分类： politics

On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump issued an extraordinary public threat to militarily destroy Oman if the sultanate chooses to cooperate with Iran on a ship transit fee scheme for the Strait of Hormuz, a proposal Iran is pushing as part of any potential negotiated settlement to end the ongoing US-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic.

In his remarks, Trump asserted unchallenged open access to the strategic waterway, declaring, “The strait is going to be open to everybody. Nobody is going to control it…it’s international waters.” He doubled down on his aggression, adding, “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up.”

The geographic and legal position of Oman makes its cooperation a critical component of any Iranian plan to implement a transit fee. Alongside Iran, Oman is the only country that holds territorial waters spanning the narrow strait, a critical chokepoint for global oil and maritime trade. At its narrowest point, the Strait of Hormuz measures just 21 nautical miles across, and under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), coastal nations are permitted to claim territorial rights up to 12 nautical miles from their coasts. While UNCLOS explicitly bars nations bordering international straits from restricting transit or charging general tolls, legal experts interviewed by Middle East Eye note that Iran could structure charges as service or piloting fees – a workaround that would require Oman’s cooperation to move forward.

Earlier this month, Iranian ambassador to France Mohammad Amin-Nejad told Bloomberg that Tehran and Muscat were already developing a framework to advance such a plan as part of talks to end the war. Notably, the US is not a signatory to UNCLOS, despite frequently referencing international law of the sea norms to advance its own regional interests.

Oman has a long-standing reputation as one of the Persian Gulf region’s most reliable neutral mediators, a role that has put it directly at odds with the Trump administration’s war agenda. Before the June 2025 joint US-Israeli attack on Iran, Oman served as the primary backchannel interlocutor between Washington and Tehran, with negotiations scheduled to take place in Muscat that were ultimately overtaken by the offensive. Muscat also made a last-ditch mediation effort ahead of the February 28 US-Israeli strike that launched the full-scale war.

Unlike more vocal Gulf powers including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, Oman has long favored quiet diplomacy – but its leadership has broken with that tradition to openly criticize the conflict. On the eve of the initial attack, Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr bin Hamad Albusaidi made an urgent public appeal on CBS News for additional time for diplomatic talks to proceed. In March, Albusaidi penned a high-profile op-ed in *The Economist* warning that the US was putting its long-term regional standing at grave risk by continuing the war alongside Israel, writing bluntly that “America has lost control of its own foreign policy.” He later took to social media to refute the Trump administration’s core justification for the war, which frames Iran as an imminent threat to US and allied interests. “Whatever your view of Iran, this war is not of their making,” Albusaidi wrote.

Multiple current and former US officials have confirmed to Middle East Eye that the Trump administration has grown increasingly frustrated with Oman’s public anti-war messaging for months. This friction comes amid a shift in alignment among other Gulf powers: Middle East Eye was the first outlet to reveal that Saudi Arabia granted the US expanded military access, basing rights, and overflight permissions at the height of the conflict, a move later confirmed by Reuters and other outlets that also reported Saudi and UAE participation in US strikes against Iran.

While the US does not maintain permanent military bases in Oman as it does in Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, the US Navy holds a long-standing agreement for regular access to Omani infrastructure, specifically the strategic Port of Duqm on Oman’s southern coast. In recent weeks, Oman has stepped back from its mediation efforts, ceding public roles to Qatar, which leverages significant financial resources, and Pakistan, which brings regional military influence to the negotiating table.

The current tension between Washington and Muscat cuts against centuries of shared history and diplomatic ties. Oman has maintained balanced, open relations with both the US and Iran for decades, a unique regional position rooted in its long history as an independent maritime power. Unlike neighboring Gulf states such as the UAE and Qatar, which only gained independence in 1971, the Sultanate of Oman is a centuries-old state that once controlled a vast maritime empire stretching across the Indian Ocean to the east coast of Africa. Oman also shares the oldest continuous diplomatic and trade relationship with the US of any Gulf state, with formal ties dating back to 1790.

Like many other Gulf nations, Oman has also cultivated economic ties to the Trump family: the Trump Organization, led by the president’s adult children, holds a franchise agreement for a luxury hotel and golf course currently under development in the sultanate.

On Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly confirmed to reporters that easing harsh, decades-long sanctions on Iran is not on the table in ongoing negotiations aimed at ending active hostilities, reopening critical shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz, and rolling back Tehran’s nuclear program. This firm rejection comes as Iranian leadership has made the release of frozen Iranian assets a core confidence-building step — and in some framing, a non-negotiable precondition — for any meaningful progress in bilateral talks.

Last Monday, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and the country’s central bank governor traveled to Qatar to discuss unlocking $6 billion in Iranian funds that have been held in the Gulf state at Washington’s directive since September 2023. The high-level visit sparked quiet speculation of a potential breakthrough in the long-strained bilateral relationship. Iran has long argued that it is owed as much as $120 billion in its own oil revenue that has been frozen in foreign financial institutions by sweeping U.S. sanctions first imposed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The framework of U.S. sanctions on Iran has expanded dramatically in the decades since the revolution. The 1996 Iran Sanctions Act extended penalties to third-party entities doing business with Tehran and explicitly barred Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Starting in 2005, Washington added layer after layer of sanctions targeting individuals and firms accused of ties to terrorist activity. Beyond barring U.S. persons and entities from conducting business with Iran, these restrictions cut Tehran off from the U.S.-dominated global financial system, which operates primarily on U.S. dollars and relies on U.S.-backed transfer infrastructure such as SWIFT. For Iran, this has created a crippling cash shortage that has gutted the country’s economy.

Speaking during a White House cabinet meeting, Trump noted he remains unsatisfied with the current state of negotiations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was in attendance, told reporters that while there have been signs of incremental progress and mutual interest in a deal, it remains unclear whether meaningful movement will come in the coming hours and days. Echoing longstanding U.S. policy, Rubio emphasized that “the bottom line is Iran’s never going to have a nuclear weapon.”

Yet independent analysts argue that Trump’s maximalist negotiating position may be misaligned with the reality on the ground. Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, explained that for the Islamic Republic, simple regime survival already counts as a victory. “They have managed to repel an aggression by the mightiest military power in the world, that of the United States, and also the mightiest intelligence service in the world, that of Israel,” Vaez noted. He added that the conflict has given Iran a new deterrent tool: direct operational control over the Strait of Hormuz, a geographic advantage it had never deployed before the current war.

Trump reiterated that any final deal must prevent any single nation from exercising exclusive control over the strait — a critical global chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supplies pass. “We’ll watch over it, but nobody’s going to control it. That’s part of the negotiation that we have,” he said. The strait was first blocked by Iran to bar passage of U.S. and Israeli-linked vessels early in the conflict, before the U.S. Navy implemented a counter-blockade that halted most Iranian oil exports.

The president made a shocking, unanticipated threat on Wednesday, saying he would “blow up” Oman if the nation agreed to work with Iran to collect transit fees for ships passing through the strait as part of a peace deal. “The strait is going to be open to everybody,” Trump said. “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up,” he added.

Earlier the same day, Iranian state television reported that Tehran had received an unofficial draft framework for a memorandum of understanding with Washington. Under the proposed text, the U.S. would withdraw its military forces from the region and lift its naval blockade, in exchange for Tehran restoring commercial transit through the Strait of Hormuz to pre-war levels within 30 days. The draft would put Iran in charge of traffic management and shipping route oversight in coordination with Oman, and a final agreement reached within 60 days would be codified into a binding United Nations Security Council resolution, Iranian state TV claimed.

Ali Bagheri Kani, deputy secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told Iran’s Mehr News Agency on Wednesday that transit rules for the strait will “be completely different from the conditions before the conflict over Iran began.” The White House immediately pushed back against the Iranian report, dismissing any claim of a draft agreement as a “complete fabrication.”

Vaez added that any long-term non-aggression pact between Washington and Tehran will almost certainly require provisions to end Israel’s ongoing military assault on Lebanon, where Iran’s ally Hezbollah operates. “It’s very hard for the Iranians to throw Lebanon under the bus,” Vaez said. “So, at this point, including the conflict with Lebanon is important for the Iranians.”

For its part, Israel has made clear it prefers the continuation of hostilities in both Iran and Lebanon. “Israel, I think, is really hoping for no agreement,” Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, said during a recent panel discussion. “The last thing that Israel wants to see is an agreement between the US and Iran.”

Even as negotiations proceed, military hostilities have not paused entirely. On Monday, the U.S. launched what it described as “self-defence” strikes on Iranian missile sites, breaking the terms of a Pakistan-brokered ceasefire that has been in effect for weeks.

Looking ahead, it remains unclear how long Trump can sustain the ongoing conflict with Iran. The war has grown deeply unpopular with the American public, and it has driven global petrol prices to alarming new heights. Additionally, heavy consumption of critical U.S. weapons systems during the war, which began on February 28, has sparked widespread concern that the U.S. military lacks sufficient stockpiles to respond to a potential future conflict with China. Drawn-down inventories include long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, as well as Patriot and THAAD anti-missile and anti-drone interceptors.

In a report released Wednesday, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) warned that depleted weapons stockpiles have created a “window of vulnerability” for any potential conflict in the Western Pacific. The report also examined Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion 2027 defense budget, concluding that “the problem today isn’t money; it’s time” to replenish critical supplies.

Four months after former U.S. President Donald Trump launched his high-profile Gaza post-war reconstruction body dubbed the ‘Board of Peace’, the organization remains entirely devoid of major funding, trapped in overlapping legal and political uncertainty, according to an exclusive new report from the Financial Times published Wednesday.

The FT’s investigation builds on a previous exclusive report from Middle East Eye, which first uncovered that a senior U.S. official involved with the initiative traveled to Saudi Arabia back in April to pressure Riyadh to follow through on a previously announced $1 billion funding pledge to the board.

Multiple anonymous sources, one an Arab official and one a U.S. official, confirmed to Middle East Eye that Aryeh Lightstone — the top American official leading Gaza post-war planning for the board — held direct talks with Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan specifically to push for the long-promised donation to be transferred.

Trump first established the Board of Peace in October 2025, immediately after the U.S. brokered a ceasefire to end Israel’s year-long military campaign in Gaza. That conflict, which has left more than 72,800 Palestinians dead according to local health officials, has been formally recognized as a genocide by the United Nations, leading global human rights experts, and scores of world leaders.

When launching the initiative, Trump courted multi-billion-dollar donation pledges from wealthy Gulf Arab states and boasted that the organization would go down as one of the most impactful global bodies in modern history. But the FT’s reporting confirms that four months on, the dedicated World Bank-managed fund created for the board has yet to receive a single dollar in pledged contributions.

Instead of formal contributions through the transparent World Bank channel, the board has only secured small, direct donations sent to a separate JPMorgan Chase bank account. Critically, this off-book structure does not require the board to disclose any information about its donors or the source of funds to its 25 member states, a lack of transparency that has already sparked growing concern among international observers.

This secretive separate funding arrangement is expected to fuel renewed questions about hidden backers of the initiative, the influence unreported donors could exert over post-war Gaza policy, and potential conflicts of interest for U.S. and international officials assigned to work with the board.

Documents and on-the-ground reporting already confirm that as of late last year, Lightstone and his team of U.S. advisors were operating out of two luxury beachfront hotels in Tel Aviv — the iconic Kempinski and Hilton properties — while drafting their long-term plans for Gaza, at a time when the enclave remains under Israeli military occupation and widespread humanitarian crisis.

Among the most controversial plans drafted by the U.S. team is a proposal to redevelop Gaza into a specialized artificial intelligence technology hub and large-scale modern megacity. Critics across the global have widely condemned this proposal as a thinly veiled effort to carry out ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian population from their ancestral land.

In a November interview with The New York Times, Lightstone openly confirmed one core element of the plan: building segregated housing for thousands of ‘pre-vetted’ Palestinians that would be confined behind an Israeli military-controlled boundary known as the ‘yellow line’ in the occupied Gaza Strip.

To date, the board has only received small direct contributions to cover basic operating costs and staff salaries. Morocco has contributed $3 million, while the United Arab Emirates sent $20 million to fund the office of the board’s high representative, Nickolay Mladenov, and the team of Palestinian technocrats working under him.

While Trump retains the ceremonial title of head of the board, Mladenov — a former United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and currently a senior leader at the UAE’s Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy — serves as the body’s active top official leading post-war planning.

The FT also revealed that $100 million in UAE funding specifically earmarked for training a new Palestinian police force for post-occupation Gaza remains frozen, with no timeline for release.

Bishara Bahbah, the Palestinian-American businessman who mediated ceasefire talks between the U.S. and Hamas, described the board’s current financial standing to the outlet as ‘really dismal’. He confirmed the organization has not been able to launch any tangible development or reconstruction work inside Gaza whatsoever, noting that ‘there is a complete lack of any funding to enable them to execute anything on the ground’.

As Washington and Tehran work toward a potential peace agreement to end months of open conflict, former President Donald Trump has thrown a new, contentious requirement onto the negotiating table: any final deal must include commitments from regional Middle Eastern nations to join his Abraham Accords framework, normalizing their formal diplomatic relations with Israel. This unexpected demand comes against a backdrop of shifting strategic fortunes for the U.S. and Israel, which launched their joint military operation ‘Operation Epic Fury’ against Iran back in late February. Today, both nations find themselves in a weaker position militarily, strategically, and economically than they were on the eve of that offensive. The long-standing alliances Washington built with Persian Gulf states are now facing major reevaluation, as those partnerships failed to stop Iran from launching retaliatory attacks on Gulf territory. Meanwhile, despite months of devastating strikes that killed dozens of top Iranian political and military leaders, Iran emerges from the conflict with greater regional influence than it held before. Against this unsteady landscape, both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu face urgent domestic political pressures: both are seeking a symbolic, electorally appealing win ahead of key upcoming votes — the U.S. midterm elections and Israel’s Knesset vote, both scheduled for later this year. This political calculus is a core driver behind Trump’s push to resuscitate the Abraham Accords, a policy he has repeatedly highlighted as one of the signature foreign policy achievements of his first presidential term. Over the weekend, Trump held a series of phone calls with regional leaders from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan, where he made clear that their inclusion in any final Iran peace deal would be contingent on their full participation in the accords, a requirement that obligates them to formalize full diplomatic ties with Jerusalem. First conceptualized during Trump’s first term, the Abraham Accords were a set of U.S.-brokered diplomatic initiatives overseen by then-White House senior advisor Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. The framework was framed as a groundbreaking attempt to resolve the decades-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict and broader tensions between Arab states and Israel. The dispute over Palestinian statehood has cast a shadow over Arab politics since the founding of Israel and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and it remains the most politically salient issue for Arab public opinion today, even as many regional leaders have sought to distance themselves from the conflict in recent years. Over decades of U.S.-backed diplomatic outreach, Israel has gradually eroded collective Arab opposition to its presence in the occupied Palestinian territories, beginning with the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt and the 1994 agreement with Jordan, a process that accelerated with the 2020 launch of the Abraham Accords. In the lead-up to the 2020 accords, the Trump administration took a series of steps widely seen as pro-Israel concessions: it moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, shuttered the Palestine Liberation Organization’s official Washington office, and reversed long-standing U.S. policy by declaring that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were no longer considered illegal under international law. That same year, the administration launched its ‘Peace to Prosperity Plan’, which departed from decades of prior peace efforts by sidelining Palestinian demands for full statehood, instead promising economic development to the region in exchange for abandoning Palestinian statehood claims. The UAE and Bahrain became the first signatories to the Abraham Accords in September 2020, followed by Morocco in December 2020, Sudan in January 2021, and Kazakhstan in November 2025. In exchange for their recognition of Israel, the U.S. offered participating states significant incentives, including economic cooperation deals, advanced military hardware, and diplomatic concessions. For example, the UAE secured access to cutting-edge U.S. military technology, while the U.S. formally recognized Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over the Western Sahara. The long-held top priority for U.S. and Israeli negotiators has been securing Saudi Arabia’s signature on the accords. Many analysts believe this was a core motivating factor behind Hamas’ October 2023 attacks on Israel, as the group sought to derail ongoing normalization talks between Riyadh and Jerusalem. Since Israel’s full-scale retaliatory war in Gaza began, Saudi Arabia has remained a vocal international advocate for Palestinian statehood, and has publicly stated it will not join the Abraham Accords without ironclad international guarantees for Palestinian self-determination. Other major regional powers, including Pakistan, Qatar, and Turkey, also face massive domestic pressure from their populations, who overwhelmingly support Palestinian statehood, making participation in the accords politically toxic. For any of these nations to reverse course, the U.S. would need to offer unprecedented economic and security incentives while applying extreme diplomatic pressure. To date, Pakistan has already formally rejected Trump’s demand, and all indications suggest Saudi Arabia will do the same. As currently structured, the Abraham Accords remain far too politically unpopular across most of the region for leaders to entertain participation, even when tied to the critical goal of ending the Iran war. Despite these headwinds, Trump and Netanyahu show no signs of backing away from their push. For Netanyahu, securing new signatories to the accords would allow him to frame closer regional integration as a political win as his military continues its offensive against Hezbollah and its occupation and destruction of southern Lebanon. Even so, this would be a minor gain compared to his long-stated core goal of eliminating the Iranian threat to Israel, and it is unlikely to ease growing domestic backlash against his government from an increasingly overstretched Israeli military that is facing growing casualty and equipment losses. Expanded regional ties with Israel also will not reverse the rapid shift in regional public opinion that has turned sharply against Jerusalem in recent years, a shift that is even visible among portions of Trump’s own MAGA base in the U.S. For the Trump administration, a win on the Abraham Accords would help offset political damage from the costly Iran conflict, which has left U.S. weapons stockpiles severely depleted, fueled a global energy crisis that has stoked widespread domestic discontent in the U.S., eroded Gulf allies’ confidence in the U.S. security umbrella, and created friction with Netanyahu, who has openly opposed any peace deal with Iran. But as the Middle East undergoes a dramatic strategic reorientation, an increasing number of regional leaders view the Abraham Accords as a U.S.-imposed framework that prioritizes Washington and Jerusalem’s interests over regional needs. Many regional states are now pursuing their own independent initiatives to reshape regional security to their benefit. Most notably, Saudi Arabia has recently proposed a regional non-aggression pact that would include Iran, modeled on the Cold War-era Helsinki Accords that de-escalated tensions between European blocs. Some analysts speculate that Trump’s push to expand the Abraham Accords is partially intended to counter this independent Saudi initiative, while also shoring up political support from pro-Israel factions ahead of the midterms. The widespread silence that has greeted Trump’s latest demand, however, suggests that many regional states are no longer willing to comply with U.S. demands, even when offered major incentives in return.