The Trump administration is threatening to bomb a two-hundred-year ally because it refuses to pick a side in a war Washington started. Not a rhetorical flourish. Not an exaggeration for effect. In last week’s cabinet meeting, the President of the United States said—seemingly offhand, as if discussing a weekend golf outing—that he might order airstrikes on Oman if it went along with Iran’s shipping-toll plan. The accusation landed with the casual cruelty of empire, delivered through offhand cabinet remarks and a Treasury Department social media post. Oman denies it. Oman’s ambassador personally assured the Treasury Secretary there are “no plans for tolling.” And still the threat stands.
This is not foreign policy. This is a protection racket with a carrier group.
The fabricated intelligence report is not a genuine analytic failure; it is a bureaucratic artifact generated to legitimize a coercive posture already decided upon. Washington demands the sultanate sever two centuries of diplomatic continuity with Tehran, citing a phantom plot to charge ships for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, even as Arab officials and United Nations records confirm Oman has spent the current conflict keeping shipping lanes open, providing navigational guidance for vessels fleeing drone strikes, and quietly negotiating fertilizer shipments to starving African ports. The machinery of permanent war requires friction where none exists—and when an Ibadite polity that mediates rather than mobilizes refuses to supply that friction, the apparatus treats diplomatic independence as hostility.
Andrew Bacevich, in Washington Rules, identified the core dynamic: the United States does not seek allies; it seeks clients. A client takes orders, signs joint statements, hosts bases, and votes with the coalition. Oman, by declining to sign an Emirati-led United Nations statement condemning Iran’s toll demands, by keeping channels open when U.S. bombs were falling, has revealed itself as something other than a client. It has revealed itself as a nation with an actual foreign policy. That is what this administration cannot abide. When war broke out on February 28, Oman’s foreign minister Badr Albusaidi told local media the conflict was weakening the region and suggested Gulf Arab states “reconsider their security ties with the United States.” Not reaffirm. Not deepen. Reconsider. That is the language of a country that has read the last forty years of U.S. military engagement in the Persian Gulf and concluded the security architecture is the threat, not the protection.
Barbara Tuchman cataloged the recurring folly of statecraft that abandons dialogue for coercion, mistaking intimidation for strategy. The Omani diplomatic tradition predates modern superpower alignments: Muscat hosted the back-channel negotiations that ended the Iran-Iraq war, facilitated the confidential tracks that produced the 2015 nuclear framework, and its foreign minister was on American television the day before the first U.S.-Israeli strikes saying a deal was “within our reach, if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there.” The administration now dismisses that history as the genesis of its distrust—punishing the very country that offered the space for a diplomatic exit. The same officials demanding Oman’s capitulation are the ones who built the pressure campaign targeting regional shipping, even as the administration sanctions Iranian agencies and strikes drones in the strait. The strategy is not intelligence failure. It is policy design.
Michael Walzer, in Just and Unjust Wars, drew the line between combatant and noncombatant as one of the foundational distinctions in any moral theory of armed conflict. Neutrality—genuine neutrality, not performative alignment—is the noncombatant posture at the state level. Walzer’s framework does not treat neutrality as hostility; it treats it as a legitimate moral position that belligerents are obligated to respect. The Trump administration is not respecting it. It is threatening to bomb it. That is not a violation of diplomatic norms. It is a violation of the just-war tradition itself, replacing treaty obligations and congressional deliberation with executive whim. The constitutional architecture does not vest the power to wage war in cabinet remarks or social media threats; the Article I mandate that only Congress may initiate hostilities is bypassed with the same offhand cruelty.
The Eisenhower reflex applies with full force. In his 1961 farewell address, Dwight Eisenhower warned that the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry would come to exert a total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—across every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. The threat to bomb Oman is that influence made explicit. It is not a response to an actual tolling plan. It is the demand that a small country with no U.S. military bases and no Beltway muscle fall in line, and the threat to destroy it if it does not.
The administration’s officials say there is no genuine plan to attack the country. But the President said it. The Treasury Secretary posted it, walked it back after receiving Omani assurances, but the machinery had already fired. The permanent-war apparatus does not need to follow through to do its work; it only needs to make the threat on the record. The threat is now on the record, and Oman—a nation of four million people on the edge of the strait where the world’s oil passes—is living under it. The sultanate’s neutrality outlasted the last cold war, and it will outlast this manufactured crisis. But the scorched lanes and the hollowed diplomatic bench will endure long after the political theater burns out.