In the long and patient work of regional diplomacy, silences can speak as loudly as declarations. Oman's foreign minister announced this week that a planned multilateral meeting between Gulf states and Iran — hosted in one of the region's few genuinely neutral spaces — would not proceed as scheduled, offering no explanation and no new date. The absence of detail is itself a kind of message, a reminder that the distance between adversaries is measured not only in geography but in the unspoken conditions that must be met before they will sit together.