Greetings. I'm Simone Sanders Townsend, in for Stephanie Rule, and welcome to the nightcap.

The war in Iran is nearing the one-month mark, and tonight 12 U.S. service members were injured in an Iranian missile strike on a Saudi air base, that's according to a U.S. official.

And a U.S. Central Command has confirmed more than 300 troops have been wounded in action,

with around 90 percent returning to duty.

This all comes as thousands of American soldiers have been deployed to the region,

and the Pentagon is reportedly considering sending more.

Although Secretary of State Marker Rubio said U.S. objectives can be achieved without a ground

operation, the troop buildup provides options. Meanwhile, late today, the president appeared at an

investors' conference run by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and talked at length about the conflict.

We're negotiating now and be great if we could do something, but they have to open it up.

They have to open up the straight of Trump. I mean, harmless.

We don't call it a war. We call it a military operation. We're very disappointed, by the way, with NATO. They didn't come to our aid. I thought oil prices were going to go up higher than they are now. It's not finished yet. I'm not saying it's sort of finished, but it's not finished. It's got to be finished. And I thought that we would see a bigger drop in stock hasn't been that bad.

Not that bad? Okay. Today, all of the major index has closed in the red once again,

with the S&P 500 posting its fifth straight losing week. Crude oil prices hit their highest

level since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. And this afternoon,

the session high for both U.S. and international crude was north of $100 a barrel. Oh, and the

national average gas price is $1 higher today than it was one month ago. With that, let's bring in

our nightcap.

Peter Baker is here, Chief White House correspondent for the New York Times.

Veteran Washington correspondent John Harwood is here.

He's a distinguished fellow at Duke University and columnist for Zetao on substack.

Kevin Barron is with us, national security analysts and journalists who spent years reporting on defense, national security, and foreign affairs.

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