GCC–Iran Foreign Ministers to Meet in Salalah to Hammer Out Temporary Strait of Hormuz Shipping Pact

Shipping choke-points have repeatedly become bargaining chips in Middle-East conflicts—from Egypt’s closure of the Suez Canal after the 1967 Six-Day War to the U.S.-escorted ‘Operation Earnest Will’ tankers during the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. Like those episodes, today’s Hormuz paralysis exposes how oil-era power derives not from owning hydrocarbons but from controlling their routes. Oman’s quiet mediation reprises the back-channel role it played in the 2013 talks that birthed the JCPOA, signaling smaller states can occasionally bend the strategic wills of superpowers. Over a century horizon, the event matters less for the temporary paperwork likely signed on Monday than for what it hints at: a gradual regionalisation of Gulf security as U.S. credibility erodes and as electrification and alternative supply chains threaten to shrink Hormuz’s leverage by mid-century. Whether this meeting succeeds or fails, it is another data-point in the long arc of Gulf actors trying—since Britain’s 1971 withdrawal—to seize agency over their own seaways rather than outsource them to extra-regional navies.