Several years ago, I asked a senior Omani scholar a question that has puzzled many in the Arab world: why does Muscat maintain such deep mutual trust with Tehran, despite decades of Iranian behavior that convinced most Arab states that Iran is not a reliable partner? He answered with quiet confidence: “Because we fought them throughout history. We understood them, and they understood us.”

It was not a nostalgic reference to old battles, but a concise summary of a long political memory. Oman is the only Gulf state that has confronted Persia directly, defeated it at times, and negotiated with it at others. This history includes a fact often ignored in regional narratives: in 1775, it was the Omani fleet that broke the Persian siege of Basra after Arab tribes appealed to Imam Ahmad bin Said. Such episodes are not invoked for pride, but to explain a relationship that cannot be understood through the lens of recent decades alone.

Yet the question returns today in a more bewildering form. How is it that Iranian missiles have struck Omani ports and facilities—despite Oman being the country that worked hardest, and most discreetly, to prevent a war on Iran? How can a state absorb such blows and still refuse to abandon its middle path?

This is not a mystery to those who know Muscat’s political doctrine. Oman’s Foreign Minister, Badr al-Busaidi, told me years ago during a discussion at Cambridge University that Omani moderation is not a tactic, nor a gesture toward Iran alone. It is a governing philosophy—part of how the state defines itself, not a position shaped by the crisis of the moment.

READ: Oman FM: US has lost control of foreign policy, entered ‘war that is not its own’

That philosophy was on full display recently when........

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