Oman's Foreign Minister Says US Insistence on Iran as Threat Is Blocking Middle East Peace

On Monday, at Girton College in Cambridge, Oman's foreign minister Badr Albusaidi stood up and argued that the Middle East has been unable to solve its own problems largely because, for 50 years, the United States has insisted that the Gulf states treat Iran as a security threat. The speech was billed as a significant attempt to break the deadlock over the region's future.

Albusaidi called for a non-aggression security pact that would bring in all six Gulf states, along with Iran and Iraq. Under such an arrangement, he said, the US would no longer be the primary provider of security. He acknowledged that the talks might be difficult and that the idea might look counterintuitive. But he argued that issues such as the strait of Hormuz have become impossible to resolve because outside powers keep defining the terms of engagement, while regional powers cannot take collective responsibility or reach a consensus among themselves.

He went further. Regional security arrangements, he said, are underdeveloped because they have relied for too long on external powers. Iran, in his account, was systematically excluded from any meaningful role for half a century, with negative consequences for the whole region. Among the priorities imposed from outside, he named the false perception of a fundamental antagonism between Iran and the Arab states of the Gulf. The most damaging, he said, was the requirement that Iran be not merely excluded but positioned as the threat around which regional security had to be organised.

The timing mattered. On the same day, senior defence and intelligence officials from Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia travelled to Tehran to try to head off a renewed outbreak of fighting between the US and Iran. Tehran said the meeting also explored future security arrangements. The presence of Saudi defence minister Khalid bin Salman in the Iranian capital was striking: Iran had struck Saudi infrastructure only weeks earlier, and Iran-backed Houthis are still firing missiles toward Riyadh.

Albusaidi is the first Gulf leader to break ranks this explicitly, calling for the mainly Sunni Gulf states to form a security alliance with Iran, a long-held Tehran aspiration. Iran's foreign ministry has often proposed a regional pact in which Iran, rather than the US, has a role. The conflict may also have reopened a debate among Gulf states over whether the heavy US base presence on their soil brings reassurance or insecurity. Oman has already explored a regional pact that includes Iran. No Gulf state openly backed the US-Israeli attacks on Iran last year or this February, though some have covertly cooperated. Iran has responded by hitting US bases and energy infrastructure in the Gulf.

Oman sits on the southern side of the strait of Hormuz, with Iran on the northern shore. The two have reached a temporary agreement on managing shipping traffic, but it is on hold until the US and Iran each lift their blockades. Albusaidi also indirectly challenged Donald Trump's case for another strike, saying that the February US-Iran talks, which Oman mediated, were making significant progress and that an agreement was within reach. "We still stand by that judgment today," he said.

The backdrop is tense. The Pentagon continues to brief on a major military buildup for a possible assault after the midterm elections. Qatari mediators spent much of Sunday in Tehran seeking terms for reopening the strait. Israeli media have reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pressing the military to provoke a war with Iran before Israel's election on Tuesday, and Trump's repeated calls for Netanyahu's re-election feed a regional sense that the US and Israel could be a long-term source of insecurity.

The proposal will meet resistance across much of the region, given the economic damage Tehran has been willing to inflict directly or through proxies like the Houthis. Iranian hardliners increasingly argue that Iran's security lies in trying to build a nuclear bomb. And a pact likely to take many months to negotiate may not answer Washington's demand that Iran reopen the strait before sanctions are lifted.