The Puzzle at the Center of the U.S.-Saudi Nuclear Deal

The Art of the Giveaway

The U.S.-Saudi nuclear deal has been hailed as a major triumph for the Trump administration, but it has also sparked concerns that it might ultimately allow for uranium enrichment and give Saudi Arabia the tools to build a bomb. The deal's opponents, in the United States and Israel, worry that the new pact might be used to develop a nuclear weapons program, despite the U.S. requiring no concessions from the kingdom in return.

The deal's framework has been on the table for years, but it came close to fruition during the Biden administration. However, the kingdom received a defense package in November and the nuclear deal this week, without stipulating the normalizing of relations with Israel as a precondition. "Leave it to this administration to negotiate after the signatures are barely dry," Elisa Ewers, a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us.

When the agreement was unveiled yesterday, U.S. lawmakers and Israeli politicians were startled by its lax conditions for Riyadh. Trump by this morning may have decided to provide reassurance with his Abraham Accords announcement—so he did what he often does. "The president wakes up every day, and every day, at least on Middle East policy, is an improvisation," F. Gregory Gause, a professor emeritus at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, told us. "He was getting some pushback on the Saudi deal, and so he added this sweetener to it for people in Congress who might feel that if the Saudis had a regular diplomatic relationship with Israel, they would be less concerned."

Trump, he noted, may improvise again and remove the stipulation if the furor dies down. Last week, the president said that the U.S. would impose a 20 percent fee on the value of the cargo on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz to counter Iranian efforts to control the waterway. The next day, the president reversed himself. "So it could be that by tomorrow, this goes away from the president’s mind," Gause said. But if he gives the Saudis what they want without asking for anything in return, he also would have thrown away all of his leverage.

In 2023, top officials in the Biden administration shuttled between Washington and Riyadh, believing that they were on the precipice of a major breakthrough: Bin Salman, known as MBS, was close to joining the Abraham Accords, a development that officials saw as a bulwark against Iran’s rising nuclear threat in the region. Talks to flesh out the details were scheduled for mid-October of that year. But the negotiations unraveled after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the devastating Gaza war that followed. In the aftermath, Saudi leaders concluded that normalization was politically untenable. Biden-administration officials then looked for other ways to entice the Saudis to both restart normalization talks and help secure the Gaza Strip. They focused on a mutual-defense agreement, which included nuclear cooperation, even though President Biden had made known his dislike for the crown prince after the 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Jon Wolfsthal, a former adviser on U.S.-Saudi nuclear cooperation, told us that the Biden administration had calculated that "if the U.S. didn’t get in the game, particularly as a nuclear provider, one of America’s adversaries might, and that is much worse for U.S. national security." But with the 2024 election looming, Saudi Arabia’s government gambled that a Trump victory would bring more favorable terms, and the talks stalled. Read: Iraq’s man in the middle

The Saudis were right. Saudi leaders already saw in Trump a partner whose approach was similar to their own: pragmatic, transactional, and largely unbothered by concerns about human rights. The relationship extended beyond official diplomacy. MBS had developed a close rapport with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner during Trump’s first term, communicating with him directly over WhatsApp. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had previously committed $2 billion to Kushner’s private-equity firm.

Following his return to the Oval Office, Trump grew fixated on getting Saudi Arabia to normalize ties with Israel. As in his first term, Trump picked Saudi Arabia for his first official overseas visit, arriving with an entourage of American business executives in an effort to foster deeper corporate ties, particularly in technology. During a meeting in Washington, D.C., in November, Trump, raising his voice, pressed MBS to join the Abraham Accords. MBS insisted that the only way to achieve this would be by