They Chose War: Why Trump Bombed a Deal That Was Already Done

Washington, March 2 – There is a hallway in Muscat, Oman, that is forty-seven meters long. For eleven days in February, a diplomatic aide walked it two hundred and twelve times, carrying proposals between an American team in one room and an Iranian team in another. His Fitbit recorded fourteen thousand steps on negotiation days. All in the service of what he believed was a breakthrough.

On Thursday, February 26, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi emerged from the third round of indirect talks in Geneva and told reporters that “good progress” had been made. Negotiators had begun working through the key elements of a potential agreement. Both sides showed “clear seriousness” about reaching a deal.

The next day, Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi went on CBS’s Face the Nation and dropped a bombshell that should have made front pages everywhere. Iran had agreed to “never, ever have nuclear material that would create a bomb.” Not “not seek to.” Not “refrain from.” Never. Ever. Zero stockpiling. Full IAEA verification. Existing stockpiles would be “blended to the lowest level possible” and “converted into fuel, and that fuel will be irreversible.” Al Busaidi called it a “big achievement.” He said a “peace deal is within our reach.”

Forty-five years. Every American president since Jimmy Carter had tried and failed to get Iran to agree to zero nuclear weapons capability. Richard Nixon. Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan. George H.W. Bush. Bill Clinton. George W. Bush. Barack Obama. Donald Trump the first time. Joe Biden. Donald Trump again. Forty-five years of sanctions, threats, assassinations, cyberattacks, and outright war. And on February 27, 2026, it was done. Fourteen pages. Times New Roman. Color-coded green for confirmed. The pens for the signing ceremony – twelve Montblanc Meisterstucks at six hundred and thirty dollars each – were already in transit.

That afternoon, Al Busaidi met with Vice President Vance in Washington. The Vice President used the word “encouraging.” His aide stopped making eye contact for the last nine minutes of the meeting. The aide in Muscat noticed this. Noticing things is the only part of his job that is not water glasses.

At 4:00 PM that same Friday, President Trump told reporters he was “not happy with the pace.” He said Iranians “are not willing to give us what we have to have.” He demanded that Iran stop enriching uranium altogether – a demand no Iranian government could ever accept and that had never been part of the negotiations.

At 6:00 AM Gulf Standard Time on February 28, the aide says woke up to push notifications. Operation Epic Fury. Operation Roaring Lion. The United States and Israel had launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran. Tehran. Isfahan. Qom. Karaj. Kermanshah. Nuclear facilities. IRGC bases. Sites near the Supreme Leader’s office.

Someone in both governments spent time choosing these names. Epic Fury. Roaring Lion. The aide had spent eleven days on “never, ever.” They spent theirs on branding. By Saturday evening, Iranian state media confirmed that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – eighty-six years old, thirty-six years in power – was dead.

Here is the question that no one in Washington wants to answer. If a deal was, “within reach” and Iran had agreed to “never, ever” possess nuclear weapons material, what exactly was the military action meant to achieve? What was the hurry? What was the point?

The bluff that became a bomb

Economist Jeffrey Sachs has been saying what establishment media tiptoes around. In an interview this week, he called the US-Israel war on Iran “an imperial war” driven by “oil and power” rather than security concerns. He accused Washington of misleading the public, arguing that wars from Iraq to Syria were sold on “phony pretenses” through focus groups and carefully crafted narratives.

But his most devastating critique came in January, when he and Sybil Fares published a piece titled “The US-Israel Hybrid War Against Iran.” They described how the United States has been waging “hybrid wars” on Iran through a coordinated strategy of economic sanctions, financial coercion, cyber operations, political subversion, and information warfare. The goal, they argued, is not to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon – Iran does not have one and, as of February 27, had agreed never to have one. The goal is regime change.

Just one day after that article appeared, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos. He outlined in detail how US Treasury sanctions were designed to drive Iran’s currency to collapse, cripple its banking system, and push Iran’s population into the streets. This is the “maximum pressure” campaign. “In December, their economy collapsed,” Bessent said. “The central bank has started to print money. There is dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the street.” He described Iran’s economic collapse as a “positive” development and framed the strategy as “economic statecraft.”

A 2022 study published in The Lancet by Francisco Rodríguez and colleagues examined the health impacts of sanctions. The research found that sanctions are “significantly associated with sharp increases in mortality,” with the strongest effects documented for unilateral US sanctions. The study concluded that the death toll from such measures can be comparable to that of armed conflict.

Sachs put it bluntly in his NDTV interview: the justification for military action is “misleading” and rooted in “hegemonic ambitions.” The Trump administration, he suggested, was bluffing about the threat while maneuvering for geopolitical dominance. Except now, the bluff has been called. The bombs have fallen. And the entire Gulf is on fire.

The retaliation and its fallout

Iran retaliated. Not surgically. Not proportionally. They fired hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at targets across the Gulf. The UAE Defense Ministry announced a ninety-six percent intercept rate – extraordinary by any military standard. But the ministry’s own numbers tell a more complicated story.

Fourteen drones landed within the UAE. Debris fell across Saadiyat Island, Khalifa City, Bani Yas, and Mohamed bin Zayed City. A Pakistani worker died in Abu Dhabi. Fires broke out at Jebel Ali Port and on the facade of the Burj Al Arab. The world’s busiest international airport shut down. In Qatar, at least sixteen people were injured. In Kuwait, one dead and more than thirty wounded. In Bahrain, drones struck near the international airport and damaged residential buildings in Manama.

And then came the attack that shatters every comfortable narrative. On Sunday morning, two drones struck the commercial port of Duqm on Oman’s eastern coast. One hit mobile workers’ accommodation, injuring a foreign worker. The other landed near fuel tanks. Hours later, an oil tanker off Oman’s coast was targeted. The Palau-flagged Skylight, anchored north of Khasab Port, was hit and set ablaze. Its twenty-crew members – fifteen Indians and five Iranians – were evacuated. Four were injured.

Oman. The mediator. The country with no American bases. The country that had just spent weeks shuttling between Tehran and Washington, walking forty-seven-meter hallways two hundred and twelve times, typing fourteen-page documents in Times New Roman. The country whose foreign minister had, just two days earlier, announced that peace was “within reach.” The country that had done what no other could do: gotten Iran to say “never, ever.” Iran bombed it anyway.

The Sovereignty question no one wants to answer

There was a sentence buried in the UAE Foreign Ministry statement on Sunday that should keep every Gulf and other leaders where US has military bases awake at night: “The UAE voices its firm rejection of the use of the territories of countries in the region as arenas for settling scores or expanding the scope of conflict.” That sentence was not addressed to Iran. It was addressed to everyone. It was addressed to the United States and its allies in this war.

The grand bargain of the Gulf has operated on a simple formula for decades. Host American military bases. Receive a security umbrella. Prosper under the perception of invulnerability. Build the tallest buildings, the busiest airports, the most expensive hotels, on the understanding that the American presence deters anyone from attacking you. That bargain just failed in real time on the most expensive real estate on earth.

Iran did not fire missiles at the UAE because it has a dispute with the Emiratis. It fired them because the UAE hosts Al Dhafra Air Base, where the US Air Force’s 380th Expeditionary Wing operates reconnaissance, refueling, and combat support aircraft. When the United States launched Operation Epic Fury from bases scattered across the Gulf, every host nation became a co-belligerent whether it consented or not.

The same logic applies across the region and including in Africa’s Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti that is the only permanent U.S. military base in Africa, hosting approximately 4,000 personnel and serving as the headquarters for Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa. The base is a critical hub for counterterrorism operations across the continent, including drone operations in Somalia and Yemen. Qatar hosts Al-Udeid Air Base, the biggest US facility in the Middle East. Bahrain hosts the Fifth Fleet. Kuwait hosts Camp Arifjan. Saudi Arabia hosts Prince Sultan Air Base. All were hit.

GCC Secretary-General Jassem Mohammed Al-Budaiwi issued a statement expressing “strong condemnation and denunciation of the brutal Iranian attacks targeting the port of Duqm.” He called them “a flagrant violation of Oman’s sovereignty and a dangerous escalation that undermines the security and stability of the region.”

The Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs went further. In a statement, it condemned “the Iranian attacks that targeted Duqm commercial port in the sisterly Sultanate of Oman and an oil tanker off its coast.” The ministry described the attacks as “a violation of the Sultanate’s sovereignty, an unacceptable escalation, and a cowardly targeting of a country playing an active mediation role.”

Dr. Majed Al Ansari, Advisor to the Qatari Prime Minister, issued a warning that should be engraved above every diplomatic mission in the Gulf: “The deliberate targeting of the Sultanate of Oman, a country that has made sincere efforts to mediate and prevent bloodshed, and has sought to keep the door to diplomacy open until the last moment, is an attack on the very principle of mediation.”

UAE -U.S recalculation underway?

Dubai did not build itself into the crossroads of global commerce by taking sides. It built itself by being the place where all sides could do business. That positioning is now incompatible with hosting the infrastructure of someone else’s war. The UAE knows this. That single sentence about rejecting the use of Gulf territories as arenas for settling scores is not a complaint. Analysts say it is the beginning of a renegotiation. If the Gulf States conclude that American bases create more risk than they prevent, the security architecture of the Middle East that has held since 1991 will have to be rebuilt from scratch.

On X, the account Aproko Units captured the dilemma: “Missiles hit malls, ports, and airports despite a 96 per cent interception rate. The lesson: absolute safety does not exist when foreign wars are fought from your soil. The UAE’s rejection of its territory being used for conflict is a sign the Gulf is reconsidering the old U.S. protection model.”

But not everyone agrees. On X, user ALIVO77 offered a different perspective: “I don’t think that there is an issue necessarily regarding Gulf States hosting US bases. It’s more of an issue that Iran is now a threat not just to US bases or Israel, but it taking it out on the civilians of their ‘allies’ and that includes Qatar and now Oman, which was also attacked, so that point doesn’t stand now.”

The counter-argument has force. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards did tell vessels that passage through the Strait of Hormuz was not permitted. That strait handles roughly one-fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption. Any sustained disruption raises global oil prices, hitting African net oil importers like Kenya, Senegal and Morocco particularly hard.

Read more: How Iran’s Retaliation Threatens Kenya’s Economy and Security

Dr. Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE President, gave a remarkably candid interview to The National. He said Iran’s attacks have “created long-term hostilities and distrust with its neighbours” that will “lead to damages that extend beyond the war in our relationship with Iran.” He described Iran’s rationale for attacking the Gulf as “unconvincing” and “unreasonable.” He said Tehran crossed a red line.

But here is the question Gargash did not answer, the question every Gulf leader is now asking behind closed doors: If the American umbrella paints a target instead of deflecting one, if ninety-six percent protection leaves four percent destruction, if the price of alliance is your airports and your ports and your hotels and your workers and your mediators – then what, exactly, is the bargain worth?

The UAE has said it will not allow its airspace or territories to be used to attack Iran. It repeatedly called for de-escalation and dialogue. None of that mattered. When the United States decided to bomb, the UAE became a target anyway.

The reckoning

The Omani diplomat who shuttled between the two sides for eleven days, whose spreadsheet of concessions turned entirely green and whose Montblanc pens remain in transit, now faces a more difficult task: rebuilding what was lost. The hallway in Muscat will need walking again. The water glasses will need arranging. But diplomats and regional analysts note that trust built over decades does not regenerate quickly, particularly when a mediating nation is itself struck and the party it negotiated with is dead.

As economist, Sachs, warned in his January essay that the persistent use of sanctions and military coercion is “rapidly encouraging other economies to decouple from the US financial stranglehold.” Data from international financial institutions shows BRICS nations are expanding bilateral trade in their own currencies, a trend analysts say could accelerate. Some economists project that Washington’s ability to impose its will unilaterally may diminish in the coming years as alternative financial architectures emerge.

The conflict entered its fourth day today with global oil prices spiking and airspace across the Gulf region closed to commercial traffic. Gulf states that host American bases, and Oman which hosts none, are clearing debris from missiles they played no part in launching. Regional observers note that the timing is particularly striking: the military action came just as diplomats from both sides signaled a deal was within reach.