Asked about talks between Oman and Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, President Donald Trump said that if Oman got in the way, the United States would bomb them. The remark was made in a telephone interview with a Fox News correspondent, who relayed it on air; no audio was released, and the White House did not immediately comment.
Pressed on it later in the Oval Office, Trump did not withdraw it. Oman, he said, had not behaved very well, "but we'd handle them very easily, just like we do other things."
Oman is a long-standing American strategic partner. It sits beside the Strait of Hormuz, borders Yemen, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and has spent years as the quiet channel through which Washington and Tehran pass messages. Iran's semi-official Mehr agency said on Saturday that the two had agreed a plan for traffic through the waterway.
Monday was also the end of the sixty-day deadline the United States and Iran set in June to end the war and settle the nuclear question.
Why it is on the board
This is the rarest thing our board can show: the same story at the top in three countries at once. It ranked first for us in Britain, in Germany and in France on Monday night — 1.33, 1.32 and 1.11 on our intensity scale, the three highest readings of the day.
They are not reading it as the same story. The BBC's most-read piece frames it as a threat to an ally. Der Spiegel leads on the verb — that Trump is threatening to bomb Oman "in Grund und Boden". BFMTV puts the quote itself in the headline. What travels across all three is not an analysis but a sentence a president said on the telephone.
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