Donald Trump appeared to threaten Oman with military action on Wednesday, warning that the Gulf state — a long-standing American ally that has served as a back-channel between Washington and Tehran for decades — would “behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up,” Al Jazeera reported, amid frustration over the slow pace of US-Iran negotiations. Trump separately said the United States was “not satisfied” with the state of talks with Iran and that he believed Tehran wanted a deal but that terms remained unresolved, the BBC reported. At the same time, financial markets rallied on hopes that an imminent agreement could reopen the Strait of Hormuz and ease the deep global economic uncertainty that has accumulated since the conflict’s onset, Al Jazeera’s market analysis noted. Trump also made clear he would not permit Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz under any deal’s terms, regardless of other concessions.
The received wisdom
The dominant reading of Trump’s Oman threat is that it represents dangerous impulsivity — a president treating a loyal, moderate Gulf ally as an obstacle to be bulldozed rather than a partner to be cultivated, in pursuit of a transactional deal whose terms remain unclear. Critics across the foreign policy establishment argue that threatening Oman, of all countries, undermines the very diplomatic infrastructure that made indirect US-Iran communication possible since at least the 1980s. Oman has hosted back-channel talks between Washington and Tehran through multiple administrations — Republican and Democratic — precisely because of its reputation for neutral facilitation. To threaten it publicly, this argument runs, is to destroy the plumbing through which any deal must flow. Progressive analysts and Biden-era diplomats would add that the Trump approach — maximum pressure, erratic threats, transactional deal-making — already failed once, between 2018 and 2020, producing Iranian nuclear acceleration rather than capitulation. The markets may be rallying on deal hopes, but markets have been wrong about geopolitical resolution before.
A different read
The frustration with this critique is not that it is factually wrong — Oman’s role is precisely as described, and the threat was almost certainly counterproductive — but that it implicitly treats the alternative of patient multilateral diplomacy as reliably effective, when the recent historical record suggests otherwise. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Obama-era nuclear deal that Trump abandoned in 2018, did not resolve the underlying question of Iranian regional power projection, Hezbollah’s armament, or Tehran’s missile programme. It froze enrichment activities in exchange for sanctions relief, but left all of the structural drivers of Middle Eastern instability intact. By the time Biden rejoined talks in 2021, Iran had used the intervening years to enrich uranium to levels far beyond JCPOA limits and to deepen its proxy networks from Lebanon to Yemen.
The more analytically interesting question is not whether Trump’s approach is reckless — it plainly is, by any conventional diplomatic standard — but whether conventional diplomatic standards have been adequate to the problem. The Strait of Hormuz question is genuinely different from the 2015 nuclear talks because it implicates global energy flows in an immediate and tangible way. Energy bills in Britain have been raised by £221 per year, the BBC reported, directly attributable to the disruption of supply chains through the Strait. That is the kind of cost that concentrates minds and creates genuine pressure — not just on Iran but on all parties — to reach a resolution.
The Oman threat, read through a less emotionally satisfying but more geopolitically realistic lens, may be an expression of genuine frustration that Oman’s facilitation has not produced movement toward a framework that Trump finds acceptable. Oman has traditionally favoured process over outcome, dialogue over deadlines — which makes it useful as a channel but potentially frustrating to a president who is running out of patience. The question is what “not in control of the Strait” actually means in operational terms. Iran does not formally “control” the Strait now; it can harass, mine, and threaten shipping. Any deal that doesn’t address that physical threat, however it is structured, leaves the economic disruption in place.
The historical parallel worth invoking here is not 2018 but 1987: during the Iran-Iraq War, the Reagan administration “reflagged” Kuwaiti tankers under American colours and deployed the US Navy to protect Hormuz shipping — not through diplomacy but through a demonstration of willingness to use force. That operation, known as Earnest Will, eventually contributed to a ceasefire by convincing Tehran that continued Tanker War tactics would produce direct US military involvement it could not sustain. The lesson is not that threats work — they can easily backfire — but that in a part of the world where leverage is measured in credibility, pure process-management has its own costs.
What to watch
- Whether Oman formally protests the threat through diplomatic channels or quietly absorbs it and continues facilitation — the latter would suggest Muscat calculates the relationship is too valuable to sacrifice over rhetoric.
- Watch for an Iranian response to Trump’s “no one controls Hormuz” statement: if Tehran interprets it as a hardening of US terms, talks may stall formally.
- The oil price reaction will be the most immediate signal: a sustained fall would indicate markets believe a deal is imminent; a spike would suggest the threat has damaged the diplomatic track.
- Whether moderate Republican senators — who have historically been Iran-deal sceptics but Oman-relationship protectors — push back on the Oman threat through formal statements or letters.
— J