Trump’s Ultimatum: Will America’s Nuclear Energy Offer Draw Saudi Arabia Into the Abraham Accords?

Less than a day after his energy secretary signed a landmark nuclear cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia, President Trump upended it with a social media post.The agreement, signed July 22 by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and the Saudi energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, was billed by the administration as a peaceful nuclear cooperation pact, one that could send American reactors, engineering expertise, and decades of business to Riyadh as the kingdom looks to power a boom in artificial intelligence and data centers without burning through its oil.Then came the president’s own addendum, posted the next morning. The deal, Mr. Trump wrote, “will be approved, but is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.” There would be no enrichment of nuclear material, he added, and no exceptions.The whiplash rollout, welcomed loudly by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, has reopened one of the thorniest questions left over from Mr. Trump’s first term. That is whether money and the promise of a multibillion-dollar nuclear partnership can accomplish what years of American diplomacy have not — persuade the Saudi royal family to put its name on a document formally recognizing the Jewish state.Two months on, the situation has not moved. The administration sent the agreement to Capitol Hill in late August, and an official said the president’s position is unchanged. Mr. Wright says the nuclear pact and talks on the Abraham Accords will be worked in parallel. A Deal Signed, Then Reshaped OvernightThe nuclear agreement itself is no small matter.Built as what is known in Washington as a Section 123 agreement, the pact is expected to run three decades. It would give American firms, Westinghouse chief among them, priority standing to build reactors and supply fuel for a Saudi civilian energy program.The administration sent the agreement to Capitol Hill for its review in late August. Under the Atomic Energy Act, if lawmakers do nothing within 90 days during which Congress is in session, the deal takes effect. Both chambers could pass a joint resolution of disapproval by simple majority, but overriding a presidential veto would take two-thirds of each. Not everyone in the president’s own party is comfortable. In mid-September, Republican Senators John Kennedy of Louisiana and Rand Paul of Kentucky joined 16 Democrats and independents in urging the administration to declassify two secret side letters attached to the agreement, saying the decision to withhold the letters has no precedent in the context of a foreign nuclear deal. Mr. Kennedy has also said publicly he is uneasy about signing a nuclear pact with a Gulf power after Washington struck Iran to keep that country from acquiring a nuclear weapon.House Democrats led by Gregory Meeks, with Brad Sherman, John Garamendi, and Don Beyer, have introduced a resolution to block the deal, but a vote is not expected until after the midterms because the House left for an early recess. The belated linkage to normalization with Israel, according to one assessment, is not how nations typically negotiate. “Inserting this major political concession by Saudi Arabia after the deal was signed is not the way that countries bargain. It might work in New York real estate; it does not work in diplomacy,” a professor emeritus of international affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, Gregory Gause, tells The New York Sun. “It lessens Trump’s credibility with the Saudis and makes the nuclear deal much less likely to be implemented.”The administration and Israel’s government, for their part, have defended the linkage as a sound strategy rather than a last-minute complication.The then-White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, maintained that the nuclear deal is “contingent on [the Abraham Accords] condition as far as the president is concerned,” adding that talks with Saudi counterparts will continue toward finalizing the deal.Mr. Netanyahu’s office, in a statement, went further, calling Saudi Arabia’s potential accession “an historic leap forward for peace in the Middle East” and crediting the American and Israeli military campaign against Iran’s regional proxy network with creating the opening for expanded normalization.Riyadh’s Answer Has Not ChangedSaudi Arabia’s muted public response has not mentioned the Abraham Accords. A Saudi official said relations are broadening and deepening and that the kingdom looks forward to working with the Trump administration and Congress. Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman has said the nuclear energy program will be peaceful and transparent. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman laid out the kingdom’s position face to face with the president in the Oval Office last November: Saudi Arabia does want in on the Abraham Accords eventually, but not without a clear, irreversible path to Palestinian statehood first.This is a position that the kingdom has hardened rather than softened since the war in Gaza pushed the Palestinian question back to the center of regional politics. For Israel to grant that kind of concession, however, looks unlikely under the current government, and the kingdom appears to know it.“It’s hard to imagine Riyadh normalizing without some Israeli commitment to a Palestinian state, which is off the table for myriad reasons. This gives convenient cover for Riyadh to avoid joining the Accords, without necessarily sacrificing the chance to strike other deals with the United States,” a fellow for American strategy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, Jonathan Ruhe, tells the Sun.Mr. Ruhe notes that Riyadh’s interest in the nuclear pact rested precisely on it carrying no strings on safeguards or normalization, and that Washington gains no real leverage by attaching one after signing.“It’s ironically a positive thing if Trump inadvertently killed this nuclear deal by trying to tie it to the Accords,” he continues.Fear of blowback, both from Tehran and from the Saudi public, is also influencing the calculation, Mr. Ruhe observes. He points out that Riyadh has been drawing closer to Pakistan and Turkey, two governments unfriendly to the Accords, even as its ties with the United Arab Emirates cool.A senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, Kristin Diwan, sees Riyadh’s posture as tied to a broader realignment.Saudi Arabia has spent recent months building an international coalition to push for renewed talks on Palestinian statehood, serving as a bridge between its Arab and Islamic partners and sympathetic European governments, Ms. Diwan tells the Sun. She says it has also been working to construct a new regional security bloc meant to resist both Iranian and Israeli encroachment in the Gulf and eastern Mediterranean.Falling back on the Abraham Accords precondition may hand Washington more leverage on paper, she says, but it will not move the kingdom absent real Israeli concessions.Congress and the Price of WaitingThe enrichment question tucked inside the deal’s fine print has drawn its own scrutiny.Reporting on the agreement’s terms indicates that Saudi enrichment would initially be capped below 5 percent but could rise to 20 percent after a joint study and a separate written agreement. Those terms sit uneasily with Mr. Trump’s “no enrichment” post. The deal also does not require Riyadh to sign the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol — the inspections regime that the United Arab Emirates accepted in its own 2009 pact. The stakes rose late last month when officials said that a classified intelligence assessment sent to Congress concludes Riyadh has not ruled out developing nuclear weapons. The State Department says the United States does not and will not support a Saudi weapons program. Senators Edward Markey and Jeff Merkley, joined by Tim Kaine, Chris Van Hollen, Peter Welch, and Ron Wyden — all Democrats — have since demanded the administration abandon the deal. Analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations have also warned that the late linkage to normalization could complicate the deal’s path through Congress, where the 90-day window for a resolution to block the deal is expected to close in early to mid-December.What it would actually take for Riyadh to move on the Abraham Accords is, by most accounts, a higher bar than a nuclear deal alone can clear.Mr. Gause at Texas A&M says the kingdom’s public position calls for an ironclad timetable for Palestinian statehood, though Riyadh might settle for a firm public commitment paired with active negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and backing from major regional and international powers.The director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, Rosemary Kelanic, is skeptical that a public commitment alone would satisfy Riyadh, noting that past promises have collapsed too many times. She believes that only concrete steps toward statehood would be believable — something she does not see happening under any government led by Mr. Netanyahu.On the current trajectory, both Mr. Gause and Ms. Kelanic suggest that Saudi Arabia’s participation in the Abraham Accords is years, not months, away if it is to happen at all. But, they say, linking the Accords to the nuclear deal is not necessarily a bad outcome.“Tying the deal to normalization now complicates the deal reaching fruition, which is positive from a nonproliferation perspective. Washington should not jettison five decades of U.S. policy against proliferating enrichment and reprocessing technologies, especially after eliminating Iran’s enrichment capability,” the deputy director of the nonproliferation program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Andrea Stricker, tells the Sun. She contends that it would be far wiser to hold Riyadh to the same “gold standard” that the United States struck with the UAE, under which Abu Dhabi agreed to forgo enrichment and reprocessing altogether and accept the strongest international inspections regime.Whether Washington or Riyadh blinks first may come down to political math as much as nonproliferation policy, Ms. Stricker adds. She says the Saudis may be betting that, even without the Accords, the Trump administration may want to lock in the deal while Republicans still control both chambers of Congress — a majority that is not guaranteed past this year.“Offering to build enrichment facilities in Saudi Arabia is a terrible idea and should be abandoned entirely because it would give the Saudis an enormous leg-up on developing their own nuclear weapons program, and the U.S. should not help any country obtain nuclear weapons — especially not a country implicated in the 9/11 terrorist attacks and where 15 of the 19 hijackers originated,” Ms. Kelanic tells the Sun. “If there is any country where nuclear weapons could fall into the wrong hands, it is Saudi Arabia.”

Trump’s Ultimatum: Will America’s Nuclear Energy Offer Draw Saudi Arabia Into the Abraham Accords?

Trump’s Ultimatum: Will America’s Nuclear Energy Offer Draw Saudi Arabia Into the Abraham Accords?

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