Now Trump and the Iranians find themselves in a familiar situation. The latter are once again facing US military attacks throughout their territory, highlighting their inability to defend their territorial sovereignty. With the blockade reimposed, their oil revenues – a lifeline for the Iranian regime – are once again cut off.

Meanwhile, Trump again faces the choice between escalation, which carries domestic economic and political costs, and settling for some kind of resolution that leaves a hostile Iranian regime in power.

“We’re back to where we were initially, where the question was: who has more patience?” said Elliot Abrams, senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Iranians, who will not be able to export oil, or the US and other countries that use oil from the Persian Gulf?”

After months of concern that the Iran war was triggering a new round of inflation that would crush popularity, Trump received good news Tuesday that consumer prices were falling.

A full resumption of hostilities, or even an escalation of the conflict, would inevitably send oil prices back to previous highs, jeopardizing that positive trend and once again putting Republicans in a fragile position ahead of November’s midterm congressional elections.

On Monday, after Trump’s Truth Social post, the price of a barrel of oil rose almost 10%, the largest one-day increase in six years.

The first time, Trump’s blockade helped pressure the Iranians to come to the negotiating table and set the table for the memorandum of understanding and a framework for a more lasting peace.

Now, according to Kelanid, the president’s influence over Iran may be diminished.

“He’s already proven the things he can do easily and credibly,” he said. “It can attack military targets, regime targets. It has done it before, and that didn’t cause Iran to surrender.”

The latest target Trump has suggested is Pickaxe Mountain, a heavily fortified nuclear research site south of Tehran. But there is conflicting evidence about the value of the site, or whether US airstrikes can cause significant damage to the tunnels lying deep beneath the granite rock.

If Trump’s latest moves ultimately end with another ceasefire and face-to-face talks, the underlying, difficult-to-reconcile disagreements – over Hormuz, over the disposition of Iran’s nuclear program, over Iran’s influence in the Middle East – persist.

“I think there is room here for negotiation on a Strait of Hormuz agreement,” Abrams said. “But not a return to the MOU.”

As the war nears its fifth month, Trump again noted Monday that other American conflicts – including the Vietnam War – dragged on for years.

That particular quagmire, however, hampered and ultimately ended Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency and damaged America’s global standing for at least a decade. That’s a fate Trump certainly hopes to avoid.

His supporters are also tired of repeating the kind of “forever wars” in the Middle East that Trump condemned in previous presidential campaigns.

But with the memorandum of understanding in tatters, the ceasefire ended and the prospect of further conflict on the horizon, the end of the Iran war appears no closer to a resolution than in the weeks after it began.