By admin 
When the United States was looking for a way to talk to Iran about a nuclear deal more than a decade ago, it turned to Oman, asking the country to do something it had quietly done for years: make an impossible conversation possible. Because Washington and Tehran had no diplomatic relations, the U.S. felt that the most promising back channel to get a conversation started led through Muscat.
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Iran was skeptical but willing to sit down with U.S. officials, provided there was some very particular diplomatic choreography. At Tehran’s request, Oman’s government found a room with multiple doors, so that American and Iranian officials would not be seen entering together. Omani officials took the head of the table, to create the impression that it was more than a bilateral conversation.
That session laid the groundwork for what ultimately became the 2015 nuclear pact. “Without Oman, I’m not sure there would be an Iran nuclear deal,” Jake Sullivan, one of the top U.S. officials involved in those talks, told me.
But today, that pact lies in ruins. President Trump tore it up, then went to war with Iran. Oman has watched its standing with Washington collapse too. Earlier this week, Trump threatened to “bomb the shit” out of the sultanate unless it did what America demanded—adding another longtime ally to the list of countries he has threatened to attack.
Oman, located on the southeastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, is often overshadowed by its wealthier, more conspicuous neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and by its more tumultuous neighbor, Yemen. Yet for decades, Oman punched above its weight diplomatically by serving as one of Washington’s most useful interlocutors in the Middle East, in part because it has maintained relationships with governments that Washington often cannot or will not talk to.
Trump has accused the sultanate of undermining his efforts to strike a deal with Iran and end the war, which began at the end of February and are now in a stalemate. The Strait of Hormuz, which is central to the conflict with Tehran, is also at the center of Washington’s dispute with Oman. The maritime corridor used to carry one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied-natural-gas supplies before the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran began and Tehran closed the strait to traffic through drone, small-boat, and mine attacks. Trump responded with a U.S. blockade, which remains in place even though the deadline for Washington and Tehran to reach an interim deal and set the stage for broader talks over Iran’s nuclear program expired earlier this week, showing no sign of a breakthrough.
Oman and Iran border opposite sides of the strait; their respective territorial waters meet in the 21-mile-wide choke point. The two countries have been in talks in recent weeks to restore commercial shipping, which has dwindled to a trickle. Both countries have floated the idea of a service fee for passage through the strait, but other Gulf nations have objected. Trump has wavered on the issue, though Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said that the strait must return to being an open and free waterway. Trump has vowed to declare the strait a U.S. territory. He recently claimed that the strait was reopened and that mines and other hazards have been cleared. Shipping trackers continue to show a rate of passage dramatically below prewar levels.
Omani officials insist that charging for passage is within the country’s legal rights. When asked on Monday in the Oval Office whether he was out of patience with Oman, Trump told reporters: “No, I don’t think they behaved very well, but we’d handle them very easily, just like we do other things.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has separately threatened Oman with sanctions if Muscat facilitates fees for ships passing through the strait.
A U.S. official familiar with the deliberations told me that the administration views Oman’s handling of the negotiations as “dishonorable,” accusing Omani intermediaries of publicly portraying the two sides as nearing an agreement while privately conveying proposals to U.S. officials that the latter viewed as unacceptable. The official also accused Oman of delivering false statements to the press, which Omani officials deny. But this much is clear: The role that Oman used to play for Washington as a useful regional intermediary is over—at least as long as Trump remains in office.
The president’s anger presents an unusually awkward problem for Washington and for Muscat. Oman is not some distant neutral country that wandered into an American dispute. It has spent decades deliberately cultivating its relationship with Washington.
“Oman has decided its strategic importance is to be nonaligned the way Switzerland is nonaligned,” Jon Alterman, the chair in global security and geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “It’s a relatively small, relatively poor place, surrounded by giants, and Oman has decided it will make itself indispensable to everyone—not because it helps everybody, but because it’s a place that can keep a secret and allows people to meet quietly and resolve conflicts.”
Modern diplomatic relations between the United States and Oman date to 1972, but their history goes back much further. In 1833, President Andrew Jackson’s administration signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with Oman, then an important maritime power, as Washington sought to expand commercial ties in the region and protect American merchants operating in the Indian Ocean. An American consulate operated in Muscat from 1880 to 1915. In 1980, after the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Oman became the first Persian Gulf state to officially grant the U.S. access to its military facilities.
Oman doesn’t host a large, permanent American base like the Al Udeid Air Base, near Doha, the capital of Qatar. But Washington does have access to Omani military facilities and ports. In 2019, the two countries expanded that arrangement to include Duqm and Salalah, two key ports on the Arabian Sea, allowing American ships to operate and resupply outside the Gulf before entering the Strait of Hormuz.
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Oman has also spent decades pursuing a foreign policy designed to maintain relationships across the region’s fault lines. It has good relations with Iran, maintains a security partnership with the United States, and has kept channels open to the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia in Yemen. It has also maintained contact with Israel.
This is often described as Omani “neutrality,” though some of the sultanate’s regional neighbors believe that it favors Tehran. That has sometimes put Oman at odds with its fellow Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which view Iran as a major regional security threat. Oman declined to join the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in 2015 and stayed out of the 2017 regional blockade of Qatar. Muscat also maintained channels to the Houthis, whom Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have long battled. One Saudi official I spoke with offered a skeptical assessment: “Oman’s definition of neutrality has been questionable.”
Oman rejects the idea that its connections to Iran, including its economic relationship with and ties to the Houthis, amount to complicity. Instead, it casts its ties as a relationship of economic and regional importance. Oman serves as an economic lifeline and reexport hub for Iran, absorbing trade activity that previously passed through the UAE. (The UAE announced this week that it is stopping all trade and financial transactions with Tehran.) Iran, meanwhile, supplies Oman with agricultural products and heavy materials.
A senior Omani diplomat I spoke with described neutrality as a practical necessity for a small state surrounded by larger powers. Oman, the official argued, gets criticized from all sides. “The Iranians will tell us, You’re being too soft on the West,” the official told me, while Western governments accuse Oman of being too soft on Iran. “And the Houthis will tell us we’re being too nice to the Saudis, and the Saudis will tell us we’re being too nice to the Houthis. It just goes with the territory.”
But Oman’s independence—its ability to talk to all sides, even if it irritates the others—is precisely what has made Muscat useful to successive American administrations.
Oman’s record as an intermediary is unusually long. The country has helped secure the release of American detainees held by Iran. It has also facilitated contacts involving Yemen. In early 2013, a small group of senior American officials quietly boarded a military plane bound for Oman. For years, John Kerry had been nurturing a diplomatic channel with Muscat, meeting secretly with Omani officials while he was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in hope of opening back-channel talks with Iran. As President Obama’s secretary of state, he gave the green light to dispatch top foreign-policy officials to Muscat, including then–Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Sullivan, who was serving as national security adviser to then–Vice President Biden.
Those talks helped form the basis for the 2013 interim nuclear agreement and, eventually, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. During the Biden administration, Muscat hosted the U.S. special envoy for Yemen, Tim Lenderking, and brokered his first direct contacts and message exchanges with Houthi representatives. Oman “wanted peace in Yemen, and they were willing to travel to Sanaa to meet with the Houthis and pass messages to Houthi leadership and exert their influence where they could to help us achieve a durable peace,” Lenderking, who is now a principal at the Washington-based law firm Squire Patton Boggs, told me. In 2025, the Trump administration again turned to Oman to host negotiations with Iran. Trump subsequently thanked Sultan Haitham bin Tariq, the country’s leader, for Oman’s role.
In addition to serving as an intermediary, Oman offers Washington military access and a stable partner near one of the world’s most important maritime choke points; Oman gets a powerful security partner while preserving the freedom to maintain its own relationships. But that bargain hinges on Oman’s independence.
Analysts told me that this is why the current rupture matters. If the U.S. wants Oman to function as an intermediary, it cannot simultaneously demand that Muscat adopt Washington’s preferred position toward Iran. The very quality that makes Oman useful—the ability to talk to everyone—can look like disloyalty.
That old paradox has now become a crisis. Oman says that it is trying to fulfill its obligations under international law and keep commercial shipping moving, including through Omani territorial waters. The Omani diplomat told me that the country’s lawyers believe that maritime fees can be lawful under international practice and that Oman has no intention of doing anything illegal.
Trump and his negotiators see the issue differently, particularly where any arrangement could give Iran greater control over shipping or legitimize Iranian fees in what Tehran could portray as a victory over its much more powerful nemesis. Other nations have stepped in to play crucial mediating roles in this conflict, thus far to no avail. But Muscat remains one of the few doors available to American negotiators. The difficult question now is whether Trump’s threats will finally slam it shut.
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