Still, the diplomatic opening helped keep oil prices near two-week lows. Brent crude LCOc1 hovered around $100 a barrel after surging earlier this month when Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis launched a major offensive, threatening traffic through the Red Sea, an alternative Saudi export route.
The war, launched by Trump in February alongside Israel as "Operation Epic Fury", has lasted nearly seven months, killing thousands of people, disrupting global energy supplies and spreading to other countries in the region — particularly to Lebanon and more recently to Yemen.
Trump repeated previous assertions that the war could end around the time of November's US midterm elections, though he has not explained why.
An interim agreement reached in June, signed by Trump and Pezeshkian, would have given Iran its main demands: lifting financial sanctions and unfreezing assets in return for talks on limiting its nuclear programme.
But that deal unravelled within weeks over shipping rules in the Strait of Hormuz, conduit for a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas before the war. Iran wants to exert control and collect fees from ships that use it, which Washington rejects.
In the latest reported attack in the strait, Britain's UKMTO maritime security agency said a cargo ship had been hit by projectiles, causing two casualties among the crew. The crew had been evacuated and the ship was on fire and adrift.
Despite near-daily attacks, traffic through the strait has picked up in recent weeks. Oil producers pay shipping companies fees of as much as a quarter of a cargo's value to take the wartime risk of sailing through the strait with transponders switched off, before transfering crude to other vessels on the far side.
Exports from the United Arab Emirates have already recovered to pre-war levels, and Saudi Arabia has sold 60 million barrels of Gulf oil for both this month and next, to be delivered beyond the strait off the coast of Oman.
Nevertheless, a third of Gulf oil is estimated to be missing from global supplies. Shortages have particularly hit refined products such as diesel, causing inflation, pushing up interest rates and hurting Trump's Republicans ahead of the elections.
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