Donald Trump's June deadline in Versailles is over and the war that he's taken on hasn't gone anywhere. The memorandum he signed with Tehran was an interim agreement that gave both sides 60 days to forge a "permanent peace" and resolve the long-standing dispute over Iran's nuclear programme. That window has been dealt with on Monday. Since that day, the distance between Washington and Tehran has grown greater, with both sides, according to the most reliable independent sources, more distant from an agreement than ever.

Under the original June plan, this didn't happen. The 33km Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world's seaborne oil and gas has passed, was supposed to be reopened. It hasn't. The U.S. naval blockade of Iranian shipping was supposed to be lifted. It hasn't either. Rather, both sides have been blaming each other for the last two months, and the fighting which the memorandum was designed to halt has continued intermittently. A week after the contract was signed, Iranian armed forces started shelling tankers from another off-the-Omani-coast route designed by the U.S. military to circumvent Tehran's grip on the strait. Washington responded with new attacks. Iran retaliated by attacking U.S. allies that were hosting U.S. troops in the Gulf. The blockade has been ongoing since mid-July and Tehran has not employed it as a bargaining chip but as a negotiating chip.

The trouble point of contention is a provision in the original memorandum. It also provided Iran with a generic "facilitating" responsibility in the reopening of the strait, language so ambiguous that Tehran has interpreted as giving it the power to collect tolls and effectively to have unilaterally unilateral control over one of the world's busiest shipping lanes. In a statement earlier this month, Iran's national security chief, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, outlined the cost of compliance: an end to strikes not only in Iran, but against the country's allies in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, withdrawal of American forces from the region, compensation for the damage wrought by the war and the release of Iran's frozen assets. Later, Iran's foreign minister has said that there are no direct talks with Washington, but only with intermediaries. That's a much tougher stance than one Tehran was taking earlier in August, when its parallel discussions with Oman about the management of strait traffic seemed to be a technical agreement.

None of these is an appealing option for Trump. If Iran is accepted, it will effectively give Tehran control of this waterway that accounted for a fifth of the world's crude and gas exports prior to the war, and would appear to allies and rivals to be a victory after almost six months of fighting. Escalating means spending more of the advanced missile interceptors the Pentagon has stockpiled than it can keep pace with, and using them during midterm congressional elections this fall at exactly the time when Americans don't want to see the price of gas rise. The administration is reportedly considering additional sanctions that would be designed to bring Tehran back to the negotiating table, but at the same time insists, in public, that negotiations have not been halted.

The situation has been deadlocked in markets for weeks. The price of Brent crude has been in a range around the high eighties and low nineties per barrel over the past few weeks with a slight decline from a summer peak of nearly ninety-five, despite a rise of around a third from the price a year ago. The world is on the verge of its largest oil supply shortage in five years, the International Energy Agency said following almost six months of disruptions in oil flows through the Gulf. Already the International Monetary Fund has lowered its projection for global growth in the year to 3 percent from 3.5 percent and has blamed the war as one of the main causes. The knock-on effects haven't been limited to oil-producing areas. Fuel prices jumped in over 100 countries in the first three weeks of conflict, including more than half in some import dependent economies in the Southeast. Even a relatively limited quarterly closure of the strait would lead to well in excess of 0.5 per cent to headline American inflation this year, directly into the costs of fuel, fertiliser, electricity and grocery items, at a time when the Federal Reserve has little room to manoeuvre.

The diplomac of diplomacy does not completely cease. The Pakistani foreign ministry, which was instrumental in negotiating the original June Roadmap, has been the most prominent extra party in their attempt to revive the dialogue process, despite the missed deadline. The only clear sign of progress is from parallel talks Oman has had with Tehran regarding strait management, but Iranian officials have been cautious to call it a technical issue separate from any broader settlement. This wasn't fighting between Iran and the Gulf nations, but the war's outer rim continues to spread: Israeli air raids on Lebanon over the weekend claimed the lives of eleven, including one top Hezbollah official.

The result of six months of conflict, two missed deadlines is a typical dynamic in long-term Middle East crises, in which time is viewed as working for both sides, each side assumes that the other will eventually lose heart, and in the intervening years everyone is absorbing the pain of the stand-off. Pakistan's diplomats could continue to keep the phone lines open and Oman is still in a position to find a technical solution to the strait. Yet, a true settlement, in the sense of a "nous" as envisioned at Versailles, is as far away today as it was six weeks ago, and little in either capital's recent demeanour would suggest that the countdown is about to begin.