Iran

Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi has called for the formation of a non-aggression security pact involving six Persian Gulf states plus Iran and Iraq, slamming US attempts to demonize the Islamic Republic as a threat. Speaking at Girton College, Cambridge, on Monday, Albusaidi stressed that Washington has promoted for almost half a century the false image of Tehran as a threat to the Persian Gulf states, holding back West Asia's ability to solve its own problems.

The Omani foreign minister, speaking to break the deadlock over the region’s future, stressed that the US would no longer be the region's primary security provider. “Issues such as the Strait of Hormuz have become impossible to resolve because external powers continue to define the terms of engagement, while regional powers are unable to take collective responsibility for making their own security arrangements and reach a consensus on them,” Albusaidi noted.

Iran has so far refused to ease its restrictions on transit through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, saying the key international energy waterway will be fully reopened once the US permanently ends its aggression and lifts its maritime blockade and sanctions against Iran. Iranian authorities have also indicated that the country would not back down from its conditions and would respond decisively to any new act of aggression against its territory.

“What holds us back is that issues which ought to be handled at a regional level by the states of the [Persian] Gulf themselves, are made more complex, more intractable and sometimes simply impossible to resolve because the region’s security arrangements are insufficiently developed,” Albusaidi further stressed. “And they are insufficiently developed because they have relied for too long on the involvement of external powers,” he added.

Oman’s top diplomat noted that the Islamic Republic “had been systematically excluded from playing any meaningful role in the security arrangements of the region. Albusaidi also stressed that such exclusion had led to “profoundly negative consequences, not just for Iran, but for the region as a whole”, including the imposition of priorities on the region by external powers such as “the entirely false perception that there is a fundamental regional antagonism between Iran and the Arab states of the [Persian] Gulf.”

According to the Omani foreign minister, the most “damaging” of the priorities imposed on the Persian Gulf region from the outside has been the requirement that the Islamic Republic be excluded. “Not just excluded. Worse. Positioned as the threat against which regional security had to be organized,” Albusaidi stressed, speaking on the day high-level defense and intelligence officials from Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia gathered in Tehran in an attempt to prevent a renewed act of aggression by the US against Iran.

Iran and Oman, both coastal states bordering the strategic waterway, engaged in intensive negotiations for months over arrangements for safe shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran and Oman finally reached a temporary agreement on how shipping traffic should be managed in the strait, but the plan is on hold as Iran keeps the waterway closed due to US acts of aggression and violations. Roughly one-fifth of global oil demand passes through the Strait of Hormuz, making the waterway one of the world's most strategically important maritime chokepoints.

Oman’s foreign minister, without mentioning by name, also challenged US President Donald Trump’s case for a further war of aggression against Iran by saying that he believed the previous round of Oman-mediated negotiations between the US and Iran in February were “making significant progress, and that an agreement was within reach. We still stand by that judgment today.” The US and the Israeli regime waged their first war of aggression against Iran, which lasted 12 days, in June 2025.

Their second aggression began on February 28, 2026, and came to a halt in early April after 40 days. Iran has been defending itself by targeting US bases and energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf states with missile strikes and drone attacks.