Iran calls Gulf ministers to Oman to talk Hormuz routes

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters that Gulf littoral foreign ministers will meet in Oman on Monday. Iran and Iraq will be there, he said, along with other coastal states. The agenda covers regional issues and the results of Iran-Oman talks on safe routes through the Strait of Hormuz. Some reports place the session in Salalah and include the six Gulf Cooperation Council members. That would be the first ministerial gathering of the GCC six and Iran in one room since the war began on 28 February.

Baghaei called the meeting a step toward trust among regional countries and away from what he termed interference by players from outside the region. He also said Iran cannot guarantee shipping security while the United States keeps up a naval blockade and an economic campaign. Those two sentences are the frame Tehran wants: a regional table, with Washington treated as the problem rather than a party.

Late last month Iran and Oman said they had discussed a phased plan that includes a temporary joint shipping corridor. One version of that plan, reported after earlier technical talks, would send inbound Gulf traffic through Iranian waters and outbound traffic through Omani waters. Tehran is also weighing service fees. Ships that ignore the current restrictions have been struck. U.S. forces have bombed Iranian coastal sites to contest that control.

Before February the strait carried about a fifth of the world's seaborne oil. That flow is no longer free. The IEA and tanker-tracking firms have spent the year counting cargoes that wait, divert, or stop. Gulf producers have learned that American pressure has not reopened the waterway on a timetable they can use. Direct talks with Tehran are the admission of that fact.

Oman is the natural host. It has a shoreline on the strait, a habit of talking to both Tehran and Washington, and a claim of its own to sovereign rights in the waterway. Muscat has already said fees could be collected for services provided. That sentence matters. If a fee regime is born in an Iran-Oman paper and then blessed by a wider Gulf table, the strait's postwar rules will have been written without the U.S. Navy in the room.

President Donald Trump has said he has no regrets about the war and has claimed at times that Hormuz is clear of mines. Iran and Oman have discussed mine clearance as a separate track. Those claims do not match the permission system still in force. Monday's meeting will not reopen the strait. It can lock in who sits at the table when routes and charges are designed.

Iraq's presence is not decoration. Drones that hit Saudi pump stations this week left Iraqi soil. Baghdad is trying to show it can police its side of the Shalamcheh crossing and still attend a Gulf conversation. The other GCC states come because their export arithmetic now runs through a waterway they do not control.

Baghaei's line about keeping "transregional players" out is the political payload. If Monday produces even a thin communique on safe lanes, Tehran will say the region is managing Hormuz itself. Washington will say the blockade and the war are what forced the conversation. Both readings can travel with the same piece of paper.