Why Oman Does Not See Iran the Way Other Gulf Nations Do

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Oman would “behave just like everybody else” over the Strait of Hormuz, warning that otherwise “we’ll have to blow them up,” after he was asked whether he would accept a short-term arrangement allowing Iran and Oman to help control or manage the waterway.

His comments came after Iranian state television reported that Tehran could reopen the Strait of Hormuz within a month if terms were agreed, under an unofficial draft that reportedly included Iranian-Omani involvement in managing traffic through the strategic passage.

Oman hosted the prewar negotiations between the United States and Iran. It has been seen as one of the few governments that enjoy Iran’s trust. In parallel, Oman maintained a radically neutral attitude during the war betwee the U.S. and Iran, rejecting even to condemn the Iranian strikes on its neighbor Gulf U.S. allies.

This relationship between the Sultanate of Oman and Iran should remind us of an important fact: the Gulf states differ significantly in how they perceive Iran as a threat. This difference stems not only from ideology or political orientation, as it may look like at face value, but basically from the demographic composition of these nations.

Shia Presence in the Gulf

According to Pew Research Center’s 2009 mapping of Shia populations, Bahrain stands out among the Gulf monarchies as the only case where Shia Muslims form a clear majority, estimated at 65–75% of the country’s Muslim population. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia follow as states with politically significant Shia minorities: Pew estimated Shia Muslims at 20–25% of Kuwait’s Muslims and 10–15% of Saudi Arabia’s Muslims. By contrast, the Shia presence in the other Gulf monarchies is smaller: around 10% in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and roughly 5–10% in Oman.

These figures show that the Gulf divide over Iran is not simply about foreign policy alignment. In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, the Iranian question intersects more directly with domestic sectarian politics, while in Oman, Qatar, and the UAE it has more often been managed through questions of trade, geography, maritime security, and regional balance.

Even before the Iranian Revolution, the influence of the Shiite Islamic Dawa Party had moved from Iraq to Kuwait. The party emerged from the Shia religious milieu of Najaf and Karbala under growing Baathist repression. As Saddam Hussein intensified its pressure on Shia Islamist networks, some of their influence and personnel moved into Kuwait.

In Bahrain, meanwhile, the Shirazi current, associated with the circle of Ayatollah Muhammad al-Shirazi and later figures such as Hadi al-Modarresi, developed a foothold among segments of Shia activism before and after the revolution. By the early 1980s, the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain had become the most visible expression of this Iranian-revolutionary current in Bahrain, advocating an Islamic political order inspired by Khomeini’s revolution.

This Shiite Islamist presence naturally grew after the Iranian Revolution, supported by the project of exporting the revolution and creating regional branches loyal to Iran under the name Hezbollah. The name itself was originally used inside Iran to describe the militia of the Islamic Republican Party during the early years of civil violence with The People’s Mojahedin Organization that followed the revolution, as well as the assassinations carried out by the Furqan group against leaders of the Islamic coalition, beginning with Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari.

The effect of the Iranian revolution was immediate across the Gulf. A few months after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Shia communities in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province rose in what became known as the Muharram uprising, centered in Qatif and al-Ahsa. Toby Craig Jones describes the unrest as seven days of violent confrontation between state security forces and thousands of Shia protesters after the regime repressed public Ashura commemorations.

Two years later, Shiites in Bahrain, led by the Iran-backed Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, attempted to carry out a coup against the Al Khalifa ruling family.

In Kuwait, the 1980s brought bombings linked to the Iran-Iraq War, culminating in the 1985 assassination attempt against Emir Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah, which Gulf and Western accounts have long associated with Iran-backed networks.

Regional balance

By contrast, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates did not feel the same kind of threat on the domestic front.

On the contrary, Qatar’s position was shaped by its own priorities. In the 1980s and 1990s, Doha faced territorial and border pressures from its neighbors. The dispute with Bahrain over the Hawar Islands and related territories escalated in 1986, while a 1992 border clash with Saudi Arabia left several dead. In this context, Iran was not a threat but a useful counterweight to Saudi pressure. Qatar and Iran also share the North Dome/South Pars field, the world’s largest gas field, making stable coexistence with Tehran a strategic necessity. Under Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Qatar’s openness to Islamist and Arab nationalist currents brought Doha further closer to Tehran.

The UAE’s relationship with Iran was more divided. Abu Dhabi viewed Iran through the lens of strategic threat, especially because of the unresolved dispute over Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs. Iran took control of the islands in 1971, just as Britain was withdrawing from the Gulf and the UAE was being formed. Dubai, however, maintained deep commercial ties with Iran and became one of Tehran’s most important trade and re-export hubs, especially under sanctions.

This created a structural contradiction inside UAE policy. Abu Dhabi increasingly moved toward hard security alignment with Washington, and later with Israel, while Dubai’s economy retained a strong interest in commercial pragmatism with Iran. The Abraham Accords sharpened Iran’s perception that Abu Dhabi was moving from pragmatic coexistence toward open participation in an anti-Iranian security architecture.

Oman’s special case

Oman’s relationship with Iran has been deeper and more historically distinctive. During the Dhofar rebellion in sout Oman, Sultan Qaboos faced a Marxist insurgency backed by South Yemen and embedded in the wider Cold War. The Shah of Iran intervened militarily in the 1970s at Qaboos’s request, sending Iranian forces to help defeat the rebellion. James Goode’s study of the Iranian intervention in Oman describes it as one of the Shah’s most successful foreign-policy initiatives, undertaken at Sultan Qaboos’s request to quell the Marxist rebellion in Dhofar.

U.S. diplomatic records from the period also note the scale of Iranian troop involvement in Dhofar, underscoring that Iran’s role was not symbolic but militarily significant. This left an enduring memory in Muscat that Iran, unlike in the Saudi, Kuwaiti, or Bahraini narratives, had once acted as a security guarantor for the Omani state rather than as a revolutionary subversive force.

By the same token, Oman’s Ibadi identity is neither Sunni nor Shia, and this gave Muscat a political culture less invested in the Sunni-Shia polarization that structured much of Saudi, Bahraini, and Kuwaiti threat perception. It creates a degree of cultural affinity between Oman and Iran stemming from the fact that both states are non-Sunni nations in the midst of a sea of Sunni populations.

This is why Muscat can appear today, from a U.S. perspective, too close to Tehran, while from Muscat’s own perspective, the relationship is less an ideological alignment than an inherited security doctrine shaped by the peculiar history of the Omani state and the region.