Geopolitical history shows that maritime charts follow guns, not forgettable diplomatic press releases. By discarding decades of State Department passivity, President Donald Trump can stamp his name on the Strait of Hormuz permanently. Ultimately, the sovereign power that physically occupies the rugged Musandam Peninsula dictates the geography of global commerce — leaving Washington to either command that raw physical reality or soon inaugurate the “Khamenei Strait.”
Commanding the southern wall of the Strait of Hormuz, Oman’s tiny Musandam Governorate weaponizes a mere 1% of the nation’s population to dictate global energy security. Within this 21-nautical-mile chokepoint, a vital traffic separation scheme funnels millions of barrels daily through lanes lying almost entirely inside Omani territorial waters. Across these contested passages, global flows exceed 20 million barrels of petroleum liquids per day alongside massive volumes of liquefied natural gas. Since alternate regional pipelines bypass only a fraction of this volume, the global market remains trapped by a single bottleneck. Crucially, Asian powerhouses such as China, India, Japan, and South Korea swallow nearly three-quarters of this crude, anchoring their economic survival to a corridor Oman uniquely controls.
By co-authoring the maritime operating manual with Tehran, Muscat has institutionalized its alignment with the Islamic Republic. Under a web of bilateral instruments spanning trade, investment, energy, and security, Oman’s Sultan Haitham and the Iranian mullahs have systematically laid the groundwork for this axis. Leveraging these pacts, a recently inaugurated joint working group now ostensibly targets navigation, services, and associated transit costs. Beneath this euphemistic framing, however, lies a coordinated maritime toll engineered specifically to bypass global sanctions. Despite Washington’s explicit warnings against facilitating Iranian revenue collection, Omani officials refuse to back down, collaborating with Tehran to design these extortion fees.
After securing this strategic ground decades ago, Washington invested heavily in Oman’s defense infrastructure, trying to anchor its regional posture. Under the historic 1980 Facilities Access Agreement, the American military gained vital access to Khasab, Masirah, Thumrait, and Raysut. As a result, the Army Corps of Engineers poured hundreds of millions of dollars into upgrading these airfields, transforming them into premier front-line assets. President Jimmy Carter originally forged this access after the Tehran hostage crisis, and President Ronald Reagan leveraged it during the Tanker War, but Oman is now systematically dismantling that multigenerational investment. Today, America’s “long-standing regional partner” is actively building a dangerous condominium alongside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy.
This historical betrayal, a forgotten Cold War campaign, highlights the supreme irony of Muscat’s current alignment with Tehran. Deploying to Dhofar in 1973, Iranian imperial troops rescued Sultan Qaboos from a terminal Marxist insurgency. By reopening the strategic Midway Road, these paratroopers rapidly choked off vital rebel supply routes. These dozens of Iranian imperial soldiers bled and died on Omani soil to preserve the al Said dynasty. Yet, this same dynasty now grovels before the bloody Islamic Republic, ceding the strategic strait those imperial soldiers died to protect to the terrorist regime that annihilated them.
Physical occupation transforms maximum pressure from a hollow bureaucratic memo into an active strategic switch, yielding immediate escalation leverage. From Khasab, American shore batteries, maritime patrol aircraft, and specialized boarding teams will directly dominate the strait’s traffic lanes. Indeed, these forward-deployed assets instantly turn inspection, escort, and denial operations into unyielding local realities.
WE ENDURED TEMPORARY SACRIFICE. THEY MADE IT ‘THE NEW NORMAL’
Executing this offensive strategy demands three precise geopolitical instruments. First, Washington must present Muscat with a treaty establishing a 99-year maritime security zone, freezing Iranian influence while granting the United States exclusive coastal jurisdiction. Under this mandate, financial compensation will include a substantial annuity indexed to safe transits, structured to zero out the moment Iran attempts to collect tolls. Second, Washington must weaponize Asian dependency by issuing a strait stewardship bond to regional energy buyers to fund the local American garrison. Third, the Pentagon must deploy a cutting-edge autonomous sea-drone net across the strait’s floor, instantly disabling unflagged hostile vessels and fully automating freedom-of-navigation enforcement.
Basing American grand strategy on the diplomatic fiction of an Omani partnership invites catastrophic systemic risk. If Washington refuses to physically command this choke point now, it yields global energy security to a revisionist axis in Tehran and a spineless dynasty that has traded its savior for its oppressor.
Jose Lev Alvarez is an American–Israeli scholar specializing in international security policy. A multilingual veteran of the IDF special forces and the U.S. Army, he holds three master’s degrees and is completing a Ph.D. in Intelligence and Global Security in the Washington, D.C., area.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
