Now consider what the bulls tend to skip over. Michael Field, Morningstar's European market strategist, has pushed back directly on the framing that Europe is outperforming at all this year, arguing that the "international stocks beating the US" narrative is mostly an emerging-markets story, and that Europe specifically remains the laggard once you strip out that distortion, still trailing an AI-driven US market on a fundamentals basis.
More importantly, look at what actually happened the last time this war was hot rather than dormant. Back in April, at the peak of the acute fighting, JPMorgan's own data showed European and Japanese equities trading well below their pre-conflict levels even as the S&P 500 and emerging markets staged a much faster recovery. Europe was not insulated then. It was, if anything, more exposed, precisely because of its energy dependence and its proximity to a conflict that was actively closing the Strait of Hormuz and pushing Brent above $140.