Trump slams brakes on Saudi nuclear deal with Abraham Accords demand
The Hill · C · trust 60/100
Comments: by Mallory Wilson - 07/23/26 6:08 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Mallory Wilson - 07/23/26 6:08 PM ET Comments: Link copied NOW PLAYING President Trump has thrown the Saudi nuclear deal into question less than 24 hours after it was signed, making it conditional on the Saudis normalizing relations with Israel.
His Thursday announcement appears vastly different from what sources familiar had disclosed about the deal on Wednesday, raising questions about whether it marks a U-turn or just a confusing rollout.
The Saudis have long said that any normalization with Israel is conditioned on seeing a pathway to the establishment of a Palestinian state, something Israel has dismissed.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters in a briefing that Trump has said if the Saudis don’t join the Abraham Accords, “the deal is off.”
When asked why the condition wasn’t mentioned Wednesday when the Energy Department announced that the deal was signed, Leavitt said it was because Trump “is always the final dealmaker.”
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said the conditions most likely caught the Saudis off guard.
“This is the president trying to kind of backtrack and address the concerns from a lot of Israel supporters and hawks in general that we didn’t get anything in return for this,” Clark said. “It’s clearly just trying to clean up the previous statement that they made with the agreement.”
He said that if the condition was a part of the original deal, Trump “would have taken credit for it right up front ... because that is a big coup.”
Robert Einhorn, a senior fellow at Brookings who focuses on arms control and nonproliferation, said that Trump may also try to use the announcement “to increase his leverage with the Saudis and perhaps improve the deal in a number of respects.”
“He probably knows that he’s not going to get Saudi normalization or willingness to normalize, but he may think that if he now drops that new condition, he could get something for it, perhaps something having to do with enrichment or verification or something like that,” Einhorn said.
“But I think it’s clear that not only did he catch the Saudis by surprise, he probably caught all of his principal advisers in the administration by surprise,” he added.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed the decades-long, multibillion-dollar deal with his Saudi counterpart, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman. It includes a “123 Agreement” and an accompanying “bilateral safeguards agreement.” Under the terms, the two countries agree to a two-year study to see whether enrichment is necessary.
The 123 Agreement is designed to create a framework for U.S. companies to assist Saudi Arabia in developing its civilian nuclear program.
The Energy Department said it will create U.S. jobs, expand nuclear technology exports and “reinforce global nonproliferation standards.”
But neither the department nor the Saudi government mentioned any contingencies in their respective statements.
The Hill has reached out to the Saudi Embassy in Washington for comment.
Lawmakers and experts were quick to question what safeguards the deal included to ensure that uranium wasn’t enriched beyond civilian-use levels.
“The question is whether the administration has built in safeguards and guardrails into the agreement that could satisfactorily reduce those risks,” Einhorn said. “The critics have been pretty clear in identifying some of their concerns and whether the administration is prepared to address those concerns in a convincing way, I’m not so sure.”
Clark said countries that pursue nuclear enrichment for civilian use “almost always have a secondary motive of starting the process of creating a latent capability to build their own nuclear weapon.”
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Saudi Arabia’s joining of the Abraham Accords “would be an historic leap forward for peace in the Middle East,” the new conditions didn’t seem to do much to quell the fears of lawmakers and experts surrounding the plan or answer their questions.
Andrea Stricker, the nonproliferation program deputy director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Trump’s comments “may, helpfully, serve to delay the agreement from coming to fruition, since it was already signed and the Saudis now have to address whether they want to normalize relations with Israel.”
“You never know whether Trump’s serious about anything,” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) told The Hill.
“You can kind of figure out that he wants everything immediately, but I have no idea whether this civil nuclear agreement is void until Saudi Arabia agrees to the Abraham Accords,” he said.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told The Hill on Thursday that he is still worried that the deal signed doesn’t block reprocessing and enrichment and that it doesn’t allow for the International Atomic Energy Agency to do its inspections like it does in other 123 agreements.
“We did a civilian nuclear deal with the UAE [United Arab Emirates], and they agreed to follow the additional protocol, which is very important to make sure if it’s a peaceful program that there’s no cheating, and it stays a peaceful program,” Kaine said. “So, the fact that the Saudis have apparently not agreed to that, I mean, it just kind of raises a red flag.”
But it’s not clear where the enrichment authority stands.
In Trump’s Thursday post, he also said, “there will be no enrichment of material,” although he added that the U.S. is “not opposed to Civil (Non-Enriched) Nuclear Facilities.”
Stricker said that if Trump’s comment…
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