As a geopolitical balancer on the Arabian Peninsula, Oman was unsurprisingly the only Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member state to not join the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen in 2015. Oman tends to see diplomacy, not military intervention, as the best way to address regional crises. The 2014 takeover of Sana‘a by the Ansarullah movement, better known as the Houthis, was no exception. Over the past decade, Muscat has leveraged its mostly neutral foreign policy to play a bridging role between various actors with the aim of achieving stability, security, and political reconciliation in war-torn Yemen.

Omani efforts to stabilize Yemen have in no small part stemmed from Muscat’s concerns about spillover effects across the...