In the first two years of the Trump administration, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, the late ruler of Oman, confronted a stark situation: Iran-backed Houthi rebels were fighting on his doorstep in Yemen, Israel was attacking his Palestinian allies, and Washington was largely giving up on diplomacy in the Middle East.
Instead of seeking refuge in the Saudi Arabia-led alliance of Sunni Gulf states, the veteran leader did something different. First, he invited the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, to his palace in Muscat. Then, he welcomed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Yossi Cohen, the head of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, for a formal state visit.
In almost any other Arab country today, hosting the leaders of both the Jewish State and the Islamic Republic would be unthinkable. For Qaboos — who died on Jan. 10 after running his country for nearly 50 years — this was simply a way of reinforcing Oman’s status as the region’s most ambidextrous conciliator.
Though he remained little known outside diplomatic circles, Qaboos was, for much of his long career, an indispensable linchpin of the international order. In recent years, he often seemed like a throwback to another era.
As recently as November, Oman hosted indirect talks between Saudi Arabia and the Houthi rebels to try to end the devastating five-year war in Yemen. Yet the greatest fruit of Qaboos’s diplomacy was the rapprochement he helped engineer between Iran and the United States.
Those efforts began in 2009, just months after Barack Obama came to office. An Omani envoy offered to open a back channel to Tehran, and soon after, Oman negotiated the release of three American hikers detained in Iran. In 2012, top officials at the State Department began convening secretly with Iranian counterparts in Muscat to lay the groundwork for an eventual nuclear deal.
When Hassan Rouhani, a moderate pragmatist, was elected president of Iran in 2013, Qaboos, sensing an opportunity, promptly traveled to Tehran, becoming the first head of state to call on Mr. Rouhani; he also met with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. By year’s end, Oman’s ability to get top-level Iranian backing for the negotiations had smoothed the way for an interim agreement between Tehran and Washington and its allies.
Now that the 2015 nuclear agreement has been formally abandoned by both the United States and Iran, and an assertive new generation of autocrats is taking over the Arabian Peninsula, it is far from clear whether the Omani sultan’s singular brand of cosmopolitan despotism can survive him.
For Qaboos, there was no contradiction in finding common ground with both the leaders of Israel and their sworn enemies in Iran or Palestine, just as there was no contradiction between his unusually absolutist monarchy and the modern, liberal and highly diverse society he governed.
While diplomats and rebel groups negotiated behind the scenes, Muscat was known for its internationally acclaimed opera house, which was inaugurated by Plácido Domingo and Franco Zeffirelli in the fall of 2011 — at a time when the surrounding region was convulsed in protests. (Oman had its Arab Spring, too, but it was carefully swept under the rug.)
Cultivated and worldly, the bachelor sultan cut an impressive figure to generations of Western statesmen and Middle East leaders alike. “He has the soul of an artist,” Mr. Netanyahu commented after his visit in 2018. “We found out that we read the same books.”
Qaboos’s outsized achievements would have been hard to predict when he deposed his father in a British-backed coup in 1970. At the time, Oman seemed benighted, with hardly any paved roads, overwhelming poverty and illiteracy, and Qaboos’s eccentric father, fearing change, had banned many forms of modern technology, even eyeglasses. A Marxist rebellion roiled the south, threatening to tear the country apart.
With much help from Britain and the shah of Iran, the young sultan handily suppressed the uprising. Then, exploiting the country’s oil reserves, he set out on a program of rapid development centered around schools, roads, hospitals and a strong assertion of Omani identity.
Because of its earlier history as an Indian Ocean empire, Oman has an unusually diverse population, including large numbers of Baluchis, South Asians and Swahili-speaking East Africans, as well as Arabs. Although it has a large Sunni population and a small Shiite minority, its predominant form of Islam is the much smaller, austere Ibadi sect, which tends to be politically quietist and tolerant of other faiths.
By turning this distinct, mixed heritage into an overriding national value, Qaboos was able to unite a divided population — now about 4.6 million strong — under his modernizing regime. It helped that he also kept the country tightly in his grip, personally holding the titles of defense minister, foreign minister, finance minister, prime minister and commander of the armed forces, and swiftly quelling any hint of religious extremism.
By the 1980s, Oman’s “al-nahda,” or the renaissance — as the country’s transformation is officially known — was well underway, and Qaboos could apply his skills as unifier to foreign policy. During the Iran-Iraq war, Oman maintained ties with both sides, and the sultan hosted secret peace talks. In the 2000s, Oman became particularly adept at bridging the Shiite-Sunni divide, despite active membership in the Gulf Cooperation Council, the alliance of Sunni monarchies that includes Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Even as this diplomacy was unfolding, however, the sultan’s own liberal autocracy was coming under increasing pressure. Nearly half of Oman’s growing population is under 25, and with declining oil revenues, job growth had not kept apace. During the Arab Spring, Oman experienced widespread protests, some of them aimed directly at the regime. Young activists called for an elected legislature and even a contractual constitution, and, as thousands took to the streets to demand jobs and political freedoms, there were violent clashes with police.
Badly shaken, Qaboos quickly announced 50,000 new jobs and gave his advisory councils some additional powers. He also placed new limits on free speech, and several dozen bloggers and activists were arrested.
Reporting on the aftermath of these little-known events in 2014, I found that support for the aging sultan remained strong. But there was a climate of growing censorship, and many young people expressed insecurity about their future. The trend has only become worse in recent years, with youth unemployment approaching 50 percent, one of the worst rates in the Gulf region.
Adding to the challenge, Qaboos left no direct heir. His successor, a little-tested cousin named Haitham bin Tariq Al Said, has promised to continue Qaboos’s policies and is expected to be much aided in this by Yusuf bin Alawi, the late sultan’s seasoned lead diplomat. But Haitham has little of the clout of his revered predecessor, nor is it clear that he can count on the close relationship with the United States that Oman had long enjoyed.
A few months after coming to office, Mr. Trump held talks with every member of the Gulf Cooperation Council except Oman. Since then, his administration has cut military aid to the country while enhancing ties with the Saudi crown prince. Apparently, the sultanate is now viewed as too close to Iran.
The death of Qaboos may mark more than the passing of one of the Middle East’s most resilient leaders. It may also herald the eclipse of a kind of discreet diplomacy that for years helped defuse some of the region’s most intractable conflicts. Like the sultan, it has no heirs.
Hugh Eakin has written about Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, among other topics, for The New York Review of Books.
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