There is something quietly striking buried in Monday’s edition of Oman’s national newspaper. On page fifteen, columnist Zaher bin Harith Al-Mahruqi publishes a genuinely thoughtful piece about Gulf security — asking hard questions about what went wrong, and what needs to change. He argues, convincingly, that the war on Iran exposed a security model built on borrowed foundations. He calls for something more honest, more sovereign, more real.

It is a good piece. And it almost says the thing it means to say.

Because the answer Al-Mahruqi is searching for is not somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered. It is in the country he is sitting in. It is, in a sense, on the front page of the same newspaper.

What the last six weeks actually looked like

When the bombs started falling on February 28, nobody in the Gulf had been consulted. The war arrived the way weather arrives — fast, indifferent to whoever happened to be in the way. Iranian strikes hit airports and ports. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel through which a fifth of the world’s oil travels every day, went quiet. Hundreds of tankers sat anchored, engines running, going nowhere. Energy prices climbed. Supply chains that had hummed reliably for decades seized up overnight.

Gulf states had done everything the traditional security playbook asked of them. They had signed defence agreements, hosted bases, bought weapons systems, maintained close ties with Washington. And yet when the moment came, none of that gave them a seat at the table where the real decisions were made. The ceasefire that eventually paused the fighting was announced on American terms, on American timing, with American interests at its centre. The Gulf paid costs it had no say in incurring.

That is the frustration driving Al-Mahruqi’s column. And it is a legitimate frustration.

But here is what was also happening

Three weeks before the war, on February 6, indirect talks between the United States and Iran took place in Muscat. Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al-Busaidi sat in the room and helped make the conversation possible. By his own account, and by the accounts of people close to the process, those talks were going somewhere real. Iran was engaging seriously. A path existed.

The war happened anyway. History turned on decisions made elsewhere.

Then came March 3. Iranian drones struck Duqm port — Oman’s own territory, on its own coast. The country that had spent weeks trying to hold a diplomatic door open had just been hit by the side it was trying to help. Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesperson said what many were thinking: the strike on Oman was “an assault on the very principle of mediation.”

It would have been entirely understandable for Oman to close ranks, harden its language, and step back from the role it had been playing.

Instead, Al-Busaidi published a statement calling for an immediate ceasefire. He said diplomatic options were still available. He said the off-ramps were still there if anyone wanted to use them. He kept the phone lines open.

And on Monday morning — the same morning Al-Mahruqi’s column appeared in print — Sultan Haitham bin Tarik took a call from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. They talked about the regional situation. They agreed on the need for continued diplomacy. They reaffirmed support for peaceful solutions.

Think about what that means in practice. In the middle of the most dangerous regional crisis in a generation, the Sultan’s calls get answered. His foreign minister’s voice carries. His country’s ports have been the venue for the conversations that actually mattered. That does not happen by accident, and it does not come from the size of your military.

The thing that is easy to miss

Al-Mahruqi frames the solution mainly in military terms — better integration, shared defence systems, joint early warning. Those things have their place. But what Oman has spent decades building is something different and, in many ways, harder to replicate.

It is the credibility of a country that has genuinely tried not to make enemies. That does not station foreign troops on its soil. That speaks to parties who refuse to speak to each other. That, when the pressure is highest and the temptation to take sides is real, chooses the harder and less glamorous path of staying useful to everyone.

This is not strategic indifference. It is strategic patience — the understanding that in a region this fractured, the most powerful thing a small state can offer is trust. And trust, once built over generations, becomes something no amount of money can simply buy.

When the Gulf now asks where real security comes from — not the borrowed kind, not the kind that evaporates when your patron has other priorities — the Omani answer is not a doctrine written in a think tank. It is a practice. It is what happened in February, and in March, and on Monday morning.

Why the silence matters

Al-Mahruqi probably did not mention his own country out of modesty, or perhaps because writing about your home with pride feels uncomfortably close to self-congratulation. Oman has never been a country that announces itself loudly.

But maybe that reticence is also worth gently challenging. There is a conversation happening right now across the Gulf and beyond about what security should look like after this war. Voices from Washington, London, and across the region are all weighing in. Oman has something real to contribute to that conversation — not as a model to be copied wholesale, but as proof that another way is possible. That a country can be small, principled, and strategically relevant all at once. That the phone can keep ringing even after your port gets bombed.

Al-Mahruqi asked the right question. The answer has been visible from Muscat for a long time. It just rarely says its own name out loud.

This analysis is informed by reporting in Oman Daily (April 13, 2026), including the column by Zaher bin Harith Al-Mahruqi, and verified through publicly available regional sources.