On 26 June, Italy’s Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Maria Tripodi, presented her Omani counterpart, Undersecretary Shaikh Khalifa bin Ali bin Issa Al-Harthy, with a proposal for a Memorandum of Understanding to establish a Strategic Dialogue between Rome and Muscat—covering sovereign wealth cooperation, infrastructure, energy, advanced technology and defence. On paper, it reads like regular Gulf outreach, similar to the framework Rome already signed with the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Yet the timing is interesting especially in the context of Italy’s Gulf strategy this year.

Oman, like the other GCC states, is very exposed both geographically and diplomatically. Since February, the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively choked by Iranian mining and interdiction following the US-Israeli air campaign against Tehran. To the west, the Bab al-Mandeb corridor has seen renewed Houthi attacks on commercial shipping. As The National put it, Oman is trapped ‘between chokepoints and between belligerents’ — and yet it is the one Gulf state that has managed, so far, to avoid being pulled fully into conflict. It was the only GCC member absent from the March collective-defence meeting in Riyadh, preserving its role as the last functioning diplomatic channel to Tehran. Omani mediators brokered the pre-war US-Iran back-channel talks, and Muscat has separately hosted talks between Riyadh and the Houthis. More recently, Oman has been quietly managing the diplomacy around Hormuz transit fees, walking a line between Iranian demands and US objections without fully breaking with either side.

That neutrality is now a strategic asset in its own right, and not only for Washington or Riyadh. Since March, Saudi Arabia has run its East-West pipeline at full capacity to bypass Hormuz — but the resulting Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb-bound volumes are headed almost entirely to Asian buyers, not Europeans, a reminder that Europe’s own Gulf-linked energy security depends less on any single reroute than on the broader stability of a region now fractured along two fronts. Having a stable, communicative interlocutor sitting between both of them is worth more to Rome than another headline defence contract. Italy’s Strategic Dialogue proposal, in that light, looks less like commercial box-ticking and more like a hedge: a bet that Oman’s mediating relevance will only grow as the dual chokepoint crisis persists.

There is also an economic logic that predates the current crisis. Oman’s sovereign wealth vehicle, the Oman Investment Authority, posted a $4.1 billion profit in 2024 and has since launched the $5.2 billion Future Fund Oman, targeting manufacturing, renewable energy, ports and logistics, tourism, mining and fisheries — the diversification agenda at the heart of Oman Vision 2040. These are sectors where mid-sized Italian industrial and engineering firms, not just the usual energy and defence primes, could realistically compete. Eni’s footprint in the country — onshore exploration blocks signed years ago with OOCEP and BP — has remained modest next to Rome’s fast-expanding energy relationship with Saudi Arabia. Tripodi herself welcomed the ‘growing presence’ of Italian companies in Oman during the June talks, but the relationship still runs well behind Rome’s ties with Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, leaving considerably more room to grow.

There is a first-mover logic here too. Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are already saturated with European suitors — the UK’s new GCC free trade deal and the EU’s own bilateral UAE negotiations are only intensifying the competition. Oman, by contrast, remains a secondary priority for most European capitals, precisely because it lacks the sovereign wealth firepower or oil volumes of its neighbours. That is exactly what makes it worth Rome’s attention now, before the rest of Europe catches up — and while Muscat’s diplomatic value, unlike its oil reserves, is actually rising.