US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Oman on 28 May that Washington would "aggressively target any actors involved, directly or indirectly, in facilitating tolls for the strait".1 Trump reportedly threatened to "blow them up" after Iranian state media said Tehran and Muscat would jointly manage Strait of Hormuz traffic.2 Oman is the Gulf sultanate that brokered the secret Muscat channel behind the 2015 nuclear deal and has carried messages between Washington and Tehran since the 1981 hostage settlement. Muscat brokers; it does not threaten US interests.
Oman backed down within the day, its ambassador assuring Washington there was no toll plan. The threat still landed on the architecture any deal depends on. Tehran has demanded the release of roughly $12bn in Qatar-held frozen assets before any Hormuz sequence, and Rubio had already called the tolls a "deal-killer". Threatening the neutral broker over the same tolls leaves Pakistan, whose foreign minister Ishaq Dar met US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington on 29 May, as the sole active mediator.3
The Muscat channel does not regenerate on demand. Oman's value was precisely its neutrality: it carried messages no formal channel could, and the quiet talks it hosted between 2013 and 2015 enabled a nuclear agreement Western formal diplomacy could not reach directly. A private toll warning may be leverage rather than rupture, and Oman's quick denial proves it worked. The cost is that the maximum-pressure logic now treats a 45-year backchannel as a sanctions target, and Pakistan, a broker with its own regional stakes, inherits a role Oman performed without them.
