President Donald Trump picked up the phone Monday, called Fox News, and threatened to “bomb the s— out of” Oman. Not Iran. Oman. A country that has spent months doing the diplomatic work this administration cannot be bothered to attempt, brokering talks with Iran over traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. For that effort, Oman got a death threat delivered through a cable news correspondent.
Trump elaborated later in the Oval Office. “We’d handle them very easily, just like we do other things,” he said, which is the kind of sentence a person produces when they have never once considered what “other things” actually cost in human lives. He also repeated his proposal to declare the Strait of Hormuz a U.S. territory. “I like the idea of declaring it a territory,” he said, as if international waterways between two sovereign nations are a condo he spotted on Zillow.
Almajidy (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsHere is what is actually happening on the ground, because the ground is where the harm lands. Shipping through the strait nearly stopped over the weekend. Thirteen ships total. Three on Sunday. This is a chokepoint that carried roughly 20% of the world’s oil before Trump launched airstrikes on Iran in February alongside Israel, triggering six months of retaliation, blockade, and economic disruption that ordinary people across the globe are paying for at the pump and in their grocery bills. Brent crude jumped above $90 a barrel the moment Trump opened his mouth Monday. Markets hear the threat. Working families pay the price.
Oman borders Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. It sits near the strait. It has been negotiating with Iran, and Iran’s semiofficial Mehr News Agency reported Saturday that the two countries reached an agreement on a traffic plan for the waterway. Two regional powers sat down and worked something out. The president of the United States responded by promising to annihilate one of them.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi posted that the strait “cannot be seized with a tweet, nor with an aircraft carrier, nor by issuing an order, nor through an election speech.” He is correct. The strait is not a territory to be claimed. It is a shared resource that the global community depends on, and the people who live around it have the greatest stake in keeping it open and peaceful.
President (1981-1989 : Reagan). White House Photographic Office. 1981-1989 (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsSen. Tim Kaine announced he will introduce a resolution when the Senate returns from recess to bar military action against Oman. He called Trump a “blindly stumbling power-drunk President.” Every senator who claims to care about constitutional war powers, about congressional authority, about whether one man can unilaterally drag this country into another war, needs to sign onto that resolution on day one. No hedging. No waiting for the polling. The framework is already written. The harm is already underway.
Jared Kushner told Fox that Trump is “very focused on the economic pressure” and that the blockade has been “very effective.” Effective for whom? Oil prices are climbing. Shipping is stalled. An entire region is being held hostage to one man’s need to sound dominant on television. The people of Oman, Iran, and every nation dependent on that waterway are not collateral in a reality show. They are communities. They are lives.
Monday was the end of a 60-day deadline the U.S. and Iran set in June to end the war and reach an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Instead of diplomacy, we got annexation fantasies and bombing threats. This is not foreign policy. This is structural violence dressed up as strength. Congress must act. The international community must hold this administration accountable. And every one of us who understands that peace is not built through threats needs to raise our voices now, before “very easily” becomes very permanently catastrophic.