A sultan who overthrew his own father, plays the lute and set up what may be the only symphony orchestra of homegrown origin in the Arab world is not the obvious figure to bring Washington and Tehran to the same table. Qaboos bin Said did it anyway, and the habit of quiet go-between work has outlived him.
Qaboos ruled Oman from 1970. He was schooled first in India, then at Britain’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. The Christian Science Monitor described a ruler who modernised his country gradually, set up its first newspaper a year after taking power and presided over a state that, in the words of the writer Robert Kaplan, was “so well-governed” in a “quiet and understated way”.
A debt owed to Iran
The link with Tehran goes back further than any diplomacy. Foreign Policy traced it to the early 1970s, when Qaboos was fighting a British-backed war against Marxist rebels in Dhofar, in the south. At his request Iran’s Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi dispatched troops and military assistance. From 1972 to 1975, thousands of Iranian troops served on Omani soil. Qaboos never forgot who had helped him win, the magazine wrote, and that personal debt shaped one of the Gulf’s more unusual friendships.
Geography did the rest. A mountain range separates Oman from much of the Arabian peninsula, and Iran sits on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow channel that matters enormously for global oil shipments.
The secret channel
The Monitor, citing WikiLeaks, said Oman proposed in 2009 to set up contacts between the United States and Iran, which had gone 30 years without diplomatic relations. Muscat’s condition was silence. The breakthrough came through a smaller crisis: the arrest of three American hikers, Sarah Shroud, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, accused of spying after walking near the Iran-Iraq border. Oman helped win their release.
With that success behind him, the sultan offered to broker a wider rapprochement, the Associated Press reported. US and Iranian officials met in Oman in March 2013. Secretary of State John Kerry followed in May. Talks gathered pace after Hassan Rouhani replaced Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran’s June elections, and by November the Geneva nuclear deal was public. Qaboos was not in front of the cameras for it, and Muscat sent out no statements claiming credit.
Haitham carries it forward
Qaboos died in January 2020, and Foreign Policy that month wondered aloud whether the special Oman-Iran relationship would survive him. It has so far. His successor, Sultan Haitham bin Tariq, took the throne in January 2020 and later made his first trip to Tehran, a year after President Ebrahim Raisi came to Muscat in May. His foreign minister travelled with him. Anadolu Agency’s sources said the sultan was bringing messages from both Cairo and Washington, and that Oman wanted to unstick the stalled effort over the 2015 nuclear agreement.
Anadolu also credited Oman, quietly but decisively, with getting Tehran and Riyadh talking again after a seven-year rupture. Muscat, along with Iraq, helped; the agreement itself emerged in Beijing following two years of talks.
Sources
- The man behind secret US-Iran talks: Sultan Qaboos
- Oman's sultan due in Tehran with Iran-Egypt detente on agenda
- Why Oman's Sultan Qaboos Loved Iran
