Rubble can't win what diplomacy has already lost

In 627 CE, a coalition of ten thousand Mecca coalition fighters assembled outside Medina in what they believed would be a swift, overwhelming siege. Instead, they found a trench, a simple ditch inspired by Persian military tradition and proposed by the adviser Salman al Farsi. The coalition had no answer for it. Their psychological and military pressure evaporated within weeks, and they retreated having gained nothing. The Battle of the Trench endures as history's clearest lesson: The side that refuses to be intimidated almost always outlasts the side that relies on intimidation.
That lesson has pressing relevance today. The US attempt to coerce the Arabian Gulf Cooperation Council (AGCC) states into abandoning their positive neutrality is not merely poor diplomacy. It is the psychological warfare arm of what the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Jerusalem Post have both documented as Israel's Rubble Doctrine, a strategy of such total physical and psychological destruction that adversaries cannot reconstitute. The doctrine, which began in Palestine and spread to Lebanon, southern Syria, and now Iran, has a political companion: The use of maximum pressure, public threats, and economic coercion to break the will of anyone who refuses alignment. Applied to sovereign AGCC states, it is failing for the same structural reasons it has failed elsewhere. You cannot reduce a mediator to rubble, physical or psychological, and then ask them to mediate.
The most visible example came on May 27, 2026. At a Cabinet meeting, President Donald Trump was asked about Oman's role in managing the Strait of Hormuz during the US-Israeli war with Iran. His answer was unambiguous: “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up.” Days later, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened Oman with sanctions. The State Department then shared the quote publicly, confirming this was not a slip but a posture. Senator Chris Murphy described the threat as “one more sign that this war has gone off the rails.” He was right, but the deeper failure is strategic, not temperamental.
As I have learned from one of the most renowned psychological warfare scholar, my late brother Colonel Anwar al Huraibi, psychological warfare operations, known as PsyOps, requires three conditions to succeed: A credible threat, an isolated target, and a message that resonates with the target's own population. Against the AGCC, all three conditions are absent. Oman has never been isolated for the past five thousand years, it is indispensable. Its back-channels produced the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, brokered last year's Ansar Allah ceasefire, and are currently the primary mechanism keeping Hormuz negotiations alive. Threatening to destroy this architecture is the equivalent of threatening to burn the bridge you are trying to cross.
The broader AGCC record makes Washington's approach look even more self-defeating. Oman and the US have built a constructive relationship since 1790, the AGCC is not only the centre of the world’s oil and gas but also the critical minerals needed by the global digital economy and more importantly the global food security. In addition, Saudi Arabia hosted the first direct US-Russia talks since the Ukraine war began. Qatar negotiated the Gaza ceasefire framework. Kuwait is one of the world’s biggest aid contributors in Asia, Africa and beyond. The UAE has facilitated over 4,300 prisoner-of-war exchanges between Russia and Ukraine, patient, trust-building diplomacy that took years to construct. These are not the acts of states that need to be frightened into usefulness. They are the acts of states that have made themselves irreplaceable precisely by wise alignment and refusing to take sides, and that irreplaceability is now the AGCC's greatest strategic asset.
The Rubble Doctrine assumes that enough destruction, physical or psychological, eliminates the will to resist. But Carnegie's analysis of the Zionist’s destructive conduct since October 2023 notes that the doctrine's core ambition, preventing adversarial reconstitution, has not been achieved in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia or Iran. Resistance adapts. And neutral states, whose entire identity rests on not being coerced, have even greater incentive to hold firm. The Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr bin Hamad al Busaidy published a public critique of the war in The Economist in March 2026, an act of Omani candid feedback and a signal that the pressure is producing defiance, not compliance.
History's most durable alternative to coercion is wise alignment. When Caliph Harun al Rashid built Abbasid influence across rival courts, he did not send ultimatums. He sent scholars, ambassadors, and trade. The AGCC states today practise a version of that same alignment wisdom, and they are gaining global stature because of it. Washington still has the option to join that table rather than overturn it. The Strait of Hormuz cannot be resolved by threatening the people who understand it best. The trench will hold.