Trump Ties Saudi Nuclear Deal to Joining the Abraham Accords
- Jul 24
- 3 min read
WHAT HAPPENED: President Trump declared that the recently signed US-Saudi nuclear agreement will not take effect unless Saudi Arabia joins the Abraham Accords and normalizes relations with Israel, attaching a dramatic new condition to one of the most consequential deals of his second term. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump was blunt about the linkage: "In order to do it, they have to be a member of the Abraham Accords," he said, adding that he believes Riyadh will normalize ties with Israel "at some point."
The statement transforms what had been billed as a landmark energy and technology partnership into an explicit instrument of Middle East diplomacy — and it puts Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the position of choosing between a coveted civilian nuclear program and a normalization step the kingdom has long said must wait for progress on Palestinian statehood.
WHAT WE KNOW: The US-Saudi nuclear agreement was recently signed but has not yet entered into force. Trump’s comments, carried by CBS News and the Times of Israel among others, make clear the White House views Saudi accession to the Abraham Accords as a precondition rather than an aspiration. Trump repeated the demand multiple times this week, telling reporters that "nobody got out ahead" of him on the deal’s terms and framing the condition as non-negotiable.
Saudi Arabia has not formally responded to the new condition. The kingdom has spent years cultivating a US civilian nuclear partnership — including uranium enrichment ambitions that have drawn scrutiny from nonproliferation experts — while carefully avoiding formal recognition of Israel.
BACKGROUND: The Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 during Trump’s first term, normalized Israel’s relations with the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco. Bringing Saudi Arabia — the custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites and the Arab world’s economic heavyweight — into the framework has been the great unfinished ambition of the project ever since. Riyadh has consistently conditioned normalization on meaningful progress toward a Palestinian state, a bar that has only risen amid regional turmoil.
The nuclear deal adds extraordinary leverage to that old equation. Saudi Arabia wants American technology, fuel arrangements and security guarantees for its planned civilian nuclear program. Washington wants the strategic prize of Saudi-Israeli normalization. Trump has now publicly welded the two together — a gambit that echoes the grand-bargain diplomacy his administration pursued before the US-Iran war reshuffled every calculation in the region.
The timing is impossible to separate from that war. With US strikes on Iran in their thirteenth consecutive night and Iranian missiles striking US positions in three Gulf countries, the administration is working to consolidate an aligned bloc of Israel and the Gulf monarchies. A Saudi entry into the Abraham Accords would be the cornerstone of that architecture.
REACTION: In Israel, officials welcomed the linkage as validation of the normalization-first approach, with commentators noting that a Saudi accession would be the most significant diplomatic breakthrough in decades. Palestinian leaders condemned the maneuver, warning that trading nuclear technology for normalization sidelines their cause entirely. Nonproliferation experts raised their own alarm: conditioning the deal on diplomacy, they argue, does nothing to resolve concerns about enrichment on Saudi soil.
In Riyadh, the public silence speaks loudly. Analysts read the kingdom’s non-response as deliberation rather than rejection — MBS has domestic and regional audiences to manage, and being seen as normalizing with Israel under American pressure, while the region is at war and Palestinian grievances remain unaddressed, carries real risks. But the pull of the nuclear program, and of deeper US security ties amid the Iran conflict, is equally real.
WHAT TO WATCH: The next signal will come from Riyadh — whether through formal statements, backchannel diplomacy, or the pace of technical work on the nuclear agreement. Watch for any Saudi conditions in response: a revived demand for a defined path to Palestinian statehood, expanded US security guarantees, or enrichment rights that Washington has resisted. Watch, too, for how the Iran war shapes the calculus; a wider escalation could either accelerate Gulf alignment with Washington or make normalization politically untouchable.
Congress is the other arena. Any nuclear cooperation agreement faces legislative review, and Trump’s explicit linkage to the Abraham Accords may complicate the vote math in both directions — winning over Israel hawks while hardening nonproliferation skeptics.
BOTTOM LINE: Trump has put the region’s two biggest prizes — Saudi nuclear power and Saudi-Israeli peace — on the same table and declared they must be bought together. It is classic maximum-leverage dealmaking, executed in the middle of a war that makes every Gulf decision existential. If it works, it redraws the Middle East. If it stalls, the nuclear deal Trump signed may sit dormant — a signed agreement waiting on a handshake Riyadh has spent decades avoiding.
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