President Donald Trump said Monday that the United States would "bomb the shit out of" Oman if the Gulf sultanate gets in the way of an agreement over the Strait of Hormuz, a threat he delivered by telephone to Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst in an interview for which the network provided no audio. [1] In the same conversation Trump called on Iran to "put up the white flag of surrender," insisted he has "no time schedule" for peace, and confirmed for the first time that Washington operates a direct back channel to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the force American and Israeli strikes have targeted since February. [2]
Sunday's edition recorded Kushner shuttling between regional leaders while Iran's foreign minister held his non-decision on negotiations. Monday's answer to a stalemated war was a threat against the mediator.
What Trump Actually Said
The quote traveled fast because Yingst published it himself, reporting on X that the president reacted directly to the ongoing Iran-Oman talks over control of the strait. [3] Fox News did not release audio of the phone call. [4] Asked about Oman again hours later in the Oval Office, Trump said the country, a longtime American strategic partner, had not "behaved very well." "But we'd handle them very easily, just like we do other things," he said. [2]
The rest of the day's messaging ran in the same register. On Truth Social, Trump restated what he called the number one goal: that Iran cannot have "in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon." [1] In the Oval Office he said Tehran wants a deal, "but they're not going to make the kind of a deal that I feel is necessary." [2] Of Iran's leadership he told Fox: "They're good poker players, but they're dying." [1] Asked whether he would extend the ceasefire agreement signed in mid-June and set to lapse Monday, he answered with one word: "No." [2]
He also answered a question nobody at Fox had asked about ammunition, dismissing concerns that nearly six months of fighting had drawn down American arsenals. What the United States has expended against Iran so far was "peanuts," he said, before suggesting that many advanced munitions and air-defense systems had been "given away" to Ukraine under his predecessor, Joe Biden. [1] That claim echoes warnings defense analysts have made since the war's opening weeks, that US and allied stockpiles are depleting faster than production can replace them. A president arguing his own arsenal is untouched because someone else emptied it is not a logistics briefing. It is a tell.
The Back Channel He Confirmed
The interview's quietest line may matter more than the loudest. Trump confirmed for the first time that Washington has opened a direct back channel to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the institution American and Israeli strikes have spent six months targeting, whose commanders have been killed in those strikes, and whose naval forces enforce the closure of the waterway under discussion. [1] "They're good poker players," he said of its leadership, "but they're dying." [2]
Read as diplomacy, the confirmation is an admission: the formal track signed at Versailles is dead, the foreign-ministry channel through Qatar and Pakistan carries messages Iran does not call negotiations, and the only conversation Washington believes is real runs through the uniformed men it is bombing. Read as bargaining, it is leverage theater aimed at a domestic audience that measures seriousness in toughness. Neither reading describes a peace process. Both describe why a mediator country keeps ending up in the sentence.
Why Oman, of All Places
Oman is not a party to this war. The country of 5.3 million people has hosted the only live negotiation track of the summer, between Muscat and Tehran, over who controls transit through the strait. It has decades of military and economic ties to Washington and has spent the war serving as a back channel between it and Tehran, a role that has earned it attacks from Iran. [1] Threatening to bomb it is threatening to bomb the venue.
It is also not the first threat. In May, during a Cabinet meeting, Trump said "Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up." [4] On Friday he told an audience he might declare the strait itself "a territory of the United States." [4] The May threat produced nothing observable. The Friday claim produced no Coast Guard. Monday's version arrives against the same empty ledger.
Iran's foreign ministry answered within hours that talks with Oman were "continuing in earnest" despite the outburst. [1] Its spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei added that the negotiations were taking a long time because of the complexity of the subject, the number of actors involved, and countries seeking to undermine the process, a list that now reads differently. [5]
The Instrument That Lapsed Today
The threat landed on the day the war's only dated document died. Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran at the Palace of Versailles on June 17, on the sidelines of the G7 summit. It paused hostilities and set a maximum sixty-day window, extendable only by mutual consent, for a comprehensive settlement covering sanctions relief, Iran's nuclear program, and other disputes. [1]
The memorandum called for all military operations to halt and for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen, but gave Iran a vaguely defined role in facilitating traffic and left open the possibility it could charge fees once the window closed. Iran seized on that clause to claim control of the waterway. [6] A week after the signing, Iran began firing on vessels using a bypass route along Oman's coast overseen by the US military. Washington struck Iranian targets; Iran retaliated against Arab hosts of American forces including Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain; the administration canceled the oil-sale waivers the deal had granted and restored its blockade of Iranian ports. By mid-July Trump declared the ceasefire over. [2][6] Each side accuses the other of killing the agreement, of which almost nothing remains. [6]
That is the context the bomb threat competes with for attention. A president who promised peace in sixty days has instead spent the deadline day threatening a neutral country that has done nothing more belligerent than host both sides' maps.
What Markets and Ship Trackers Did While the Clip Trended
Oil barely moved. Brent crude futures rose 55 cents to $89.07 and West Texas Intermediate added 17 cents to $82.57, after a week in which both benchmarks gained more than 5 percent on attacks against ADNOC-operated tankers in the strait and a Saudi Aramco refinery. [5] Bjarne Schieldrop at SEB Research told clients prices would not move substantially unless the nighttime flow of crude out of Hormuz actually stops or Bab el-Mandeb closes. [5]
Ship tracking told the starker story. Kpler data showed three vessels transited the strait Sunday against roughly 130 crossings a day before the war began on February 28, with the five-day average at 12. [2] The paper's energy desk records the divergence plainly: X loops a two-second clip as if a fleet had sortied; the hulls that would have to book the passage numbered fewer than a basketball team's starting five.
A senior Iranian official separately warned Reuters on Monday that Tehran will escalate tensions in the strait and the wider region if diplomacy fails, describing a policy shift from defense toward offense. [4] That is the actual escalation signal of the day, and it pointed the other way.
A Threat Is Not a Lane
Set the three Muscat threats side by side. May: behave or be blown up. Friday: your water is my territory. Monday: get in the way and be bombed. Between the first and the third, Iran and Oman advanced a transit map, tanker owners still refused the route, and the American position devolved from claiming control of the water to punishing the country trying to reopen it.
The pattern this paper has recorded since August holds. Threats against Muscat are not coordinates. Owners do not sail on rhetoric, insurers do not price it, and a mediator with holes predicted in it cannot hand anyone a map. The gap between platforms did real work Monday: one platform got the clip it wanted, the wraps got another item, and the reader who follows only one of them misses that the only functioning negotiation channel in the Gulf is now the one the American president says he may bomb.
-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington