Oman's Geometry: The Sultanate That Borders Both Sides of the Chokepoint
The Musandam Peninsula is an exclave of Oman separated from the rest of the sultanate by a strip of UAE territory. It juts northward into the Gulf, forming the southern jaw of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s coastline forms the northern jaw. Between them is the corridor through which the global oil trade flows. Oman is the only country in the world that shares a maritime border with Iran along the strait, and this geographic fact has given the sultanate a diplomatic role that its size and military capacity would not otherwise justify.
Muscat has maintained a working relationship with Tehran throughout periods when most Arab Gulf states have treated Iran as an existential threat. This is not ideological sympathy. It is geographic realism. A country that shares the most important body of water in the world with a neighbor cannot afford to treat that neighbor as purely an adversary, regardless of what its alliance partners prefer. Oman’s Iran policy has been consistent across decades and across the transition from Sultan Qaboos to Sultan Haitham: engagement, not confrontation, with enough distance maintained to avoid becoming an Iranian client.
The practical consequences of this posture have been significant at several pivotal moments. Oman hosted the secret US-Iran backchannel negotiations that preceded the 2015 nuclear agreement, providing the physical space and political cover for contacts that both Washington and Tehran needed to conduct without public acknowledgment. Muscat’s role in that process was not incidental. It reflected a sustained investment in being the party that both sides trusted enough to use. That investment has costs — it requires maintaining genuinely independent relationships with Washington, Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi simultaneously — and it produces returns that are difficult to quantify but occasionally decisive.
The Omani position creates friction within the Gulf Cooperation Council. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have at various points expected GCC members to adopt unified positions on Iran that Oman has declined to embrace. The Qatari diplomatic crisis of 2017 complicated the region’s politics in ways that reminded everyone how fractious the Gulf states can be beneath the surface of formal cooperation. Oman navigated that crisis by refusing to join the blockade while maintaining functional relationships with all parties, which is consistent with its general approach and which illustrated both the value and the limitation of its position: Muscat can stay out of fights, but it cannot stop them.
Sultan Haitham, who came to power in January 2020 after Qaboos died without a publicly designated successor, has maintained the foreign policy continuity that the sultanate’s position requires. The transition was managed smoothly, which was not a foregone conclusion given Qaboos’s long personal control over foreign policy and the opacity of Omani succession arrangements. Haitham has continued the Iran engagement, continued the American defense relationship — Oman hosts US forces at several facilities and has signed an access agreement covering additional sites — and continued the practice of making Muscat available as a quiet back-channel when parties need one.
The oil dimension of Oman’s geography is sometimes overlooked in discussions of its diplomatic role. Oman is a mid-sized oil producer whose own exports move through the Gulf of Oman rather than through the strait, which means a Hormuz closure would not directly interrupt Omani exports even as it disrupted everyone else’s. This gives Muscat a slightly different set of interests from the Arab Gulf producers whose revenues depend entirely on strait transit. It also gives Oman a potential role as a re-export and transit hub in disruption scenarios — the port of Duqm on the Arabian Sea coast has been developed with precisely this kind of strategic flexibility in mind.
Geography created Oman’s diplomatic role. Consistent policy has made it indispensable. The strait needs both jaws to function, and the southern jaw belongs to a sultanate that has spent fifty years ensuring that everyone who matters wants to keep it in that position.