US-Saudi nuclear deal hits turbulence just a day after signing

A landmark nuclear deal between the United States and Saudi Arabia is already unraveling into confusion, less than 24 hours after it was signed with fanfare in Washington. The agreement, laying the groundwork for American companies to help Saudi Arabia build a civilian nuclear power industry, immediately sparked concerns about a Saudi path to enrichment before President Trump himself muddied the picture with a social media post tying the deal to Middle East diplomacy that his own negotiators hadn’t included, Michael Ratney wrote in a Center for Strategic and International Studies commentary published Thursday.

Ratney, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and now works as a senior adviser at CSIS, laid out how the deal, formally known as a 123 agreement after the section of the Atomic Energy Act that governs U.S. civil nuclear cooperation, came together on July 22 when Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed it in Washington. Saudi Arabia has treated nuclear power as central to Vision 2030, the kingdom’s plan to diversify its economy away from oil, alongside investments in solar and wind. The rationale is straightforward from a Saudi perspective, since the kingdom currently burns crude oil domestically for more than a third of its electricity generation, oil it could otherwise sell abroad for substantial profit, making nuclear power a genuinely useful alternative rather than just a prestige project.

The first came from press reports, including reporting from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, suggesting the agreement could eventually let Saudi Arabia build its own uranium enrichment capability, a process that separates usable nuclear fuel from raw uranium ore and can, if pushed far enough, produce material capable of powering a weapon rather than just a power plant. Currently just 14 countries operate their own uranium enrichment facilities, and Saudi Arabia has significant domestic uranium deposits along with a long-standing ambition to control the entire nuclear fuel cycle, from mining raw uranium to running finished power plants, rather than depending on foreign suppliers for enriched fuel. Any move toward Saudi enrichment, even one press reports suggested would only follow years of additional study into whether an enrichment facility even makes commercial sense, raised alarm in Washington and Israel over the risk that enrichment capability built for civilian energy could eventually support a weapons program.

The second controversy followed almost as a reaction to the first, and it came from the president himself. Trump posted on social media the day after the signing, linking the nuclear deal to Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords, the series of diplomatic normalization agreements Trump brokered during his first term between Israel and countries including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. He also appeared to rule out uranium enrichment entirely in that same post, contradicting the ambiguity in earlier reporting, and, in Ratney’s telling, oddly equated Iran’s nuclear program with that of the UAE, two countries with very different nuclear track records and international standing.

That timing struck many in Washington as strange, according to Ratney, since Trump’s most senior officials had negotiated and signed the agreement just a day earlier without publicly attaching a normalization condition to it.

“Trump’s insistence that the nuclear deal would be contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords and normalizing relations with Israel surprised many observers, seemingly adding a major condition to an agreement that his most senior officials had negotiated on his behalf and signed to great fanfare only a day earlier,” Ratney wrote.

Ratney argued that the surprise condition doesn’t actually change Saudi Arabia’s underlying calculation on normalization, which has depended since talks began during the Biden administration on Israel agreeing to support the creation of a Palestinian state, something the current Israeli government has explicitly and repeatedly ruled out. Layered on top of that is the enrichment question, since Ratney suggested Saudi leadership likely places real political value simply in retaining the right to pursue enrichment someday, even if an actual facility would be extraordinarily expensive, take a decade or more to build, and might never make commercial sense on its own.

“Likely driving Trump’s surprise announcement was a desire to blunt the domestic and Israeli criticism that emerged as soon as the deal was announced,” Ratney wrote.

Atlantic Council nonproliferation expert Matthew Kroenig has argued it would be a mistake to let Saudi Arabia gain enrichment capability at all, while the deal’s 30-year duration and structure, according to CNN reporting, could allow Saudi Arabia to enrich fuel for its own civilian reactors without fully adopting what nonproliferation advocates call the gold standard of international oversight, meaning a legally binding commitment to forgo enrichment and reprocessing entirely. The Section 123 agreement itself still requires congressional review, and while lawmakers could theoretically block it, doing so would require a veto-proof majority in both chambers, a high bar that leaves the deal on track to take effect regardless of the confusion surrounding Trump’s remarks.

Over the course of this administration, Washington has agreed to sell Saudi Arabia F-35 fighter jets, struck economic agreements covering areas like artificial intelligence, and now signed this nuclear cooperation deal, essentially handing the kingdom most of what it stood to gain from normalizing with Israel under the grand bargain first negotiated during the Biden administration, an arrangement that had also envisioned a mutual defense treaty and a path toward Palestinian statehood before the Gaza war and Israel’s refusal to support a two-state solution took that broader deal off the table.

“By inserting normalization at the last minute, President Trump now throws a great deal of uncertainty into a deal that was always going to be controversial and creates more questions about the reliability of the United States as a strategic partner,” Ratney wrote.