US and Iran to Meet in Oman as Tehran Calls Hormuz Attacks a “Mistake”
US and Iranian negotiators are due to meet in Oman today, after Iranian officials privately conceded that firing on ships in the Strait of Hormuz was “a mistake” carried out by hardliners acting without authorisation. Washington’s price for a deal is steep: a public Iranian declaration that the strait is open and safe for shipping, and the handover of enriched-uranium residue — the “nuclear dust” — from sites bombed earlier in the war. “If we don’t get the dust, we do not have a deal,” one US official said. Trump has set a deadline.
The diplomacy and the threats are the same policy: pressure applied to force terms. American officials believe Iran attacked shipping because oil and gas were increasingly routing along the Omani coast, away from the strait, eroding Tehran’s leverage over the world’s most important oil chokepoint — and that the strikes were a panicked overreach rather than strategy. If that reading holds, a face-saving formula exists: Iran declares the strait open, which it needs for its own exports anyway, in exchange for de-escalation. The nuclear demand is harder. Washington wants the highly enriched uranium residue from the bombed sites accounted for, both to verify the programme’s degradation and to deny Iran a quick reconstitution. Trump’s negotiating team runs through Vance, Kushner, Witkoff and Rubio. For UK households the transmission is the oil price, which has eased as talks resumed. Watch whether Oman produces a communiqué, whether Iran makes the public Hormuz statement, and whether the uranium question sinks the effort.