U.S. President Donald Trump conditioned a civilian nuclear cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia on Thursday on Riyadh normalizing relations with Israel, an action the kingdom has so far refused to take.
Trump said the deal would take effect only if Saudi Arabia joined the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords under which several Arab states established ties with Israel. The kingdom has long rejected joining the accords absent a pathway toward Palestinian statehood.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Trump had spoken with Gulf and Arab allies many times about pegging the deal to the Abraham Accords and that if the kingdom does not join them “the deal is off.”
The U.S. and Saudi Arabia announced the agreement on Wednesday allowing Riyadh to enrich uranium and build nuclear reactors using U.S. technology without the snap U.N. inspections Washington has demanded of Iran.
In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump wrote: “The Civil Nuclear Deal (There will be no enrichment of material!)… 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.”
“The United States is not opposed to Civil (Non-Enriched) Nuclear Facilities,” Trump said.
The U.S. Congress will have 90 session days to review the deal before it goes into force. There would also be a two-year feasibility study on the enrichment part of the agreement.
Saudi Arabia said before Trump pegged the deal to the Abraham Accords that the agreement supports efforts to diversify energy sources, and includes the “highest international standards” of nuclear safety, security and nonproliferation.
‘WE’LL CONTINUE TO TALK’
“We’ll continue to talk with our Saudi counterparts to get the deal finalized and hopefully see them joining Abraham Accords very soon,” Leavitt told reporters at the White House.
Leavitt said she did not believe Trump had spoken with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman since his post, but it was something he had raised in previous conversations.
The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first term in 2020, breaking a longstanding taboo to become the first Arab states to recognize Israel in a quarter century. Morocco and Sudan followed suit.
Israel, which feared the Saudi deal could ignite a Middle East arms race, welcomed the condition on Thursday.
“Saudi Arabia’s joining of the Abraham Accords would be an historic leap forward for peace in the Middle East,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.
Leavitt said she did not know if Netanyahu had requested that the deal be contingent on the wider accords. “Not to my knowledge, no,” she told reporters.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration said the civil nuclear deal abides by nonproliferation agreements in the U.S. Atomic Energy Act, which are among the world’s strongest.
The deal would let Saudi Arabia enrich uranium and reprocess nuclear waste, both of which are potential pathways to a nuclear weapon. The UAE agreed to forgo both when it signed a similar deal with the U.S. in 2009.
It was unclear what Trump meant in his social media post when he said there would be no nuclear enrichment under the agreement. It was not immediately clear if that was a specific reference to the highly enriched uranium used in weapons. Weapons-grade uranium is enriched to about 90% while fuel for nuclear reactors is enriched to up to 6%.
-Reuters
