From ‘Indispensable’ Ally to Target of Annihilation
The Atlantic · LC · trust 20/100
The latest target of Trump’s ire is the low-profile Sultanate of Oman.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. August 21, 2026, 7 AM ET Share Save W hen 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.
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.
T he 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…
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