United States has lost control of its foreign policy: Oman FM

Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi has said that the United States has lost control of its foreign policy and is involved in a war that is not its own.

Writing in The Economist, he said the United States and Iran had been close to reaching a genuine agreement. He added that the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February, carried out just hours after the latest and most substantive round of talks, were a “shock but not a surprise.”

Albusaidi said: “The American administration’s greatest miscalculation, of course, was allowing itself to be drawn into this war in the first place.” He added: “This is not America’s war, and there is no likely scenario in which both Israel and America will get what they want from it.”

He continued that “Israel’s leadership seems to have persuaded America that Iran had been so weakened by sanctions, internal divisions and the American-Israeli bombings of its nuclear sites last June, that an unconditional surrender would swiftly follow the initial assault and the assassination of the supreme leader.”

He added that “it should now be clear that for Israel to achieve its stated objective will require a long military campaign to which America would have to commit troops on the ground, opening a new front in the forever wars which President Donald Trump previously vowed to end.”

Albusaidi said such a course “is not what America’s government wants. Nor do its people, who certainly do not see this as their war.”