Saudi Arabia stopped the Salalah talks on the Strait of Hormuz
Iran, Iraq and five Gulf states were due to meet on Monday to draw shipping corridors through the strait. It was called off the night before, with no new date, after Riyadh filed amendments to a proposal Tehran and Muscat had already settled.
The meeting that was meant to draw shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz never opened. It was set for Monday in Salalah, the port city on Oman’s southern coast, and it was called off on Sunday night with no new date attached.
The host said so itself. Oman’s foreign ministry announced the postponement of the Salalah regional meeting, citing the need to build the right conditions for constructive dialogue, and foreign minister Badr Albusaidi framed the delay as a matter of consensus.
Iran, Iraq and five of the six Gulf Cooperation Council states were due to attend: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman.
The blocker was not the country everyone was watching
This is the part worth slowing down for. Bahrain had already refused, and said why at volume: it will not sit in a collective meeting with Iran before diplomatic relations are restored, and it regards regional security as something appeasement cannot buy. But Bahrain’s absence was priced in. The meeting was going ahead without it.
What stopped it was Saudi Arabia, which was going to be there. Iran’s foreign ministry pointed squarely at the Saudi objection as the reason for the delay. Riyadh is understood to have filed amendments to the Iranian-Omani proposal, worried that the wording would harden into a new status quo in the strait that it could not live with.
The timing explains some of the irritation. Days earlier Saudi Arabia shut its East-West oil pipeline after drone strikes launched from Iraq, and it has been hit repeatedly by the Houthis, who over the weekend took control of Yemen’s Red Sea coast.
What the deal would have done
Iran and Oman are the only two countries with territorial waters in the strait, which is why the two of them are the ones drafting. On the version described so far, the inbound corridor would run through Iranian waters and the outbound one mostly through Omani waters, with short stretches still Iranian. Voluntary tolls were on the table to pay for navigation aids, environmental protection and search and rescue.
Tehran keeps stressing that none of this reopens Hormuz. It is a traffic system built for the day the conditions exist, not a declaration that they do.
Which leaves the falsifiable part, and it is the part we said we would follow: registration. On Monday Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said Tehran and Muscat had still to decide how to announce or register the agreement. No notification has been lodged anywhere, and until one is, no shipowner has a route it can rely on. For Europe, and for the energy prices that reach Portugal, that piece of paper matters more than any summit photograph.
Image: Balou46 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
