White House Ties Saudi Nuclear Deal to Abraham Accords Membership

The White House has clarified that a prospective US-Saudi civil nuclear energy agreement is conditional on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, according to spokesperson Karoline Leavitt.

She said President Trump has previously held detailed discussions with Saudi leadership regarding the accords and that Washington hopes Riyadh will soon join the framework.

Leavitt said the US will continue ongoing negotiations with Saudi Arabia to serve American interests and support regional peace, framing the nuclear deal explicitly as leverage tied to broader Middle East normalization goals rather than a standalone energy or technology agreement.

She emphasized that Trump wants to expand the Abraham Accords’ scope further, seeking additional countries to join in order to improve political and economic conditions across the region — positioning Saudi accession as part of a larger strategic push rather than a bilateral matter limited to US-Saudi relations alone.

The conditional linkage carries significant weight given Saudi Arabia’s central role in the broader Middle East diplomatic landscape. The Abraham Accords, established during Trump’s first term, saw the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan normalize relations with Israel, but Saudi Arabia — as the Muslim world’s most influential state and custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites — has remained notably absent from the framework, with Riyadh historically linking any normalization to progress on Palestinian statehood.

Conditioning nuclear cooperation on Abraham Accords membership places Saudi Arabia in a position where a significant economic and strategic incentive — access to US civil nuclear technology, which would support Saudi Arabia’s ambitions to develop its own nuclear energy program — is directly tied to a politically sensitive normalization step that Riyadh has approached cautiously given domestic and regional political considerations, including public sentiment across the Muslim world regarding relations with Israel.

The timing is notable given the current regional backdrop. Saudi Arabia has faced direct security threats in recent days from Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, which declared a naval blockade specifically targeting Saudi Arabia, while Pakistan and other Muslim-majority nations have simultaneously issued statements defending Saudi security interests and condemning threats against the kingdom. Riyadh’s calculus on any Abraham Accords step would need to account for this heightened regional tension, including its own exposure to the widening US-Iran conflict.

Whether this conditional linkage accelerates Saudi accession to the Abraham Accords, or whether Riyadh continues resisting the pressure given its traditional emphasis on Palestinian statehood as a prerequisite, will likely shape both the nuclear negotiations’ progress and the broader trajectory of Trump’s stated ambition to expand the accords’ membership across the region.