Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to “blow up” the country of Oman if it didn’t bow to his wishes around control of the Strait of Hormuz as the U.S. president seeks a peace agreement with Iran to reopen the strait.
The president hosted a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Thursday and reiterated his insistence that Oman and other nations sign on to his first-term-brokered Abraham Accords, a U.S.-led treaty which encourages the normalization of diplomatic ties between Arab nations and Israel.
He also took a question from reporters, one of whom asked about a potential short-term deal that would allow for shared control of the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman, which border the key waterway. In response, the president issued a direct threat to Oman, a U.S. ally.
“Oman will behave just like everyone else, or we’ll have to blow them up,” the president stunningly warned, adding, “Nobody’s going to control it.”
His seemingly off-the-cuff remark was immediately tweeted out by the State Department’s account on X, hammering home the message.
The president’s threat comes as the Strait of Hormuz has remained closed for nearly 90 days, disrupting key oil and natural gas shipping routes and causing a major spike in global energy prices which now threatens to spread to the rest of the economy. Experts say the closure, even if resolved soon, will have lingering effects for months.
But U.S. efforts to re-open the strait, either through military or diplomatic means, have so far been unsuccessful. Trump announced plans for U.S. Navy vessels to escort civilian ships through the strait in early May, only to suspend those plans two days later.
Peace talks with Iran have yet to achieve a formal agreement to end the war, which has shifted back into a protracted stalemate over the strait as a shaky ceasefire continues to hold and sporadic U.S. strikes continually test that stability. Some of those strikes occurred earlier this week.
Trump himself directly threatened to blow up those talks on Thursday. Defending his call yesterday on Truth Social for hesitant Middle Eastern nations to sign the Abraham Accords out of gratitude for dealing with Iran’s supposed nuclear threat and eventually (potentially) securing the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the president warned at his Cabinet meeting that he may decide against signing a peace deal with Iran unless those countries acquiesced.
“They owe it to us,” he said. “I’m not sure we should make the deal if they don’t sign.”
He also suggested that he was not concerned about the role the war and its growing economic cost would play on his party’s chances of holding the House and Senate this fall.
“I don’t care about the midterms; look what happened last night, that was the prelude to the midterms,” he told reporters, suggesting that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s defeat of an incumbent Republican senator, John Cornyn, in a GOP primary was a sign of the strength of his political brand.
In Washington, resolve to allow the president to continue calling the shots is waning on Capitol Hill. The House of Representatives gaveled out last week before the Memorial Day weekend without taking up a War Powers resolution passed by the Senate, for fear that it would have the votes to pass. Despite Republican majorities in both chambers, a growing list of GOP defections is challenging the White House’s narrative on Iran.
At the same time, the president’s neoconservative and pro-Israel backers continue to loudly insist that any peace deal is meaningless without securing the full destruction of the Iranian nuclear program, or possibly even the Iranian goverment itself.
U.S. officials are known to be pushing for Iran to give up its entire stockpile of enriched nuclear material and swear off any efforts to rebuild its nuclear program, but many Iran hawks are pushing for even further monitoring requirements and are balking at news that the Trump administration is considering extending sanctions relief and freeing up frozen Iranian assets in U.S. banks as a means of securing a deal.
