Oman turned the closure of the Strait of Hormuz into a strategic commercial victory. Ports at Duqm, Salalah, and Sohar now absorb the cargo that once moved through the Iranian-blackmailed choke point, transforming the sultanate into the…
Page A11From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 1 September 2026
Trump calls Iran 'dead' the same week an ally builds it a sanctions back door.
As it ran on the front
I wrote this down, hold on, let me find the page — here. 'Iran is dead.' That's a direct quote, one of ours ran it this week, Tehran nearing the brink, the president's own words. I circled it, because I circle things I want to come back to.
Then, same reporting cycle, different outlet: a story about Oman building what it calls Iran's 'ultimate sanctions back door.' I wrote that phrase down too — 'ultimate sanctions back door' — because you don't usually see 'ultimate' modifying a back door in a filing. Usually it's just a door. This one's ultimate.…
…(cont) Now, my fixation this week is that word 'dead.' I keep coming back to it. Dead is a word we use for a thing that has stopped. It doesn't do anything anymore. It doesn't buy anything anymore. It doesn't need anybody building it a door.
I tried something at the kitchen table, if you'll indulge me. I took a shoebox, cut a hole in the side, called the hole a 'back door,' the way the story does. Then I asked myself: would somebody build a back door onto a dead thing? In my experience, no. You build a door onto a house somebody's still living in. Nobody frames out a doorway for a building they've already condemned. That's just carpentry.
So I've got two entries in the notebook from the same week. One says the thing is dead. The other says an ally is actively under construction on its behalf, cutting it a door marked 'ultimate.' I'm not a foreign policy man, I want to be clear about that. I do the notebook, that's all I do.
But I keep circling back to the word. If a thing is dead, what's the door for?
Oh — and excuse me, one more thing, before you go: which one is it, dead, or getting a door installed this week?
“You can't call a country dead and also need an ally building it a door at the same time, unless the death was for the domestic audience and the door's for whoever actually pays the bills. Watch which sentence runs on which network.”
“The president's language was rhetorical, 'dead' meaning strategically diminished, not literally — the back door reporting is separate, allied nations build all kinds of infrastructure, that's not a loophole, that's commerce, I don't — that's not what I meant to defend, next question.”
The receipts
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This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.