President Donald Trump reportedly told Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst on Monday he was prepared to order airstrikes against Oman if it interferes with resolution of the Iran conflict.
“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the s**t out of them,” Yingst said Trump told him during a telephone interview. Yingst did not publish an audio recording of the remarks.
Trump was allegedly reacting to Iran’s frequent statements that it has nearly worked out a deal for joint control of the Strait of Hormuz with Oman, including a scheme for the two nations to extort “fees” from international shipping and divide the proceeds between them.
In June, the Iranian and Omani foreign ministries issued a joint statement announcing the formation of a “Strait of Hormuz Committee” that would draw up plans for “future management of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, the associated services to be provided, and the fees for the services.”
Oman reportedly gave Iran a proposal for joint stewardship of the strait that Tehran rejected, in part because Iran did not want Oman to have the option of using its territorial waters to help ships avoid Iran’s ransom demands. Instead, Iran demanded a system under which outbound traffic from the Persian Gulf would travel along the Omani coast, while incoming traffic would be under Iran’s control.
The United States has resolutely opposed any scheme for extorting “fees” from traffic through the vital international waterway, and Trump’s comments suggested he has grown exasperated with Oman working on a bilateral deal with Iran to control Hormuz, even as the Omanis claim to be impartial mediators between the U.S. and Iran.
According to Yingst, Trump said Iran must “put up the white flag of surrender” to end the crisis, and he was willing to be patient and give the U.S. blockade time to degrade Iran’s economy until it surrenders.
“I have no time schedule. I’m not in a hurry,” Trump said.
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“The midterms have nothing to do with my thinking,” he said, responding to a common theory that Iran believes Trump will fold before the U.S. midterm elections in November because he does not want high gas prices and inflation to turn voters against his party.
Trump told Yingst that the U.S. has a “direct backchannel” to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for negotiations, despite public pronouncements from Tehran that it has no interest in negotiating with the United States.
“They’re good poker players, but they’re dying,” Trump said.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei reiterated on Monday that Iran is not talking to the U.S., not even the negotiations that were supposed to take place within 60 days of the signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the U.S. and Iran in June.
“We did not begin any negotiations because, a few weeks after the signing, widespread violations of the agreement began, thereby rendering the 60-day provision irrelevant,” Baqaei said.
Baqaei said on Monday that Iran has reached an “agreement in principle” for joint control of the Strait of Hormuz, including a “route map for transit,” and said a joint statement from the two countries would be coming soon.
Trump previously threatened to use military force against Oman in late May, during earlier reports of bilateral talks between Oman and Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz.
“The strait is going to be open to everybody. Nobody’s going to control it. We’re going to watch over it. We’ll watch over it. But nobody’s going to control it,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on May 27.
“Oman will behave just like everybody else. Or else we’ll have to blow them up. They understand that,” he said.
Trump restated his red line against Iran’s nuclear program in a post on Truth Social in Monday morning: “The number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon.”