On Wednesday morning, President Trump walked into a Cabinet meeting and threatened to bomb an ally. Not an adversary. Not a rival. An ally of more than 50 years, whose foreign minister had spent months working to prevent a wider war. The country in question, Oman, had done nothing except sit at the intersection of two competing visions for who gets to control one of the most strategically important waterways on earth. Trump’s answer to that question, delivered to reporters without apparent hesitation, was characteristically blunt: “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up.”
The remark landed immediately. Some officials initially speculated Trump had misspoken and meant Iran. But the U.S. State Department later shared the comment on social media with a transcript that explicitly referred to the Arab country. The threat stood. It wasn’t a slip. And it said something significant, not just about Trump’s diplomatic style, but about how close the situation around the Trump Strait of Hormuz standoff is to spiraling out of anyone’s control.
To understand what Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting was actually about, you have to go back to February, and to a waterway that most people couldn’t find on a map but whose closure has changed the price of almost everything.
What the Strait of Hormuz Actually Is and Why It Matters
The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow channel of water that sits between Oman and Iran, connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the open ocean beyond. Ships don’t just pass through it for convenience. They pass through it because there is no other viable route for most of the Gulf’s oil and gas to reach the world.
Before the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran began, about 25% of the world’s seaborne oil trade and 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas passed through it. Pre-conflict, around 3,000 vessels used the strait each month. That number now stands at around 5% of that level. The strait isn’t just a shipping route. It’s a pressure point on the entire global economy, and Iran figured that out the moment the bombs started falling.
Shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been largely blocked by Iran since February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched an air war against Iran and assassinated its Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issued warnings forbidding passage through the strait, boarded and attacked merchant ships, and laid sea mines in the waterway. Within days, the global shipping industry had effectively decided the risk wasn’t worth it.
The economic damage has been severe and immediate. According to AAA, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline reached $4.56 ahead of Memorial Day weekend, a four-year high and an increase of more than 50% since the war began on February 28. Every U.S. state has crossed the $4 threshold. The closure triggered the largest disruption to oil supplies in history. By May 12, the cost of the war to the U.S. military alone was estimated at nearly $29 billion, and the Pentagon had requested a further $200 billion.
How the War Began and Why a Ceasefire Changed Almost Nothing
The surprise attacks were launched during negotiations between Iran and the U.S. regarding Iran’s nuclear program. For months beforehand, Oman had been hosting and mediating rounds of talks between Washington and Tehran, with its Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi shuttling between delegations. On the morning of February 27, just hours before the strikes began, Albusaidi appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” and told host Margaret Brennan that “the peace deal is within our reach,” saying the talks had already achieved “quite substantial progress.” By the time his interview aired in full, the bombs had already started falling.
After more than five weeks of fighting, the United States and Iran agreed on April 7-8 to a ceasefire that included Israel. But the ceasefire resolved almost nothing about the strait. In the weeks that followed, the conflict shifted to a game of brinkmanship between the United States and Iran over restricted access to the Strait of Hormuz.
After the failure of subsequent talks, Trump announced a naval blockade of Iran from April 13, creating a situation described as a “dual blockade,” with the U.S. Navy blockading Iran and Iran blockading the Persian Gulf. Washington also attempted to reopen the strait by having U.S. Navy ships escort vessels through the waterway. That plan, announced in early May, was abandoned just two days later.
Everything since then has been a negotiation conducted at gunpoint, with both sides making contradictory claims about what they’ve agreed to, and neither side willing to blink first in front of an audience.
The Draft Deal That Wasn’t and the Trump Strait of Hormuz Threat That Was
The trigger for Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting was a report from Iranian state television. Iranian state TV reported this week that it had obtained an unofficial draft of a U.S.-Iran agreement, which included terms that Iran and Oman would jointly manage traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and restore shipping to pre-war levels within a month. The reported draft also included the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade and withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iran’s area.
The Trump administration called the report “a complete fabrication.” Trump also rejected a separate Iranian claim that the U.S. had agreed to unfreeze billions of dollars in Iranian assets. “We’re not talking about any easing of sanctions or giving money,” he said. Then, in the same Cabinet meeting, the Trump administration placed new sanctions on Iran’s newly created agency that is seeking to control shipping through the strait.
Then a reporter asked about the joint control proposal, and Trump answered with the threat that made headlines around the world.
The remarks came during the Cabinet meeting at the White House. According to reporting from Time, Trump told reporters: “No, the strait’s got to be open to everybody; it’s international waters. We’ll watch over it, but nobody’s going to control it.”
Oman, a strategic partner of the U.S. for more than 50 years, has played a key role in efforts to mediate a peace deal between the U.S. and Iran. Threatening to bomb it, even in an offhand comment that was later softened with a “they’ll be fine,” is not a minor diplomatic miscalculation. It is the kind of statement that undermines the credibility of every back-channel the U.S. is simultaneously relying on.
Iran’s position on the matter had already been stated plainly. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said that any mechanism concerning the Strait of Hormuz should be agreed between Iran, Oman, and the countries bordering the waterway, and that the United States “has nothing to do” with it. Trump’s response, essentially, was to threaten one of those bordering countries.
Trump’s Strait of Hormuz Problem Has No Easy Exit
The military situation in the strait has been escalating even as diplomats try to construct a framework for winding it down.
The U.S. military carried out overnight strikes on a military site in Iran’s Bandar Abbas. U.S. forces had shot down four Iranian attack drones that threatened the strait, and the facility, a ground control station, was preparing to launch a fifth drone. A U.S. official described the strikes as “purely defensive, and intended to maintain the cease-fire.”
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it targeted a U.S. airbase at around 4:50 a.m. local time on Thursday. The IRGC did not specify the location of the airbase. Iranian forces also reportedly fired on a U.S. tanker that “tried to pass through the Strait of Hormuz by turning off its radar system.”
So the pattern now is this: both sides claim to be observing a ceasefire, both sides keep shooting, and both sides keep holding talks that appear to make progress right up until they don’t.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said talks with Iran have made some progress. He said the U.S. will give diplomacy “every chance to succeed.” But Rubio also said Trump has other options if talks don’t work, an apparent reference to renewed military strikes. That is not, as a diplomatic message, exactly reassuring.
The energy markets are watching every word. Oil markets had been finding firmer footing as investors increasingly priced out worst-case supply disruption scenarios amid signs Washington and Tehran were moving closer to an agreement. But after Trump’s Oman threat, oil prices rose again as fresh U.S. strikes in Iran renewed concerns over disruptions to commercial shipping through the strait.
The volatility is now self-reinforcing: every aggressive statement sends oil prices up, which creates political pressure to resolve the conflict, which generates optimistic claims from both sides, which briefly sends prices down, until the next incident resets the cycle.
Oman’s Impossible Position
The country at the center of Wednesday’s threat has spent decades building exactly the kind of diplomatic credibility that makes it useful to everyone and threatening to no one.
Oman, a country of five million people, sits at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Its shores and mountains jut out into the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway where a fifth of the world’s oil passes. Its geography alone makes it indispensable to any resolution of the current crisis.
The first round of high-level pre-war meetings between the U.S. and Iran was held in Oman, led by U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Oman hosted or mediated multiple subsequent rounds. There have been relatively fewer Iranian attacks on Qatar and particularly Oman, both of which have historically helped mediate talks between Iran and other states.
That protected status is not an accident. It is the result of decades of careful positioning, staying out of regional wars, maintaining relations with Tehran when other Gulf states cut theirs, and cultivating a reputation as a country that can be trusted by both sides. Muscat’s enduring status as Iran’s most trusted Gulf counterpart is something it has maintained despite years of regional polarization and broader skepticism from other Gulf Cooperation Council members toward Oman’s neutrality.
Trump’s threat, even if partly rhetorical, chips away at that credibility. If Oman has to worry about U.S. retaliation for engaging diplomatically with Iran, it becomes less useful as a mediator, not more. And right now, the U.S. doesn’t have a surplus of back-channels it can afford to damage.
Contradictions at the Negotiating Table
The broader peace talks are proceeding along lines that suggest both sides want a deal badly enough to keep talking, but not badly enough to actually close one.
A major sticking point has been Trump’s demand that Iran surrender its enriched uranium and permanently relinquish any nuclear weapons capacity. In an interview with PBS, Trump said Iran is “going to give up their highly enriched uranium.” Iran has not agreed to this. Iran has sought to put off nuclear talks until after a formal cessation in hostilities.
There are also contradictory signals coming from within Washington. GOP senators Roger Wicker and Lindsey Graham, both Iran hawks, expressed caution at Trump making a potential peace deal with Iran. Graham raised concerns about Iran being perceived as a dominant force requiring a diplomatic solution, writing that “this combination of Iran being perceived as having the ability to terrorize the Strait in perpetuity and the ability to inflict massive damage to Gulf oil infrastructure is a major shift of the balance of power in the region.”
Trump, for his part, said he is willing to “out-wait” Iran and dismissed the suggestion that approaching midterm elections might push him toward a faster deal. But the political reality is that gas prices sitting above $4.50 a gallon going into summer are not a comfortable backdrop for any incumbent party, and House Speaker Mike Johnson publicly said the Iran deal Trump is working to finalize would help bolster the GOP in this year’s midterm elections by lowering gas prices.
Even if a deal is signed tomorrow, the damage to supply chains will take time to unwind. It will take at least four months to ramp oil flows to 80% of normal levels even if the U.S.-Iran conflict ends immediately, according to Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, head of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. It will take until the first or second quarter of 2027 for flows to fully normalize.
Read More: Trump is Now in Way Over His Head
The Quiet Part
There is something worth sitting with in the way Wednesday unfolded. The same Cabinet meeting that produced a threat to bomb an ally also featured the Secretary of State saying the U.S. will give diplomacy “every chance to succeed.” Both things were said, in the same room, on the same day. That is not a contradiction that belongs to Trump alone. It reflects the genuine incoherence of a policy that is simultaneously trying to bomb its way to a negotiating table and negotiate its way out of a bombing campaign.
If you are trying to make sense of what to watch for next, the clearest signal will not come from White House press briefings or Iranian state television, both of which have spent three months saying opposite things about the same supposed agreements. Watch the oil price. The market needs to see verifiable, definitive steps taken to reopen the strait before the prospect of $5 gasoline is genuinely off the table. GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis Patrick De Haan has attributed more than nine-tenths of the year-over-year gap at the pump directly to the conflict with Iran, saying “that’s what happens when the world’s most vital waterway to the shipment of oil becomes a military target.” That means physical ships moving through the strait in meaningful numbers, not a memorandum of understanding that one side calls historic and the other calls a fabrication on the same afternoon it’s announced.
The second thing worth understanding is Oman’s position, because it matters more than it appears. The region has entered a phase where miscalculation, not malice, is the greater danger, and the core risk is both sides misunderstanding the other’s intentions and capabilities. Oman is currently the best-placed country to correct those misreadings. It has the trust of Tehran, a working relationship with Washington, and geography that makes it impossible to exclude from any lasting arrangement on the strait. Threatening it, even rhetorically, makes that corrective function harder to perform. If the talks collapse in the coming days, the moment Trump called Oman a bombing target at a Cabinet meeting will be cited as one of the points where the off-ramp got narrower. And if a deal somehow holds, it will almost certainly be because Omani diplomats kept working through the insult anyway, which, given their track record, is not beyond them.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.