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Donald Trump has said that a civil nuclear agreement that the US signed with Saudi Arabia this week will proceed only if Riyadh normalises diplomatic relations with Israel.
Trump’s declaration came less than a day after his administration announced the deal without any mention of Israel, promoting it as laying the foundation for “a decades-long, multibillion-dollar partnership”.
“The Civil Nuclear Deal (There will be no enrichment of material!) being made between the United States Department of Energy and Saudi Arabia, which pertains only to non-military use such as the ones that Iran and UAE (and others) already have, will be approved, but is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform early on Thursday.
The Abraham Accords, a signature Trump first-term policy, have sought to normalise ties between Israel and Muslim nations.
The US Department of Energy said on Wednesday that Washington and Riyadh had signed “a peaceful nuclear co-operation agreement” that would provide “great access for American companies” and help to fulfil Trump’s “nuclear renaissance” for America.
Under the terms of the arrangement, the US would help its Gulf ally to develop nuclear energy for civilian electrical use, including by potentially helping it to enrich uranium on Saudi soil, said people familiar with the deal.
The announcement drew an immediate backlash from Democratic lawmakers and Israel-aligned conservatives in the US, who warned that such a deal — which the US had earlier sought to link to a Saudi-Israeli rapprochement package — forfeited valuable US “leverage”.
They argued it also lacked safeguards to ensure Saudi Arabia would not later use the technology to build a nuclear weapon.
Trump’s intervention, 16 hours after the announcement, is likely to quiet some of that criticism but to unnerve Saudi Arabia, which — along with its Gulf neighbours — has been targeted by Tehran since the US and Israel attacked Iran in February.
US officials have said that the US and Saudi Arabia were close to inking an agreement in 2023 that would have provided for a US-Saudi defence pact and US-assisted development of the kingdom’s civil nuclear programme, in a package that included Riyadh’s establishment of diplomatic ties with Israel.
But the effort was derailed by Israel’s punishing war in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel in 2023. Israel’s campaign in the Palestinian territory hardened Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s stance on normalisation.
The crown prince has since insisted that such a move would only be possible if Israel took irreversible steps towards enabling the establishment of a Palestinian state, which Israel has refused to do.
There was no immediate response from Saudi Arabia to Trump’s comments. The kingdom’s state news TV channel highlighted a post by the US president about punishing Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Iran but appeared to ignore his statement about the nuclear deal, posted a few minutes earlier.
The office of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the announcement, saying: “As President Trump has said, Saudi Arabia’s joining of the Abraham Accords would be an historic leap forward for peace in the Middle East.”
Additional reporting by Neri Zilber in Tel Aviv and Ahmed Al Omran in Jeddah
