Six years ago this month, Sultan Haitham bin Tariq inherited a country on the brink. Oman’s beloved ruler of nearly half a century had just died, oil prices had cratered, the COVID-19 pandemic was about to shut down the world, and the sultanate’s debt was spiraling toward 70 percent of GDP. Credit rating agencies had already downgraded Oman to junk status. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was forecasting that the economy would shrink by 10 percent—the worst contraction in the Gulf.
It was, by any measure, the worst possible moment to assume power in a petrostate.
Six years ago this month, Sultan Haitham bin Tariq inherited a country on the brink. Oman’s beloved ruler of nearly half a century had just died, oil prices had cratered, the COVID-19 pandemic was about to shut down the world, and the sultanate’s debt was spiraling toward 70 percent of GDP. Credit rating agencies had already downgraded Oman to junk status. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was forecasting that the economy would shrink by 10 percent—the worst contraction in the Gulf.
It was, by any measure, the worst possible moment to assume power in a petrostate.
Yet now, as Oman marks the sixth anniversary of Sultan Haitham’s accession, the transformation is remarkable. Newly crowned monarchs in the Middle East have a tendency to celebrate by spending big on vanity projects—whether or not they can afford them. Haitham is a rarity: He cut spending. Public debt has been slashed to 34 percent of GDP. Credit ratings have climbed back to investment grade. Foreign direct investment had surged by 121 percent by 2023. The fiscal deficit has become a surplus. And Oman is now positioning itself as a global leader in green hydrogen—the energy source that could define the next century.
This is a story about competent governance at a time when competence in the Gulf is often overshadowed by spectacle. While Saudi Arabia builds mirror cities in the desert and the United Arab Emirates races to Mars, Oman has quietly demonstrated something perhaps more valuable: that steady, technocratic management can pull a country from crisis to stability in just five years.
Sultan Haitham didn’t inherit his predecessor’s charisma, and he doesn’t pretend to. Sultan Qaboos bin Said was the region’s philosopher-king—a cultured, enigmatic patron of the arts who established symphony orchestras and wrote poetry. He was the Arab world’s longest-serving ruler, and his personal relationships were central to Oman’s role as the Gulf’s indispensable mediator. Qaboos could pick up the phone and talk to anyone from Tehran to Washington, and both sides would listen.
Haitham is cut from different cloth. Where Qaboos was the diplomat-artist, Haitham is the manager. His background is in heritage preservation and bureaucratic planning—he spent 18 years running the Ministry of Heritage and Culture, and, critically, chaired the committee that drafted Oman Vision 2040. He understands spreadsheets more than symphonies.
This difference in style has proved to be precisely what Oman needed. Qaboos’s grand diplomatic vision was admirable, but his economic management was lax. Even during the oil boom of the 2000s, Oman ran fiscal deficits. When Haitham took power, he faced a stark choice: maintain the old way of doing things and watch the country collapse or impose discipline that would be deeply unpopular.
He chose discipline. Within months, he ordered government agencies to end 70 percent of foreign expert contracts and retire 70 percent of long-serving officials. He introduced the Medium-Term Fiscal Plan, which actually contained spending—a radical concept in a region accustomed to using oil windfalls as fast as they arrive. He launched a value-added tax, and in 2025, he became the first Gulf leader to impose a personal income tax on high earners. These are politically risky moves in countries where the social contract is built on oil wealth flowing to citizens, not taxes flowing from them.
The results speak for themselves. Oman’s debt-to-GDP ratio has been cut in half. The country achieved a budget surplus of 7.5 percent in 2022. Nonhydrocarbon exports have tripled as a share of total exports since the early 2010s. The economy that was supposed to implode is now growing steadily, with the IMF projecting nearly 4 percent growth by 2026.
But the real genius of Haitham’s approach has been pairing fiscal discipline with strategic investment. While cutting waste, he’s been placing massive bets on green hydrogen—$140 billion worth by 2050. In April 2024 alone, Oman signed $11 billion in green hydrogen deals. The sultanate established Hydroma state entity dedicated to orchestrating the hydrogen sector, and it launched multiple auction rounds for projects that could 1.38 million metric tons of green hydrogen annually by 2030. This isn’t vanity spending; it’s an attempt to build the economy that will sustain Oman when the oil runs out—which it will, sooner than in neighboring states.
And crucially, Haitham has maintained Oman’s diplomatic neutrality. He’s continued his predecessor’s practice of talking to everyone—facilitating the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement in 2023, mediating a cease-fire between the United States and Houthi forces in 2025, and keeping channels open to Tehran while remaining close to Washington. This neutrality isn’t just moral posturing; it’s sound business. In a region torn by rivalries, being everyone’s friend makes you indispensable.
But there’s a harder edge to Sultan Haitham’s managerial approach. Along with debt, he’s also been curbing dissent. In 2022, he signed a decree imposing prison sentences of three to seven years for anyone who “challenges” the sultan’s authority—language so broad that it criminalizes virtually any criticism. Activists have been jailed for social media posts about corruption and economic hardship. At the 2020 Muscat International Book Fair, authorities confiscated more than 50 titles. The Internal Security Service retains sweeping powers to detain critics, and Oman remains one of the few countries in the region where certain features of basic communications platforms such as WhatsApp are regularly blocked.
Significant challenges remain, and they’re the kind that can’t be solved with fiscal discipline or political repression. Youth unemployment hovers around 15 percentreaching more than 30 percent for young women. Each year, 55,000 Omanis enter a job market that creates far fewer positions. The government’s “Omanization” program—requiring companies to hire nationals instead of cheaper expatriates—creates tensions with the private sector, which complains that young Omanis lack skills and demand higher wages than the market can bear.
This is the classic trap facing Gulf states: How do you create meaningful employment for a generation of young citizens who expect government jobs that no longer exist, in an economy still dominated by state-owned enterprises and dependent on expatriate labor? Haitham’s green hydrogen gambit might eventually create jobs, but not for years. In the meantime, unemployed graduates with engineering degrees are a political tinderbox. Youth unemployment sparked the 2011 protests in Oman; it could spark them again.
And then there’s the elephant in the room: oil prices. For all of Oman’s impressive fiscal consolidation, 70 percent of government revenues still come from hydrocarbons. If prices collapse again, the margin for error in Haitham’s plan will disappear.
Finally, there’s succession. Unlike Qaboos, who left no heir and shrouded the succession in mystery until his death, Haitham moved quickly to establish a crown prince—his eldest son, Theyazin bin Haitham—and formalized primogeniture succession. This is smart policy. But Theyazin is young, and the reforms that Haitham has introduced will take decades to fully mature. The next generation of leadership will inherit both opportunities and pressures that could easily overwhelm them.
Still, five years in, Haitham has demonstrated something rare in Middle Eastern leadership: the ability to make hard choices and make them work. He hasn’t promised his people a glittering future of megaprojects and moonshots. He’s promised them stability, careful planning, and a gradual transition away from oil dependence. It’s not a vision that inspires viral videos or international headlines. But in a region prone to both hubris and catastrophe, competent management might be the most revolutionary act of all.
On the sixth anniversary of his rule, Sultan Haitham deserves credit not for being charismatic, but for being effective. That may sound like faint praise. In the Middle East, it’s anything but.
