20AUG

GCC backs free passage, splits on Oman

4 min read

16:36UTC

Rubio and the six GCC foreign ministers issued a Manama communique on 25 June welcoming free Hormuz navigation with no tolls, while GCC member Oman had co-signed an Iran fee committee two days earlier.

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ConflictDeveloping

Key takeaway

The GCC's no-fees stance collides with Oman, the member already signing Hormuz fees with Iran.

Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, and the six foreign ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) issued a communique in Manama on Thursday 25 June welcoming the end of hostilities and the "restoration of free and secure navigation" through the strait of Hormuz, with no tolls and no fees ¹. The GCC is the Gulf bloc of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, founded in 1981. Rubio told the ministers there was "zero support among Gulf countries for any toll or fee" and confirmed the Bahrain session did not discuss any Iran reconstruction fund ².

The communique tied lasting Gulf security to three Iranian concessions: an end to missile and drone attacks, a halt to militia support, and no interference in state sovereignty. It is a direct answer to Tehran's posture, and it builds on Rubio's no-tolls declaration in the UAE two days earlier , which set the agenda for the Manama meeting.

The document implicitly rejects both the IRGC toll scheme and the Iran-Oman committee that would set the rates. Yet the contradiction sits inside the bloc itself. Oman, a GCC member, signed the Muscat fee committee with Iran on 23 June , two days before adding its name to a communique opposing exactly those fees. Rubio's "zero support" line papers over a coastal state already co-governing the tariffs the bloc says it will not accept.

That split matters because Oman holds the southern shore of the strait and the Oman-IMO corridor runs through its territorial waters. A no-fees front that includes the one member negotiating a bilateral fee mechanism with Iran is a declaration of intent, not an enforced policy. The bloc agrees on the principle and divides on the signatory who can deliver it.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

On Thursday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met the foreign ministers of the six Gulf Arab states in Bahrain and they agreed on a joint statement: there should be no fees or tolls on the Strait of Hormuz, the water should be free for ships to use. One of those six states, Oman, had already signed a deal with Iran just two days earlier to set up a joint committee that would manage Hormuz fees. Oman agreed in Bahrain that there should be no fees, while having just agreed in Muscat that it would help set them. This matters because Oman is Iran's preferred negotiating partner and has often acted as a go-between. Iran will almost certainly treat the Oman bilateral deal as the real agreement and the GCC statement as diplomatic theatre.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Oman's structural position explains the contradiction. Muscat is the only GCC member that shares a coastline and maritime boundary directly with Iran, maintains a long history of back-channel mediation between Tehran and Washington, and is economically dependent on keeping Hormuz commercially functional rather than politically closed.

Oman cannot afford to subscribe to a zero-fees position that Tehran would punish by directing ships away from Oman's territorial waters and into the IRGC-governed channel.

The GCC's consensus structure created the paradox. Communiques require unanimity, so Oman's signing of the Manama text was necessary for the bloc to have any statement at all. The GCC has no enforcement mechanism for bilateral member-state deals that deviate from collective positions; the bloc can condemn but not compel. Rubio's 'zero support' line therefore describes the GCC's stated position while the operative reality is a member state co-governing the fees the bloc says it opposes.

What could happen next?

Consequence
Oman's dual signing has functionally created two competing Hormuz governance frameworks within the GCC: the bloc's stated zero-fees position and Muscat's operational fee-committee role; whichever Iran chooses to work with will determine the post-60-day transit cost structure.
Risk
If the Iran-Oman committee publishes a tariff before GL X expires on 21 August, it will have established a de facto fee standard that the GCC communique opposed but cannot enforce, splitting the bloc's stated position from the operational reality.

Source Landscape

This story draws on centre-left-leaning sources from Qatar

Qatar

Primary parallel: The Arab League's response to Egypt's 1979 Camp David Accords offers the closest structural precedent for a multilateral bloc fracturing over a bilateral deal with an adversary: Egypt signed a peace with Israel that the Arab League declared void, expelled Egypt, and imposed sanctions, yet Egypt maintained normal trade relations with Israel throughout and was readmitted 10 years later without reversing the peace.

Oman's 2026 bilateral fee committee functions the same way: a member state has signed an arrangement the bloc has declared it opposes, and the bloc has neither expelled Oman nor sanctioned the bilateral deal.

Counter-parallel: Qatar's 2017 Gulf crisis, when Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt severed relations with Doha over its ties to Iran and Turkey, shows the opposite: a Gulf state's divergent bilateral engagement with Iran can fracture the GCC when the divergence becomes operationally threatening. The 2017 crisis lasted three years. Oman's role differs because Muscat's fee committee with Iran is an attempt to control the price, not endorse Tehran's governance claim.

Consensus view: Gulf Studies Centre at Qatar University and the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington (AGSIW) assess the Manama communique as a diplomatic cost-minimisation exercise: the GCC's three-condition formula (end missile attacks, halt militia support, no sovereignty interference) repackages existing demands in a format Rubio can cite without opening a new negotiation track with Tehran.

The critical structural signal is not the communique text but Oman's dual position: Muscat signed both the Iran-Oman fee committee on 23 June and the zero-fees communique on 25 June, demonstrating that GCC consensus is formal while member states' bilateral positions diverge materially.

Counter-view: Analysts at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) Tehran desk and Iran's Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS) note that from Tehran's perspective, the Manama communique is irrelevant to its negotiating calculus: Iran signed the bilateral fee committee with Oman, not with the GCC, and Rubio's 'zero support' line addresses the GCC's collective position, which Oman demonstrably does not hold on a bilateral basis.

Tehran negotiated the fee committee bilaterally with Oman, not with the bloc, and that bilateral track is the one Iran intends to enforce.

Key tension: Whether the Iran-Oman bilateral track, which Tehran treats as the operative framework, is compatible with the GCC's stated zero-fees position long enough for a managed transition, or whether Oman's dual signing forces a bloc rupture that Tehran can exploit to establish the fee committee as the de facto Hormuz standard.

First Reported In

Update #138 · Three flags over Hormuz, none enforced

Al Jazeera· 25 Jun 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Rubio lands in UAE: no Hormuz tolls

Rubio's 23 June UAE no-tolls declaration (ID:4462) set the agenda for the 25 June Manama GCC ministerial and the resulting zero-fees communique.

Occurred 23 Jun 2026

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Iran and Oman claim the strait

The GCC-US Manama communique implicitly rejects the Iran-Oman Muscat fee committee (ID:4458) that Oman had signed two days earlier as a GCC member.

Occurred 23 Jun 2026

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This Event

GCC backs free passage, splits on Oman

The bloc's united no-fees front already contains a coastal member co-governing the very tolls it claims to oppose.

Different Perspectives

UK Maritime Trade Operations

UKMTO logged six armed men boarding a tanker 136 nautical miles east of Al Mukalla on 20 August and redirecting it toward Somalia. A vessel steered toward the Somali coast reads as an attempted seizure, a distinct hazard from the stand-off strikes the same lane has seen before.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf

Iran's Majlis speaker received Iraq's Hormuz carve-out request in Baghdad on 19 August, a request that treats passage as Tehran's to grant. Ghalibaf's authority over that grant sits alongside the Revolutionary Guard's separate transit rules, which have moved independently of Iran's foreign ministry before.

Haibat al-Halbousi

Iraq's parliament speaker asked Iran for special consideration on Iraqi Hormuz oil exports during Ghalibaf's 19 August Baghdad visit. Iraq presses the request from a weak position: Iran's central bank is simultaneously demanding Baghdad release Iranian reserves parked in Iraqi accounts.

Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research

Switzerland's economics ministry updated the Article 21 forms governing lawful Iran money transfers on 19 August, with only the revised forms accepted from 26 August. Bern operates one of the few remaining legal Iran payment channels and has just set a hard cutover on its control point.

Motegi Toshimitsu

Japan's foreign minister said in Muscat on 20 August that Tokyo wants closer coordination with Oman on safe Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb passage. Japan has no naval presence of its own in the strait, so it is routing the ask through the state negotiating with Iran instead.

Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi

Oman's foreign minister joined Japan's in Muscat on 20 August to call for intensified coordination on Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb navigation. Oman also runs the mediation track with Tehran, so the appeal travels through the same channel as the negotiation.