For a few days late last month, Donald Trump seriously considered a move that he has been trying to avoid for his second term: a resumption of war with Iran. The president met with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine to discuss "what options are there to finish the job on Tehran," according to the Wall Street Journal. He declined to do so. Trump, for now, remains determined to follow the diplomatic path set by his own administration four and a half months after American and Israeli warplanes attacked Iran on Feb. 28, and he has quietly let aides know that the Aug. 18 deadline for a permanent nuclear deal isn't set in stone. He will allow them more room to maneuver if they require it.

That one move a move, seemingly small, in itself is more eloquent than almost anything said publicly in Washington, Tehran and Jerusalem in the last week about where this conflict really is. It confirms what the administration's early rhetoric indicated it didn't: that the war was not over in February and March. It shows that Iran, though highly damaged, still had enough leverage after the battle to make Washington think that further strikes would be more of a burden than benefit. But it also makes it clear that the tenuous June 17 memorandum of understanding is not one the White House is ready to abandon just yet though few observers of the situation believe it's running its intended course.

The process of the ongoing conflict is almost routine, especially given the consequences. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner flew to Doha this week to meet with Qatari mediators, who've facilitated almost all substantive Washington-Tehran meetings since April. Trump told reporters in advance that Iran has requested an “upper level” meeting. Both Qatar and Iran have said flatly that such a meeting was not on the agenda. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei was even more adamant, stating there will be no talks with the American side in the coming days "at any level. The other two parties in the room also gave a different account of what happened, and this was the second time in 10 days that Trump's public framing of the talks and their own starkly contradiction a tactic that has become almost second nature for this negotiator and that has traders, allies and Trump's own domestic critics all equally unsettled.

What both sides do agree upon, however, is the deconfliction channel between IRGC officials and US Central Command, which a White House official told the Journal was already in use between the two militaries to prevent a spark of shooting from fanning out. This is a significant channel, far more than its bureaucratic name implies. Now, it is the plumbing that has prevented a fragile ceasefire from unraveling following rounds of tit-for-tat strikes since the memorandum was signed, such as a weekend exchange just days ago that included Iranian drones and missiles targeting Kuwait and Bahrain, and American and Israeli strikes against Iranian targets. A working relationship between the U.S. military and a group Washington calls a foreign terrorist organization is an awkward but revealing sign of how shaky the peace is.

Iran has become more confrontational, not more accommodating. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the country's parliament and now the highest ranking political and military official still alive after the killing of former negotiator Ali Larijani earlier this year, said this week that Iran was ready for dialogue, “but if the dialogue is not fulfilled, we are also ready for war and will act accordingly.” He accompanied that warning with a statement designed to throw the whole American theory of leverage out the window: Iran has shipped over 40 million barrels of oil since Washington lifted its navel blockade of Iranian ports, compared with about zero for the 50 to 60 days it was in place. But whatever the validity of that number may be, the message was intended specifically for Washington and the Gulf states: "the maximum pressure approach of the blockade has only temporary effect and Iran has survived the sanctions more quickly than the sanctions have succeeded in tightening.

Ghalibaf also reiterated Iran's stance that sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz is shared between Iran and Oman and that the tolls imposed on ships after the sixty days grace period stipulated in the memorandum expire in mid-August will be Tehran's right. “It's not going to end in a world where the Iranians are collecting tolls on the ships that pass through the Strait of Hormuz,” vice president JD Vance said flatly in a broadcast interview this week. The separation between those two positions isn't a technicality. About one-fifth of the world's seaborne oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas flows through that waterway, and the tug-of-war over who gets to charge for passage through it, in effect, is one over who controls one of the most momentous chokepoints in the global economy.

Tallies of the economic fallout of the past four months are still underway, and the totals are not meager. The disruption is the biggest supply shock in the oil market's history, according to the International Energy Agency. Before the conflict, brent crude oil was trading around $70 a barrel and, as Iran essentially blocked the strait, some 6.7 million bpd of production from the Gulf was stuck, reaching more than 10 million bpd of lost supply by mid-March. In Asia, diesel and jet fuel prices briefly hit $200 per barrel equivalent. Gas prices rose by more than a dollar a gallon at the pump in America, and in some places in California, they were over $6 a gallon. Pakistan urged its own cricket-crazy population to stay at home and watch the games on TV instead of using fuel to travel to stadiums. Despite the significant decline in prices since the signing of the memorandum, the World Bank's latest commodity outlook has Brent averaging in the mid-$80s for the year, far higher than the prices prior to the war.

That relief has been genuine but sporadic. Brent this week settled at about $73 a barrel, near the bottom of the six-year price range for the quarter and down by about a 25th of a dollar from the second quarter average, as the tanker traffic through the Hormuz Strait has resumed somewhat, while Iranian and Russian exports have reached levels that have some now talking about an emerging supply glut. But the news of Iran's refusal to accept direct talks in Doha was sufficient to push both the Brent and West Texas Intermediate prices up on Wednesday, and to remind oil markets how tightly they're tied to the on-again, off-again dance of negotiations. In the long run the harm is more serious than a price chart. Iraq's oil economy, which accounts for about nine-tenths of government revenue, experienced a decline in production in the southern part of the country of more than seventy percent at the height of the crisis. Gulf Cooperation Council countries, which depend on the strait for the majority of their food imports, were met with a similar crisis, with some markets reporting up to 120 percent increases in consumer prices before other air and land shipping routes were scrambled. The prices for the benchmark fuel nearly doubled, prompting the European Central Bank to postpone rate reductions and the UK inflation forecast to exceed five percent for the year, marking the highest rate since after the last major European energy shock.

In Washington, the price tag has migrated from the pump to the ledger. The Pentagon has quietly requested Congress approve about $80 billion largely for the cost of the military campaign against Iran in addition to a larger total defense request that would increase defense spending by nearly a half year over year. That's landing in a Congress where support for the war was never wholehearted, and is growing even more fragile as the midterm politics prompt more arguments against the war from the White House.

There is an interpretation of all of this that assumes that Trump was being "strategically patient": He didn't want to jump back into an expensive, unpopular war when it was already weeks since a ceasefire had taken effect, though imperfectly. Another version, more difficult to articulate in Washington but gaining traction among those who have closely followed the negotiation process, is that it's not patience, but that the campaign failed to deliver on its promises. Iran's nuclear facilities and missile arsenal were hit rather than destroyed. It did not have a regime collapse. Its negotiators, instead of giving in, wrangled an agreement that does not actually relax sanctions or freeze assets, but rather a memorandum that obligates Washington to ease restrictions and return frozen assets, while leaving Tehran's enrichment program, missile program and regional proxies on paper more or less untouched. In the interim period, Iran has been showcasing its ability to still shift oil, still harass shipping, and still take military punishment without flinching, which is exactly what a "maximum pressure" policy is supposed to prevent. For Israel, the memorandum never existed, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that its main elements have not been met, so it is watching a process it has no control over but it can't walk away from, either.

None of that makes war now out of the question for good. It is not as if Trump's own advisers do not still believe that occasional, limited strikes are an acceptable response to any future Iranian violations, and, indeed, the deconfliction channel is in place because both sides still assume it will be used again. But, for now, the arithmetic being done in the Oval Office has been put on a bet that a flawed, disputed and often-broken diplomatic process is still the better wager than returning to a war whose economic and political costs are already being felt from gas stations in California to budget hearings in the parliament in Washington, and whose military benefits four months into it have proved far less easily translated into a lasting settlement than the administration has promised.