Oman's foreign minister calls on US’s allies to help it exit Iran war

ISTANBUL

Oman’s foreign minister has called on the US’s allies to help extricate it from an "unwanted entanglement" in Iran, arguing that Washington had ceded control of its own foreign policy.

Writing in an opinion piece for The Economist, Badr Albusaidi, who mediated the most recent indirect nuclear negotiations between Washington and Tehran, said the US had made its "greatest miscalculation" by allowing itself to be drawn into the conflict at all.

"This is not America's war," he wrote, adding there was no realistic scenario in which both Israel and the US would achieve their objectives.

He warned that Israel's goal of toppling the Iranian regime would require a prolonged ground campaign, opening "a new front in the forever wars which President Donald Trump previously vowed to end."

Calling on Washington's friends to intervene, he said doing so required acknowledging "the extent to which America has lost control of its own foreign policy."

Albusaidi described Iran's retaliatory strikes against Gulf countries that host US bases as an "inevitable, if deeply regrettable" response to a war explicitly "designed to terminate" it, saying it was "probably the only rational option available to the Iranian leadership."

He also pointed to the disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz as a foreseeable consequence, warning that it was driving up energy prices and threatening a deep recession.

"If this had not been anticipated by the architects of this war, that was surely a grave miscalculation," he wrote.

On diplomacy, Albusaidi was pessimistic, saying it would be "certainly difficult" for Iranian leaders to return to talks with an administration that had twice switched from negotiations to bombing and assassination.

"But the path away from war, hard though it may be for both parties to follow it, may have to lie through precisely this resumption," he wrote.

US-Israeli strikes on Iran began on Feb. 28 and have reportedly killed around 1,300 people so far, including then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.