Yesterday was supposed to be a big deadline. Yesterday was 60 days from when Donald Trump signed the "Memorandum Of Understanding" with Iran, and was theoretically going to be when the final peace agreement between the two nations would be finalized. Needless to say, the deadline passed without this actually happening. The M.O.U. completely collapsed soon after it was agreed to, which made the deadline itself completely meaningless.

It was always a pie-in-the-sky deadline, it is worth noting. Even if the two countries had stuck to the agreement, it is highly doubtful that they would have been able to hammer out an agreement by now that covered all the topics it was supposed to -- not least of which was some sort of agreement on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the half-ton of highly enriched uranium it still possesses. It took Barack Obama over a year to get the Iranians to agree to a nuclear deal, after all (a deal that Trump famously ripped up in his first term, replacing it with absolutely nothing). So expecting a fully-fledged nuclear deal to appear inside of two months was always unrealistically optimistic.

America and Iran are now in a stalemate (or "quagmire," take your pick). Neither side is directly attacking the other at the moment, but Iran continues to fire upon ships in transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Donald Trump's hands are tied in a big way, both by the Gulf allies holding him back and by the U.S. military's dwindling supply of interceptor missiles (not to mention the problems the U.S. Navy is having). This is why Trump is not even threatening to rain down bombs upon Iran any more -- not that anyone would believe such bluster anyway, at this point (since Trump now has zero credibility on the matter after making so many previous empty threats).

Iran is content to sit and wait. They know full well that the American midterm elections are less than three months away, and if Trump suffers a big political loss then he will be in a much weaker negotiating position. The price of gasoline remains above four dollars a gallon nationwide in America, which could be the deciding factor in the midterms for many voters. So at this point Iran isn't even bothering to hold talks with Trump's team, because the longer the current situation continues the better, for them.

It is pretty plain to see that Iran has essentially won this war. They are going to emerge in a stronger position than they were before the war started, and the American military is now considering plans to abandon many military bases across the entire region (since they have been proven so vulnerable to Iranian missile and drone attacks). The Gulf states are getting more and more fed up with being attacked because they host American military bases, so even if the Pentagon doesn't pull forces back they may be kicked out at some point anyway. All of that is a big win for Iran and a big loss for the U.S., obviously.

Whenever a new deal is reached between the two countries, it will likely largely mirror the text of the M.O.U., since America already agreed to everything within it. And the M.O.U. was a very bad deal for America. Trump was so desperate to reach a ceasefire that he essentially gave away the store to get it to happen. The M.O.U. is almost entirely a list of Iranian demands, with only one notable exception. There is one lone paragraph about Iran's nuclear capabilities, but this paragraph doesn't concede anything -- it can be summed up as merely: "We'll talk about it."

None of Trump's other stated goals for starting this disastrous war of choice were even mentioned in the M.O.U. There's nothing in it about Iran's ballistic missile capabilities or their support of regional proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and quite obviously the regime change Trump was hoping for never happened either. That half-ton of highly-enriched uranium is exactly where it was before the war started, with no agreement in place about what is going to happen to it.

Iran is now going to try to exert control over the Strait of Hormuz, and together with Oman may start charging ships hefty fees to pass through unmolested. That is a new development -- one that simply wasn't true before the war began. And it will be seen as the most obvious reason why Iran won this war and we lost it.

Trump wanted a quick and painless operation -- one that took only days, preferably. He hedged this when asked by the media, and predicted that the war would be over within four to six weeks, at most. We are now more than six months in, and there is absolutely no end in sight. Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Trump to enter this war with wild predictions about how easy it would be and how quickly the Iranian regime would fall. None of them proved to be true.

The passing of the 60-day deadline is yet another dismal milestone in this disastrous war. Donald Trump quite obviously didn't have a clue what he was doing when he started the war. He brushed off any attempt by anyone with any expertise to explain to him what the consequences might be for America and the world. Now, Trump simply has no idea how to get out of it all. The one offramp -- the M.O.U., which was supposed to have produced a final peace deal by yesterday -- lies in tatters. Trump ran for office explicitly promising not to enter into "forever wars" in the Middle East, it's worth pointing out. But that is exactly what he did, and we're all paying the price for it.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant