In mid-September, Saudi officials postponed a meeting that was set to be held with their Iranian counterparts in Salalah, Oman, to discuss reopening transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Oman’s foreign minister said the meeting had been postponed “in the interest of consensus,” as the focus of ongoing talks between Muscat and Tehran has shifted from managing wartime navigation to the future institutional governance of the Strait. The apparent lack of consensus among the Gulf Cooperation Council states reflected the growing stakes of the negotiations. Riyadh’s calculus became even more complicated days later, when Yemen’s Houthis overran central government positions on the Red Sea and established a foothold overlooking the strategic maritime chokepoint of Bab al-Mandab, further constraining Saudi export options.
GCC states have long differed over how to engage Tehran, including during the past seven months of war. The latest episode, however, signaled that those differences had entered even weightier territory—from navigating an emergency situation to potentially legitimizing a future order. At stake is not simply how to reopen Hormuz, but who gets to write the rules that govern it afterward.
Restoring Navigation Is Not Governing Navigation
The political value of controlling a chokepoint is not synonymous with the ability to deny access. It rests, however, in the possibility of turning restored access into a negotiated institution. Wartime control creates bargaining leverage; it does not, by itself, create peacetime governing authority. The unresolved question in Salalah was where one ends and the other begins.
The Oman-Iran framework that would have been discussed in Salalah already contained the seeds of this transition. Their August 25 joint statement proposed a temporary navigational corridor and joint mine-clearance project, while envisaging technical negotiations over a permanent corridor and future administration of the strait, including information-sharing, traffic management, and navigational and security services. These measures are no longer emergency arrangements; they concern who writes the rules, who implements them, and potentially who derives political or economic value from compliance.
The emerging fault line within GCC states, therefore, is not simply over whether and how to engage Iran. It is over whether temporary arrangements made necessary by the war become the institutional foundation of the region’s postwar order.
Iranian participation in a future Hormuz framework is not itself anomalous. Geography makes Iran and Oman indispensable coastal states, and there is an established precedent for their cooperation: the existing Hormuz traffic-separation scheme was proposed by both states and adopted by the International Maritime Organization in 1968. The critical distinction is between co-authorship and hierarchy. A postwar arrangement can recognize Iran as a co-author of mutually negotiated rules without recognizing privileged authority derived from its demonstrated capacity to disrupt the system.
Restoring navigation, in other words, is not equivalent to determining the future governance of navigation. The former addresses an emergency while the latter distributes authority, and collapsing the two risks converting coercive leverage into an enduring institutional entitlement.
A Division of Gulf Strategic Functions
The GCC states approach this question from different positions, reflecting their distinct geographies, relations with Tehran, exposure to continued disruption, and broader strategic security strategies. But those differences need not translate into competing policies. Properly coordinated, they could amount to a division of strategic functions.
Oman’s immediate priority is separating maritime deconfliction from the wider war while preserving a regional negotiating channel. Muscat has sought to prevent continued paralysis in the Strait while the parties wait for a comprehensive U.S.-Iranian settlement. Tehran, meanwhile, has emphasized Oman’s role as its primary negotiating partner over Hormuz, given that the territorial waters of the two countries encompass the Strait. This gives Muscat an indispensable procedural role, but also creates the risk that arrangements negotiated bilaterally could acquire regional consequences before other Gulf states have consented to them.
Saudi Arabia’s concern is different. Riyadh wants to ensure that any durable arrangement governing Hormuz receives broader GCC political acceptance rather than emerging incrementally from temporary wartime measures. It therefore distinguishes between support for engagement with Tehran and consent to the architecture produced by that engagement. Oman’s explanation that the Salalah meeting was postponed “in the interest of consensus” is revealing in this respect. It suggests that agreement among the Gulf states is itself becoming part of the bargaining process—and that withholding such agreement can serve as a source of leverage.
Bahrain has staked out the clearest position at the other end of the spectrum. It refused to participate in the Salalah meeting altogether, arguing that regional security could not be preserved through “appeasement” and demanding that Hormuz remain open without discrimination, fees, or permits. Its role is therefore less that of broker than boundary-setter: rejecting the premise that Iran’s wartime ability to regulate passage should confer a right to do so after the war.
Qatar occupies a position closer to Oman diplomatically but has drawn a similarly clear distinction between negotiation and authority. Doha has remained active in mediation with Iran and other regional and international actors while insisting on the immediate and unconditional reopening of Hormuz. More importantly for the postwar debate, it has said that any future arrangements for managing the Strait should rest on regional consensus and international law. That position provides a possible bridge between Muscat’s emphasis on keeping negotiations moving and Riyadh’s concern that negotiations not outrun collective consent.
The UAE is pursuing another form of leverage altogether. Abu Dhabi has likewise demanded the unconditional reopening of Hormuz and rejected its use as an instrument of economic pressure. But it is also accelerating efforts to reduce its dependence on the Strait through alternative ports, pipelines, rail links, and trade corridors. This “Zero Hormuz” strategy cannot make the waterway irrelevant, but it can reduce the value of threatening to close it. Where Oman seeks to manage Iranian leverage diplomatically and Saudi Arabia seeks to constrain it politically, the Emirati approach attempts to erode it structurally.
These approaches point toward a potentially more consequential form of Gulf coordination than simply maintaining a unified diplomatic position. Iran possesses immediate leverage because it can obstruct navigation. The Gulf states possess a different kind of leverage: the diplomatic, legal, economic, and political capacity to confer—or withhold—the regional legitimacy necessary to turn a wartime arrangement into a durable postwar order.
The larger Gulf foreign policy test, then, is whether these differentiated approaches can converge around a common political threshold. Wartime coercion may produce bargaining leverage, but it should not be permitted to generate a sustained entitlement to govern the regional commons. Absent such a threshold, Gulf differentiation risks becoming the mechanism through which Tehran bilateralizes questions whose consequences are inherently regional, extracting through fragmented negotiations what it could not through collective agreement.
With one, however, Gulf diversity may acquire strategic value rather than signify fragmentation. Individual states could perform distinct diplomatic, political, legal, and infrastructural functions while collectively limiting the conversion of Iranian coercive leverage into institutional authority. In this sense, the debate over Gulf strategic autonomy is not primarily about negotiating with Tehran without Washington at the table. It is about whether the GCC states can help write the postwar rules without allowing the emergency that forced negotiations to predetermine the authority those rules ultimately confer.
