New Delhi, June 8 -- The phone call from Washington came first. Then the missiles.

a conflict that President Donald Trump once promised would end fast, launched on February 28 when the United States and Israel killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian military leadership in coordinated strikes. The anniversary arrived not with a peace agreement or a Strait of Hormuz reopened to international shipping, but with air-raid sirens across Israel, a second wave of Iranian ballistic missiles, and an Israeli counterstrike on an Iranian petrochemical facility that Trump had privately asked Benjamin Netanyahu not to execute.

The sequence matters more than any single strike. According to a senior U.S. official cited by CNN, Tr...