On Wednesday afternoon, at a White House cabinet meeting, a reporter asked Donald Trump a straightforward question. Would he accept a short-term arrangement allowing Iran and Oman to jointly manage shipping through the Strait of Hormuz?
There was no simple answer to Trump’s question. “No one will be in charge of it,” he said. It’s international waters and Oman will act like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up.
Oman; A nation with a population of 5.3 million, a US partner for more than 200 years. A state with no American troops stationed there, that remained neutral during the Iran war, that took Iranian drone attacks on its commercial port in the early days of the war, and which has been one of Washington’s best back-channel avenues to Tehran for the past three months. A nation where Trump’s own family has a business stake, namely a Trump-branded golf resort.
At first, there was some confusion that perhaps Trump had mispronounced “Oman,” and meant “Iran. The State Department then shared the transcript on social media, in which the name of Oman was prominently featured. This is no accident. It wasn’t a policy statement, but it was a statement, and the State Department decided to overplay it.
Muscat has been a silent reaction. Iran’s Foreign Ministry showed solidarity with Oman. Fox News anchor John Roberts, who was on live TV during the cabinet meeting, told viewers he was “not quite sure what that was all about. It was the logic of a mafia chief, critics said. A rights group said the UN Charter bans threats to force against any state and that the U.S. is just as obligated as any other.
So, it is on day eighty-eight of the Iran war. There is a ceasefire in principle, missiles are still flying, negotiations have stalled. And the American president has just threatened to bomb his own ally.
Oman and the Strait: Why This Small Country Is at the Center of Everything
In order to appreciate why Trump’s threat is significant — and why it shows something about the extent to which the situation in the Strait of Hormuz has spiralled out of control, you need to know what the Strait of Hormuz is and what Oman has to do with it.
The narrowest point of the Strait is around 21 miles wide. Those 21 miles carry about 20 percent of the world’s oil and a large amount of liquefied natural gas. No other path exists to scale for Gulf energy exports. The closure of the Strait following the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28 was the biggest supply disruption in the history of the world’s oil market, according to the International Energy Agency. It’s not hyperbole. The Strait is truly irreplaceable at these volumes.
What makes Oman’s situation so complicated? The Strait is located in the territorial waters of two countries: Iran in the north and Oman in the south. It’s not, as Trump claimed, “purely international waters. The shipping lanes of the vessels traverse both countries’ territorial seas. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea provides for the right of ships to pass through international straits, such as the Strait of Hormuz, but this does not imply that the bordering states have no legitimate interest in what is going on in their waters. That is, it is not possible to obstruct innocent passage.
Iran has been doing just as it did since March 4, not calling it a blockade but a “toll system,” asking fees that it dubs “services” for boats passing through waters it considers its own. The legal argument is weak. International maritime law prohibits countries from imposing tolls for ships transiting through natural straits even if a portion of the straits is in their territorial waters. In reality, however, Iran has been using its military to enforce the closure and no international organization has succeeded in forcing it to halt.
Oman’s role in this arrangement is both geographic, diplomatic and strategic. From a geographical point of view, its territorial waters cover the southern half of shipping lanes. It is the only Gulf state that Iran can trust and the one that has been the most reliable link between Tehran and Washington in the past. But on the strategic side, any long-term deal to reopen the Strait is likely to include Oman’s approval, since Iran is not likely to give the waterway back to the US Navy without a face-saving deal with a neutral party.
The MOU That “Never Existed” and What It Actually Tells Us
Iranian state television said on Wednesday Tehran and Muscat were near an agreement in which they would jointly oversee passage through the Strait of Hormuz, with ships paying fees as “services” rather than “tolls” to abide by international law. The Trump administration stated this report was a “total fabrication.
The White House may not have wanted to admit the report was more accurate than Trump’s threat to obliterate Oman. Think about it. If the Iranian state television report was genuinely fabricated, the appropriate response is to say so and move on. You don’t threaten to bomb a 200-year ally because of a made up news story. When you’re worried that what the story says could be true, or could be true soon, and you don’t want it to happen, you threaten to bomb a 200-year ally.
Analysts say Washington is trying to stop Oman from taking some action that would be dramatic and provocative. It’s Oman doing something private, legal, face-saving, that permanently legitimizes Iranian control of the Strait, under another name. A system in which Iran and Oman cooperate on the passage and collect fees in the form of “service charges” would make what is now a temporary act of war into a fact of administration. The Strait would not actually be closed. Ships could pass. Iran would be able to collect revenue. The basic idea of metering and monetizing the world’s most vital maritime chokepoint would be quietly set in place, in the name of an Omani partnership that would grant Iran Arab legitimacy.
The threat was meant to be avoided. As one analyst stated, “What Washington is trying to avoid is the ‘normalization’ of Iranian control over Hormuz, cloaked in administrative and legal terms and enjoying Arab cover by a US ally.” Threatening a small ally is also a message to the entire Gulf: Don’t give Iran cover.
Oman Said Peace Was Within Reach, The Day Before the Bombs Fell
There’s something in this story that needs more attention than it’s getting: It tells us something about how the Iran war started and what it’s cost us in the diplomatic arena.
Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi met with JD Vance in Washington on Feb. 27, 2026, the day prior to the US and Israel’s attack on Iran. Following the meeting, Albusaidi made the following public statements: “The nuclear negotiations have yielded creative and constructive ideas and proposals” and that progress was “unprecedented. He said, “Peace is within reach.
Several hours later, Trump declared that the U.S. had “a feeling” Iran was to be the first to attack, and thus struck Iran. The strikes took the life of Supreme Leader Khamenei and started the war which is in its eighty-eighth day. Albusaidi pushed back. Iran had not been an imminent threat, he said. Significant progress had been made. There was a diplomatic track.
Three months later, the same Trump administration that started a war while negotiations were underway and Oman was the pivotal player involved in these negotiations is threatening to bomb Oman for allegedly trying to help end the war. This consistency issue here is not subtle. Oman was helpful in a diplomatic process that the US has since walked away from. Now, Oman is a threat because it’s enabling another diplomatic process that the US is not in control of.
What the Abraham Accords Demand Reveals About the Stalled Negotiations
The stalled negotiations are clearly revealed by What the Abraham Accords Demand.
Trump’s threat to Oman did not come out of the blue. In the same cabinet session, he restated his demand for the Arab nations to sign the Abraham Accords normalisation agreement with Israel as part of any deal on an Iran ceasefire.
This is a major increase of demands. The initial Abraham Accords were between the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, none of which have land borders with Israel and none of which have the domestic political constraints that exist in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan. Nearly everyone agrees that Saudi Arabia will not agree to normalizing relations with Israel unless there is a viable path to a Palestinian state, which Israel has repeatedly denied. Normalization with Israel is virtually impossible in Pakistan given its internal political dynamics irrespective of what Washington can offer in return.
Linking the Iran ceasefire to the expansion of the Abraham Accords is either a negotiating tactic designed to achieve maximum concessions, or a tactic to make a deal impossible while “appearing to negotiate in good faith. In either case, it is the reason why the Islamabad talks have failed to get off the ground and why the rounds of offers and counter-offers have failed to yield any results. The 10-point plan Iran has presented and the nuclear demands Washington has is not only at odds on the issue. They’re in completely different diplomatic worlds.
The Legal Fiction Trump Is Selling
Trump said the Strait of Hormuz is “international waters.” It is not, at least not entirely.
The shipping lanes run through Iranian and Omani territorial waters. Transit passage rights under UNCLOS apply, meaning ships have the right to pass through without interference, but the bordering states have legitimate regulatory interests in their territorial seas. Iran’s charging of tolls violates the prohibition on charging for transit through natural straits. But Iran’s broader assertion of sovereignty over waters that are genuinely within its territorial sea is not as legally baseless as the “international waters” framing suggests.
This legal ambiguity is precisely what the proposed Iran-Oman arrangement was designed to exploit. By framing toll payments as service fees and involving Oman as a co-administrator, Iran would be constructing a legal and diplomatic architecture around its de facto control of the Strait that is considerably harder to challenge than a naked military blockade. Washington understands this, which is why the response was not a legal brief but a threat to blow things up.
The UN Charter issue cuts the other way. Raed Jarrar of the rights group DAWN noted that the Charter prohibits the threat of force against any state, and that the US is bound by that prohibition as much as anyone. Threatening to bomb Oman for participating in a diplomatic arrangement that Washington dislikes is not legally distinguishable, in principle, from the kind of coercive behavior the Charter was written to prevent. The fact that Washington invokes international law when it comes to transit passage rights and ignores it when it comes to threats against allied states is a contradiction that the rest of the world notices, even if Washington’s domestic political conversation rarely surfaces it.
Day 88: Here Is What the War Has Actually Produced
The Iran war is in its eighty-eighth day. A ceasefire technically exists. Military exchanges have continued throughout. Iran is still controlling the Strait of Hormuz passage and charging for it. The US is still enforcing a naval blockade of Iranian ports. Nuclear talks collapsed in April and have not resumed in any substantive form. The proposals being exchanged through Pakistan are far apart. Israel is still striking Lebanon and Netanyahu has declined to extend that ceasefire. Trump has linked the Iran settlement to Abraham Accords expansion that regional states say is impossible without Palestinian statehood.
And now the United States has threatened to bomb the one country in the Gulf that both sides of the conflict trust enough to talk to.
Oman’s value in this war has always been precisely its neutrality. It does not host American forces. It maintains working relationships with Iran. It has the diplomatic standing to carry messages that neither Washington nor Tehran can send directly. The 2015 JCPOA backchannel ran partly through Muscat. The nuclear talks that were progressing in February 2026 ran through Muscat. Whatever diplomatic off-ramp eventually ends this war will almost certainly need to pass through Muscat at some point.
Threatening Muscat, even carelessly, even as a cabinet meeting aside, damages the instrument that the resolution of this war depends on. It tells every government watching that the United States is prepared to coerce its own allies when they do things Washington does not like, regardless of how those things serve American interests in the medium term. And it signals to Iran that Washington’s approach to the Hormuz question is binary: open the Strait on American terms or face force, when the reality of the geography, the law, and the diplomatic situation is that no binary solution exists.
The Strait of Hormuz will not be resolved by threatening Oman. It will be resolved, if it is resolved, through an arrangement that gives Iran some face-saving administrative role in waters that genuinely are partly Iranian, that involves regional states in a way that provides legitimacy for Iran’s partial withdrawal from maximum control, and that reestablishes transit passage rights without requiring Tehran to simply capitulate to American demands. That is a complicated arrangement. It requires diplomatic patience and a willingness to let allies like Oman do what they are positioned to do.
Threatening to blow them up is not diplomacy. It is a confession that diplomacy has run out.
