The United States seemingly put aside the only proposal that could have ended a war that has already reshaped the economies of the Gulf and shaken up energy markets in Rotterdam to Yokohama seven months in, yet it has failed to make any noise about it. Tehran has again attempted to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and according to people who have listened to discussions with the president, he has rejected the idea, and told advisers privately that he believes American bombers will return to Iranian airspace after the November midterm elections.

Tehran has again pushed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and the Wall Street Journal quoted US officials as saying directly to people familiar with the deliberations that the president has rejected the idea, and that he expects American bombers to be back over Iranian airspace after the November midterm elections. In public, things are different; the same goes for the calculus.

Over the past few weeks Trump has repeatedly claimed that Iran is on its knees economically and that when voters make their voices heard it will come to him with a deal on his terms. In private, he doubts Tehran will ever come up with what Washington demands, and sees a resumption of strikes as more likely, regardless of what these diplomats can come up with this week in New York, he says.

Trump's wave of the proposal wasn't a small one. If the United States agreed to some conditions, then normal shipping could resume in the Persian Gulf port of Chabahar within seven days, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told reporters after the UN General Assembly. The conditions had been far-reaching: lift of the US naval blockade on Iranian ports, sanctions release on oil exports, and unfreeze of Iranian assets worth of at least twelve billion dollars.

Officials who spoke to the span of the ceasefire, mediated by Qatar, also revealed Tehran would also seek the extension of the ceasefire to fighting between its allies in Lebanon and Yemen. In a television interview, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian presented the offer as a return to the memorandum of understanding that both sides signed in Pakistan back in June, explaining that after Washington accepted to proceed based on that memorandum, the situation would simply return to where it was prior to the collapse.

The previous deal was short-lived, as Iran opened fire on commercial vessels in the strait it claimed had violated an approved shipping route within weeks. Since then, Tehran has demanded permission for ships to pass, a requirement it has enforced haphazardly and sometimes forcefully; America's forces have also struck Iranian coastal targets on a regular basis, in response.

The outcome has been a slow-motion economic blockade of one of the world's most important trade choke points. Some twenty-one percent of the world's daily output of oil and almost one-fifth of the world's liquefied natural gas flow through this passage between Iran and Oman, while the four largest customers on the receiving end–China, India, Japan, and South Korea–consume nearly seventy percent of all that passes. In Europe, on the other hand, the same area supplies about a third of its jet fuel.

The financial toll has been steep and is still being tallied. Brent crude, which was trading around $72 a barrel before the war in late February, surged to about $118 by the end of March following a shift in tanker rerouting and overnight increases in war-risk insurance premiums. Direct damage to infrastructure has been estimated at over sixty billion dollars in the energy sector, and lost trade and revenue will increase to over one hundred fifty billion dollars by some industry estimates.

However, since the peak, prices have settled because other escorts have been found and shipping traffic has partially returned to normal, and forecasters have reduced their full-year averages for Brent oil to the mid-eighty dollar range but credit analysts warn that if the violence resumed it would soon be back up again.

A key aspect of Washington's rejection is the timing. Iran is currently in economic difficulty, its currency severely weakened and its oil exports cut, but a top Iranian official told Reuters that Tehran will not back down on its nuclear program even if all other demands come true. The talks are stalled in part because of that one sentence, I'd say. An agreement that does not cut into the ability of Israel to break the program is a deal breaker for Israel, which has said that its goal when the war started alongside American strikes in February was to stop it.

The regional dimension continues to grow rather than shrink in size. Drones and missiles fired by Houthis, who are allied with Tehran, continue to fly towards Saudi Arabia, as the Saudi coalition has reported new interceptions targeting the Khamis Mushait area and Riyadh in the last day alone. In Iraq, pipeline sabotage by groups suspected to be linked to Iran has already temporarily taken Saudi crude off the market once.

In a remarkable move, Iran has even been briefing its historic rival in the Gulf on the safe-passage understanding it has separately negotiated with Oman, suggesting the pain of a closed strait may be bringing closer together the capitals of the region than any Washington-brokered agreement. France, meanwhile, is preparing a UN draft resolution to declare freedom of navigation through Hormuz, a move to internationalize a conflict that has thus far been dealt with almost exclusively as a bilateral struggle between Washington and Tehran.