Vice President JD Vance on Monday during a press briefing at The White House has declined to say that the current six-month military standoff with Iran is a “war. Vance said that “there is no active shooting” right now, but didn’t say if the fighting would end before the Nov. 3 voter-mandated congressional midterm elections.

The vice president’s comments came as Iran fired back at Kuwait and threatened to shoot down commercial shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz. Washington has a responsibility to carry out acts of war to protect commercial ships, Vance said, and imposing artificial deadlines for an end to the war is a matter of Tehran’s decision.

The long conflict has generated a series of political and economical problems for the administration, pushing up the domestic inflation and maintaining high fuel prices. There has also been some questioning about the way casualty figures are reported on the U.S. Department of Defense’s books, as wounded or dead servicemen who had been involved in a ceasefire that had broken down were recorded under the Overseas Operations column instead of the war column.

International benchmark Brent crude was stuck above $95 per barrel, significantly higher than pre-conflict levels, but administration officials said trade is basically back to normal. On recent days, American naval escorts were helping to move 15 million to 17 million barrels of oil through the waterway, as close as they are to pre-war levels, representatives of the U.S. Department of Energy and the vice president said.

But independent maritime monitoring groups say the level of shipping traffic is still well below pre-crisis averages of 130 transits a day. These continued interruptions have resulted in continued focus on shipping safety and non-compliance designations by Tehran and are an issue for global maritime authorities such as the International Maritime Organization as well.

The administration is still using a mix of economic pressure and deterrence, and is minimising the long-term geopolitical influence of the waterway. While regional actors are looking into a coordinated transit management structure through diplomatic channels over the next few years, officials at the U.S. Department of the Treasury believe planned bypass pipelines will substantially reduce the strait’s strategic significance within the next two years.