Oman’s foreign minister says war in Iran is Trump’s ‘greatest miscalculation’ in scathing attack
Oman’s foreign minister has said that the war in Iran is Donald Trump’s “greatest miscalculation” and urged Washington’s allies to push him to end the conflict immediately.
In the most scathing attack on Washington’s foreign policy yet by a Gulf state, Badr Albusaidi said “this is not America’s war” and criticised Mr Trump for supporting Israel.
Writing in The Economist, he called on American allies to help extricate the country from the conflict, which has continued for a third week despite failing to achieve the US and Israel’s stated aim of instigating regime change in Tehran or stopping its nuclear programme.
Since the war began, Iran has launched retaliatory attacks across the Gulf, most recently targeting oil and gas facilities – a development that shook global energy markets. Oman has been targeted on several occasions.
Mr Albusaidi said being drawn into the war was the “American administration’s greatest miscalculation” and implied that Israel didn’t have the right intentions for Iran.
“This is not America’s war, and there is no likely scenario in which both Israel and America will get what they want from it,” he wrote. “Hopefully America’s commitment to regime change is just rhetorical, whereas Israel explicitly seeks the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and probably cares little about how the country is governed, or by whom, once this has been achieved.”
He said that Israel appeared to have persuaded Trump that Iran had been so weakened by sanctions, internal protests and the 12 Day War last year that an “unconditional surrender would swiftly follow the initial assault and the assassination of the supreme leader”.
“But it should now be clear that for Israel to achieve its stated objective will require a long military campaign to which America would have to commit troops on the ground, opening a new front in the forever wars, which President Donald Trump previously vowed to end. This is not what America’s government wants. Nor do its people, who certainly do not see this as their war.”
Mr Trump lashed out at Iran following a strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan energy complex on Wednesday, which came in retaliation for an Israeli attack on its South Pars gas field. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the US could “massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars gas field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.”
In his article, Mr Albusaidi described Iran’s retaliation as “an inevitable, if deeply regrettable and completely unacceptable, result” of the conflict.
“Faced with what both Israel and America described as a war designed to terminate the Islamic Republic, this was probably the only rational option available to the Iranian leadership.”
His own country has fallen victim to Iran’s strikes, with two oil tankers, one off the coast of Muscat and another north of the Port of Khasab, hit by attacks. A separate drone strike targeted an industrial zone in Sohar.
Western leaders have proven unwilling to support Trump in the Iran War despite his call for help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital route for oil that has been blocked by Tehran since the war began last month.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz ruled out participating in any military activity, including efforts to reopen the strait. He said: “There was never a joint decision on whether to intervene. That is why the question of how Germany might contribute militarily does not arise. We will not do so.”
