At his Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, President Trump threatened to use military force against Oman — a US ally and the primary back-channel diplomatic link between Washington and Tehran — if it agreed to jointly manage the Strait of Hormuz with Iran. The remark has alarmed Gulf allies and exposed the precarious internal logic of the US negotiating position.
United States President Donald Trump has threatened to use military force against Oman if it collaborates with Iran to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz. At a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, a reporter asked Trump to weigh in on the idea of Oman and Iran overseeing trade on the strategic waterway, which handles more than 20% of the world’s oil traffic. Trump replied: “Nobody is going to control it. It’s international waters, and Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up.”
He then added, almost as an afterthought: “They understand that. They’ll be fine.”
The comment caused immediate alarm in diplomatic circles. Oman is not a peripheral actor in the current crisis. It is a US treaty partner, a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and — critically — one of the primary diplomatic conduits through which Washington and Tehran have been communicating throughout the war and ceasefire negotiations. Threatening Oman is, in a meaningful sense, threatening the infrastructure of the negotiations themselves.
What Triggered the Remark
Trump’s threat came after reports of talks between Iran and Oman about jointly charging a toll for ships passing through the crucial waterway. Tehran wants to persuade Oman, a US ally, to support a mechanism to collect tolls from vessels transiting through the strait, the Associated Press reported, citing a regional official.
“The strait is going to be open to everybody,” Trump declared. “Nobody’s going to control it. We’re going to watch over it. But nobody’s going to control it. That’s part of the negotiation that we have.”
The substance of Trump’s position — that the Strait of Hormuz should remain international waters under no single nation’s control — is defensible and consistent with longstanding US policy and international maritime law. The strait, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, is classified as an international strait subject to the right of transit passage, meaning that all ships and aircraft have the right to transit continuously and expeditiously through it.
Iran’s interest in establishing a toll or management mechanism over the strait would be a fundamental change to that legal framework — effectively converting an international passage into a managed waterway under Iranian or joint Iranian-Omani oversight. The US rejection of that concept is not unreasonable on legal or strategic grounds.
The problem is not the policy. It is the delivery.
Why Threatening Oman Is Diplomatically Self-Defeating
Oman occupies a unique position in Gulf geopolitics. Unlike its GCC partners Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait — all of which have been directly targeted by Iranian strikes during the current war — Oman has maintained studied neutrality. It has formal defence arrangements with the United States and the United Kingdom while simultaneously preserving working relationships with Iran that date back decades.
That neutrality is not weakness. It is a deliberately cultivated asset. Oman brokered the preliminary talks that led to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. It has served as a back-channel between Washington and Tehran in multiple administrations. The location of its territory — with Oman’s exclave of Musandam forming one of the two coastlines of the Strait of Hormuz — gives it a geographical stake in any arrangement governing the waterway.
Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi publicly said that a deal to avert the Iran war was “within our reach” as Trump ordered bombing to commence in February. Oman’s good offices have been part of the diplomatic scaffolding that has enabled the ceasefire process to proceed.
Threatening to bomb that scaffolding — even in a casual aside, even with an immediate qualification — is the kind of remark that reverberates through diplomatic channels in ways that a press briefing clarification does not fully undo. Gulf capitals watch what the US president says at Cabinet meetings. They draw conclusions about reliability. And those conclusions shape their willingness to continue cooperating with US diplomatic initiatives in a region where the United States is asking for a great deal of trust.
The Iran-Oman Toll Proposal: What Was Actually Being Discussed
The proposal that triggered Trump’s threat is worth examining carefully, because its emergence in Iranian state media and regional diplomatic channels reveals something about Tehran’s negotiating strategy.
The White House dismissed Iranian state media reports that “an initial, unofficial document” outlining a framework for an agreement would lift the US blockade of Iranian ports in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz while leaving it under joint Iranian-Omani control.
Iran’s interest in a toll or joint management mechanism is transparently strategic. A framework that gives Iran — or Iran and Oman jointly — formal oversight of the strait’s transit would represent a permanent change to the waterway’s legal and practical status. It would institutionalise Iranian leverage over global energy flows in a way that survives the end of the current conflict. For the US and its allies, that outcome would be worse than the pre-war status quo they are trying to restore.
The fact that the concept was floated through Iranian state media and regional channels — rather than in the formal negotiating track — suggests it may be as much a positioning move as a serious proposal: a way of establishing what Iran considers its minimum acceptable outcome and testing how the US responds.
Trump’s response — threatening to bomb the other party to the proposal — was more visible than a diplomatic rejection. Whether it was more effective is a different question.
What Gulf Allies Are Thinking
The broader audience for Trump’s Oman remarks is the collection of Gulf states that have endured Iranian strikes on their territory, hosted US forces at significant political and security cost, and invested their own diplomatic credibility in supporting the ceasefire process.
Kuwait, which intercepted an Iranian ballistic missile overnight, has borne particular costs. Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure was targeted by Iranian strikes. Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE have all had their airspace disrupted and their US-hosted facilities threatened.
These countries have a stake in the outcome of the US-Iran negotiations that is immediate and material. They want the strait reopened, the ceasefire to hold, and a framework to emerge that reduces the probability of a repeat of the past three months. They are watching every signal from Washington — including signals sent at Cabinet meetings — about whether the US is a reliable partner capable of managing the diplomatic process as well as the military one.
Analysts noted that “threatening to ‘blow up’ an Arab country because its waters happen to sit along an oil route Washington wants reopened is the same lawless logic that produced this war in February, and it is the clearest possible signal that any ceasefire this administration brokers will hold only until the next time the president loses his temper at a Cabinet meeting.”
That is a pointed critique. It reflects a concern that goes beyond the Oman remark specifically: that a negotiating process conducted through social media posts, Cabinet meeting asides, and public threats — however productive in generating Iranian responses — is inherently fragile, because the next improvised statement can undo whatever the last planned diplomatic move achieved.
What Happens Next
Oman has not responded publicly to Trump’s threat. The Omani government’s characteristic approach to such moments — studied silence, continued engagement, quiet communication through diplomatic channels — is likely to hold. Oman has absorbed more provocative moments in its diplomatic history and continued operating as a neutral facilitator.
The question is whether the combination of the Oman threat, the overnight Iranian missile strike on Kuwait, and the ongoing US strikes near Hormuz has produced a situation in which Saturday’s planned talks can proceed on schedule — and with enough mutual confidence on both sides to produce a breakthrough rather than another stalemate.
Trump’s remarks suggested that US and Iranian negotiators are not as close to a deal to end the 88-day war — in which US and Israeli forces have killed thousands of Iranians and global energy prices have soared — as the president has claimed.
The gap between Trump’s public optimism and the operational reality on the ground has been a consistent feature of the ceasefire period. The overnight exchange of strikes, culminating in an Iranian ballistic missile over Kuwait, suggests that gap remains wide.
LoudFact.com is an independent global news and explainer platform. This report is based on reporting from Al Jazeera, The Irish Times, Common Dreams, the Associated Press, and the Washington Post as of May 27-28, 2026.
