We Interrupt These Negotiations...

[Read all my Iran stuff.]

The US-Iran nuclear talks survived the war longer than I actually thought they would.

That is probably the strangest part of the whole thing. Before the Strait became the center of the story, the “interim ceasefire” had settled into tit for tat with minor complaints. Everyone issued statements about restraint while doing the thing the statements were supposedly restraining. It was dangerous, ugly, and absurd, but it still had a rhythm.

Like most everyone, I kept waiting for the talks to collapse because the nuclear talks were supposedly the point of the war. That was the final justification. We can’t let a jihadist theocracy have nuclear weapons. It takes a pretty primitive view of the world to disagree with that.

Iran's nuclear program set years back if not eliminated. Iran's leadership had to be restrained. Iran's military capacity had to be whacked. As usual, Trump wanted the grand declarative version of all this. The war would be won, the problem settled, the cameras satisfied, and the world would move on to the next episode.

But the talks did not collapse over the nuclear issue. I’m not sure nukes were ever even discussed other than the two sides could not agree whether or not inspectors would be allowed into the country. Which is kind of where we were before we decapitated them. Lebanon has been dragged into the settlement along with the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s impatience for glory did not kill the talks, although he helped shape the whole mess. They did not collapse because Iran and the United States exchanged blows after the ceasefire, because they had already been doing that and the framework kept staggering forward anyway.

They collapsed because the IRGC went one strike too far.

Trump wants out. He wants the war-ending announcement. He has accepted too much ambiguity in the “ceasefire” because ambiguity let him call something finished that had not been defined. "The Strait is open" sounded good enough for a man who wanted to go home. It was not good enough for the ships that had to pass through it, the coastal states that had to administer it, or the armed men in Iran who thought "open" meant "open under our shadow."

The Guards did not simply test the boundary. That is not really their nature. They test a boundary by exceeding it temporarily, then measuring the response from the other side of the line. They do not ask where the fence is. They drive through it, watch what shoots back, then try to negotiate from the wreckage. This is not a subtle institution. It is a coercive institution with a talent for discovering how much illegality can be laundered afterward into necessity.

That is what happened in the Strait of Hormuz. The IRGC moved the conflict over the nuclear program into the operating rules of the Strait. As it turned out, that (and Lebanon) is a clever escalation. A missile alert in Bahrain or Kuwait can still be folded into the regional retaliation cycle. A U.S. strike on a Iranian coastal radar site can still be treated as another exchange in the postwar cleanup. But yesterday the IRGC fired at three tankers moving through the Oman side of the Strait. The IRGC seems hellbent on controlling the Strait either with or without Oman’s involvement.

The June 17 memorandum of understanding had opened a sixty-day window and oil tanker traffic was climbing back toward something like normal — over a hundred crossings some days, oil prices easing on the recovery of supply chains. Then three ships were hit in one stretch, a gas carrier and a Saudi tanker among them, a tanker off Oman caught fire after a projectile strike, and the U.S. answered by revoking the oil license and hitting Iran again. Iran's foreign ministry called it a violation of the deal. None of that reads like an accident of timing. It reads like the Guards deciding the recovery itself was the threat.

The IRGC wants a direct say in what happens in the Strait. Not a diplomatic say. Not an Iranian foreign-ministry say. Not the kind of say that Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi can carry into a meeting with Oman's foreign minister, Sayyid Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, and dress up in the language of coastal-state sovereignty. The Guards want the kind of say that makes a ship captain, an insurer, a Gulf exporter, and an Omani official wonder whether passage is safe without Iranian permission.

The war was supposed to settle Iran's ability to coerce the region. Instead, it revealed the institution most committed to coercion after the rest of the state had been broken. Iran was beaten. Its leadership was half-dead. Its military infrastructure was hit repeatedly. Hundreds of targets destroyed. The old Iranian threat did not survive intact.

Yet, here we are. No ceasfire any more apparently. No talks. The IRGC can ruin the Strait at will. As I have said before as long as Iran controls or dictates the Strait they are winning the war. That is absurd. Loser continues to, what? Not lose, exactly?

Meanwile, out of nowhere Oman finds itself holding the golden egg.

In February, Oman was a mediator. Useful, serious, familiar in that role, but still a mediator. Sultan Haitham bin Tarik's Oman is built for that kind of position. It talks to everybody. It does not do theatrical hostility. It likes the practical formula, the phrase that allows two sides to leave with different interpretations and no one bleeding in the hallway. Sayyid Badr is almost perfectly suited to that. He sounds calm even when the region is on fire, which is one of the reasons Oman keeps getting invited to help put fires out.

Then the Strait moved from background geography to the center of the settlement. That changed Oman's position completely. Oman was no longer only the mediator between Iran and the United States. It was one of the two coastal states through which the future arrangement had to pass. Oman could speak not only as a diplomatic facilitator, but as a sovereign state with a coastline on the chokepoint everyone suddenly needed to redefine.

It is also a nasty gift. Iran's behavior endangers Oman and elevates Oman at the same time. Tankers being hit near Oman's coast is not good for Oman. It is not good for shipping, insurance, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, India, China, Japan, or anyone who needs Gulf energy to move without becoming a war-risk calculation every twelve hours. Oman cannot want that. But the crisis also makes Oman indispensable. The more Iran behaves like the dangerous coastal state, the more Oman becomes the reasonable coastal state. The more the IRGC makes the Strait ungovernable, the more Muscat becomes necessary to any attempt to govern it.

That is why Oman cannot simply break with Iran. It can (and did) condemn violence. It can (and did) insist on safe passage. It can reassure shippers. It can coordinate routes. It can work with international maritime authorities. It can tell everyone that the Strait must remain open. But if Oman turns Iran into an external enemy rather than a necessary coastal-state participant, Oman loses the very role the crisis has created for it. The whole point of Oman's position is that it can still talk to Iran when others cannot or will not.

Oman and Iran's public language makes this clear. The two countries say the Strait should remain secure and open for international navigation. That sounds like normal regional boilerplate until the sovereign-rights sentence arrives. Future arrangements, they say, must respect the sovereignty and sovereign rights of the two coastal states. Oman and Iran. Not Washington. Not the shipping market. Not the U.S. Navy. Not the insurers. Not even the Gulf exporters whose economies depend on the passage. Oman and Iran.

That language is a gift to Tehran, but not necessarily to the IRGC. It gives Iran a lawful way forward. It acknowledges that Iran cannot be treated as if its coastline is incidental to the Strait. It gives Araghchi and the civilian diplomatic apparatus something they can use. It also gives Oman a larger role than it had before the war. What it does not do is give the Guards what they actually want, which is the practical right to decide which ships move safely and which ships learn a lesson.

Oman is trying to translate Iranian relevance into law, coordination, and maritime safety. The IRGC is trying to translate Iranian relevance into good old primitive fear. Those are opposing aims. They won’t play well together. Oman wants Iran inside a coastal-state framework because that is how the Strait becomes manageable. The Guards want Iran's role to be felt as danger because danger is their instrument. A legal framework can be negotiated, monitored, amended, and eventually routinized. Fear has to be renewed.

That is why the Oman-side passage was so provocative to the IRGC. A ship passing near Oman is not just a ship passing near Oman. It is an argument. It says the Strait can function through Omani coordination, international norms, commercial necessity, and American protection without submitting to IRGC authority. It says Iran may be one of the coastal states, but the Guards are not the tollbooth, the harbor master, and the final permission structure of the Gulf.

For the IRGC, that is intolerable. The Guards have already felt Iran lose the war in the normal military sense. They watched Trump and Israel break the old structure badly enough that the postwar Iranian state now has to be held together through a harder military-security core.

This is why the "nuclear talks" frame now looks almost like an after-thought. Nukes were the point, people! No one questioned free navigation of the Strait. Until Israel and the US struck. Nuclear diplomacy survived the first rounds of postwar violence because the parties still had reasons to pretend the frame existed. What it could not survive was the IRGC revealing that the Strait clause was not a side issue. The Strait clause was the real test of postwar power.

Trump thought "open" meant oil moves, he gets to leave and, more importantly, declare “total victory.”

Oman thought "open" meant safe passage under a framework that recognizes both coastal states.

Iranian diplomats thought "open" meant Iran had forced its way back into the framework of the settlement.

The IRGC thought "open" meant nothing unless ships moved under its shadow.

The Guards have been handed something useful. Iran lost badly, but Hormuz became central to the settlement anyway. It gave the IRGC a path back into relevance. It let the regime say the war had not simply ended with Iranian defeat, because the world still had to bargain over the Strait. It gave Tehran a political and diplomatic asset at the very moment its military assets had been battered. A more disciplined state might have banked that gain. A more coherent regime might have let Oman help turn it into a formal role.

The IRGC could not leave it there. Unfortunately, this is who these people are. The Guards do not trust recognition unless it is accompanied by fear. Being included is not enough. They have to show why excluding them hurts. But the method of showing that is exactly why no serious maritime arrangement can treat them as a normal manager of anything. They are more desperate and volatile than Trump.

After all of this, after the war, after the strikes, after the decapitation, after the wreckage of the navy and the military apparatus, the institution that lost so much is still trying to dictate terms by firing at tankers off the coast of Oman.

The region is not happy. Qatar has no reason to find Iranian maritime coercion amusing when LNG tankers are at risk. Saudi Arabia and the UAE want commerce restored without making Iran the proprietor of the chokepoint. Kuwait and Bahrain are exposed because they host American facilities and therefore become pressure points when Iran wants to answer U.S. strikes. Everyone wants the Strait open. Almost no one wants that openness to mean paying respect money, formal or informal, to the IRGC.

Oman is the exception only because Oman has to be the exception. Its opportunity depends on keeping Iran close enough to civilize the claim. That does not mean Oman approves of Iranian attacks. It means Oman understands that condemning Iran so completely that the channel closes would hand the future of the Strait to the very forces Oman is trying to restrain. Muscat's balancing act is not sentimental. It is strategic. Oman wants to become the place where Iranian danger gets converted into regional procedure.

The IRGC wants to control that conversion. Procedure domesticates power. Fear preserves it, but only for a while. The IRGC can make the Strait unruly but the truth is the world won’t tolerate an unruly Strait indefinitely. Firing missiles at oil tankers that are not even in your waters is secular blasphemy. How can the Guards project power without losing it altogether?