Anti-Anti-Proliferation

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

Trumpism is a politics of spite, by which I mean that its strategic impulses often seem driven by nothing more complicated than “if the traditional liberal establishment believes X, then surely Not X must be better.”

 

That’s how we ended up in our current mess in Iran. In 2018 the president exited the hated nuclear deal that Barack Obama had negotiated with the regime; the Iranians responded by resuming their enrichment of uranium, eventually amassing a stockpile of 22,000 pounds. That eventually led to last year’s joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and ultimately to this year’s stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz.

 

The nominal strategic logic for leaving the nuclear deal was that putting “maximum pressure” on Iran would be more likely to get it to denuclearize than friendly diplomacy would. (Donald Trump seemed to think better of that belatedly, per last month’s now-defunct peace agreement.) But in all probability, it wasn’t strategic logic that made the president abandon the Obama nuclear deal. It was its provenance.

 

The late Lindsey Graham once shared the secret of his influence over Trump with political reporter Mark Leibovich. “If he had a goal of getting Trump to do something, especially if it involved foreign affairs, Graham would just tell the president that his then-predecessor, Barack Obama, would do something that was 180 degrees different,” Leibovich recently recalled. That approach was reliably effective, the senator claimed, because “Obama drives him nuts.”

 

If the traditional liberal establishment typified by Obama believed that negotiating with Iran was good, then surely not negotiating with Iran—“180 degrees different,” as Graham put it—must be better.

 

That impulse animates lots of Trumpist policies. There are ideological rationales for postliberal hostility toward NATO and the Pax Americana, toward “soft power” federal agencies like USAID, toward domestic diversity initiatives and LGBTQ rights, and toward college education and women in the workplace. But postliberalism is a revolutionary project, and at base that project is driven by contrarian rejectionism toward the postwar liberal order in its entirety. As such, in literally any situation, knowing that liberalism favors X will cause postliberals to at least strongly consider Not X, if not to embrace it outright.

 

No matter how stupid or pernicious Not X might be.

 

I thought of that this morning upon discovering that the president evidently now thinks nuclear proliferation in the Middle East might be a good idea.

 

Last night the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House has signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia that “will provide the country with a civilian nuclear program and potentially open the door to uranium enrichment in the kingdom’s territory.” Joe Biden’s administration had considered a similar deal but conditioned its support on the Saudis agreeing to normalize relations with Israel. Trump’s administration is making no such demand.

 

Nor is it insisting on the sort of safeguards that the U.S. imposed on the United Arab Emirates when it struck a nuclear deal with that country in 2009. Supposedly, per the Journal, any enrichment facility that America constructs for the Saudis will be built “under a secretive ‘black box’ arrangement that would preclude the transfer of sensitive enrichment technology to Riyadh.” But, according to the New York Times:

 

To get the deal done with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s 40-year-old de facto leader, Mr. Trump had to agree to terms that may limit international inspectors from going to any sites in the country that they think could be a pathway to diverting fuel to weapons projects.

 

And he agreed that, after a joint study with Saudi Arabia on the economics of producing nuclear fuel, the Saudis may be allowed to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium on their soil.

 

If the Saudis don’t intend to convert this supposed nuclear energy program into a weapons program, it’s weird that they’d drive a hard bargain about permitting homegrown enrichment and limiting inspections, no?

 

For 80 years, the traditional liberal establishment believed that the risks of international nuclear proliferation waaaaaaaay outweighed the deterrent benefits. It appears that postliberalism has arrived at the Not X stage with respect to that too.

 

Tit for tat.

 

As always with Trump, it’s possible that helping the Saudis build a nuclear program had nothing to do with strategic logic.

 

Maybe it’s a thank-you to the Saudi royals for being such generous benefactors of Trump family businesses. If so, it’s not the only story on the wires today in which a Middle Eastern government that rained cash on Trump Inc. has received a benefit that threatens long-term U.S. national security. How any of that squares with the idea of “America First” is hard to say, although I suppose that’s why the president has reserved the right to define that term however he likes.

 

Maybe it’s a simpler matter of Trump taking his usual “friends/enemies” approach to politics. The Saudis are trusted cronies and so they’re naturally exempt from the usual arm’s-length strategic considerations that might normally guide decisions like “Should we make this sharia desert backwater a nuclear power?” Rules, laws, and norms like anti-proliferation apply only to enemies, never to friends. That’s Postliberalism 101.

 

It could also be that the Saudis appealed to Trump’s insatiable thirst for oil, which drove his coup in Venezuela and is clearly on his mind in Iran. Per the Journal, Riyadh has argued for years that a nuclear program will help it meet its domestic energy needs, which “would free up more of its oil production for export and boost revenues.” No matter that most of the planet is headed toward electric vehicles and green energy, particularly in China. To the president, a creature of the 1970s and 1980s, cheaper gas in the distant future continues to hold talismanic appeal.

 

Or perhaps green-lighting a nuclear program is Trump’s way of trying to make it up to the Saudis for having sabotaged their oil industry by starting a foolish war in Iran. Our Gulf allies learned a painful lesson this year about the limits of America’s ability to protect them from the local Shiite menace. The president might be trying to atone for that by boosting their native ability to defend themselves. With, er, a nuclear deterrent.

 

Wherever you land in all of this, it goes without saying that a U.S. government led by Trump can’t be counted on to stop the Saudis from converting their nuclear energy program into a nuclear weapons program, no matter what sort of formal “black box” guarantees might be built into the relationship. Relying on postliberal America for oversight of Riyadh is like relying on one mafia family to police another with which it’s in business.

 

I do think there could be some bona fide strategic logic to Trump’s Saudi nuclear gambit, though. Pure and simple: Tit for tat.

 

He was once asked during his first presidential campaign what his favorite Bible verse was and, instead of replying disingenuously with some crowd-pleaser from the Gospels like “love thy neighbor,” he responded candidly with “an eye for an eye.” Tit for tat: If someone wounds you, you wound them. And when you do, you make it painful enough that they’ll never think of wounding you again.

 

“Tit for tat” is about as sophisticated as his strategic acumen gets, I’m afraid. Certainly, it captures his thinking on how to free the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian control. Tit for tat: They shoot at a passing tanker, we bomb a few targets along the coast, and then the cycle repeats—never mind that U.S. intelligence has warned the White House that tit for tat won’t work here, which means we’re burning through dwindling weapons stockpiles to no obvious effect.

 

This morning Trump went as far as to make the strategy official military policy. “From this point forward,” he announced, “any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran.” They hit a ship, we hit a bridge. They block the strait, we block the strait. Tit for tat.

 

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, but if tit for tat is all you know, you’re destined to keep doing it even after it fails. So is it any surprise that the president might have reasoned that the proper countermeasure to a nuclear threat by Shiite fanatics … is to create a nuclear threat by Sunni fanatics?

 

Let’s see if we can identify any strategic problems with the idea of a Saudi nuclear program that might override the otherwise compelling logic of “If the Iranians get the power to blow up the world, it’s only fair that the Saudis should have it too.”

 

A strategic disaster.

 

In the first place, although it’s hard to remember now, the initial case for war with Iran rested on the belief that a regime as radical as the Islamic Republic had to be deterred from developing nuclear weapons by any means necessary.

 

If that’s so, why the hell would we want to further incentivize them to build nukes by agreeing to help their bitter sectarian rivals in Riyadh create a nuclear program of their own?

 

“Saudi enrichment would put immense pressure on Iran to get the bomb,” Middle East expert Rosemary Kelanic observed. “Is Trump TRYING to provoke Iran into weaponizing?” Remember that, during last month’s brief rapprochement, the president actually defended Iran’s need for ballistic missiles by reasoning that its enemy Saudi Arabia has missiles too. If he grasps how conventional deterrence works, why doesn’t he grasp that nuclear deterrence will work the same way?

 

It’s particularly stupid given that the silver lining in the dark cloud hanging over Hormuz is that the Iranians have discovered they don’t need a bomb to work their will on the region and the West. Maybe, in a post-war world, they would have pivoted away from nuclear terrorism and toward commercial terrorism—but not if, thanks to Trump, the Saudis now stand a chance of outgunning them. And they do: Mohammed bin Salman promised years ago to build nuclear weapons if Iran does, giving Tehran that much more reason not to fall behind.

 

Another problem: This is an awfully weird decision for “the most pro-Israel president in history” to make, no?

 

Israeli leaders are understandably mortified by news of a Saudi nuclear program. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called it “a grave strategic failure that endangers our security. Allowing uranium enrichment on Saudi soil could trigger a regional nuclear arms race and lead to a highly dangerous loss of control.” Former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, head of the hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu party, echoed the point in urging Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to oppose the program “with all our might,” predicting that “Saudi Arabia’s civilian nuclear program will end in nuclear weapons and lead to a mad arms race across the entire Middle East.”

 

No one doubts it, do they? “Whither goes Saudi Arabia, so goes the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Egypt,” one nonproliferation expert warned the Journal. (America might have some oversight over Saudi Arabia’s program, but what about when Turkey and Egypt go nuclear?) The Biden administration’s imperfect solution to Israel’s anxiety was to demand that the Saudis at least sign a peace deal with Jerusalem before receiving nuclear help. Trump, by comparison, is giving the Israelis nothing.

 

Which means we’re all teed up for war in the distant, or possibly not-so-distant, future. Maybe Israel will feel obliged to reprise its raid on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor by targeting the new Saudi nuclear program, destroying any chance of peace with Riyadh. Or maybe Iran will touch off a regional war by attacking the Saudi facilities itself, as Lieberman fears.

 

Or maybe some future American administration will do it.

 

That’s another scenario that the president evidently hasn’t considered—that the chumminess between the United States and Saudi Arabia won’t last forever. A country that famously produced 15 of the 9/11 hijackers and whose government has been suspected for ages of funding jihadists abroad to keep them away from the kingdom is a bad long-term bet to remain stable and pro-Western. Today’s Mohammed bin Salman nuclear energy program is tomorrow’s Salafist nuclear weapons program.

 

And once it is, the United States will be in precisely the same place with respect to Saudi Arabia that it is right now with respect to Iran. Only this time, we’ll have built their nuclear infrastructure ourselves.

 

The Saudi royal family will doubtless use that scenario to extort future presidents for continued U.S. support in whatever nutty authoritarian things it wants to do. Once the regime’s survival becomes necessary to prevent nuclear know-how from falling into terrorists’ hands, the world will have no choice but to prop it up. If the day comes when the Saudis need American military help to defeat some homegrown ISIS-style outfit, how could we possibly refuse?

 

Even if the royals maintain their grip on the country, the risk of an atomic disaster will rise meaningfully once Saudi Arabia gains nuclear capabilities. Many officials in the kingdom’s bureaucracy sympathize with jihadist outfits like Hamas and al-Qaeda, I’m sure; if any one of them is willing and able to chisel a radioactive material from the national supply, they could potentially arm those groups with so-called dirty bombs.

 

Cleanup.

 

The long and short of it is that the president and his team are poised to re-create the very elements of Iran’s nuclear program that make it so dangerous—domestic uranium enrichment without international inspections under the control of an austere Islamist regime. In theory, this nuclear version of tit for tat will force the Saudis and Iranians to resolve their differences rationally and diplomatically, the way the U.S. and Soviet Union had to, to avoid annihilation.

 

But in practice, with messianic sectarian fundamentalists on both sides this time, who knows?

 

The easiest prediction in the world is that some hapless successor to Trump will be forced to clean up this foreseeable mess and will lack good options. Perhaps President J.D. Vance will choose to stop supervising the Saudi program altogether, washing his hands of all foreign business on “America First” grounds and leaving the Middle East to solve its own problems—however hairy that might get.

 

Or perhaps some future Democratic president will consider intervening to block the Saudis’ path to a bomb, only to back off when he’s extorted by the royals in the manner I described before and attacked by Republicans for supposedly siding with Iran in the region’s nascent nuclear conflict. If and when a rough equilibrium in atomic deterrence is achieved, how could any administration dare risk disturbing it in the name of nonproliferation?

 

These are the dilemmas you force upon yourself when you choose someone to command the military whose grasp of strategy runs not much deeper than tit for tat, gassy rhetoric about “strength,” and casualty comparisons as a yardstick for whether a military operation was successful. For all its failures, the traditional liberal establishment did a solid job of keeping the nuclear genie in its bottle. But here too, it appears, Not X will win again.