbW) is a condition in which a country’s daily decisions — and, over time, its institutions and social rhythms — organise around the shifting posture of one external power. Formal sovereignty remains on paper, but governing turns into forecasting.

Weather, climate and the threshold

Every state governs under constraints it did not choose. In international relations, those constraints form a kind of climate — the durable backdrop of great-power dynamics, multilateral rules, market forces — that all states share. Climate is slow, structural, multi-sourced. Weather is something else: volatile, concentrated, daily. GbW describes the threshold at which one outside actor becomes the dominant source of day-to-day uncertainty across trade, finance, technology, housing and social life — and the pattern persists not for an episode but for decades. When that happens, the weather effectively becomes the climate for the society living under it, even as the rest of the world experiences only normal atmospheric variation.

The key is not alignment. Governance by weather can grow from antagonism. A state can define itself against an outside power and still make distance from that power the organising principle of budgets, narratives and timetables. A sovereignty that must be narrated........

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