With Saudi Arabia, Another Inferior Nuclear Deal

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, July 24, 2026

 

The Trump administration has offered a nuclear development deal to Saudi Arabia, a country pulled in two ways between the desire of its hereditary despot to move toward something closer to global normalcy and its economic-political elite’s longstanding entanglements with jihadist ideology and international terrorism.

 

This has raised understandable concerns and a few big questions, and the most obvious one—Who in Donald Trump’s circle is getting paid behind this?—we can expect to be answered in due course, one convenient side effect of the shamelessness of these people. But the other issues and questions are worth considering too.

 

We might begin by noting that this accord builds on a proposal developed under the Joe Biden administration but with important differences: Rather than a prohibition on enrichment of uranium in Saudi Arabia, the Trump deal would establish a commission to study the issue—the classic Washington dodge. That is meaningful.

 

The deal is superficially about nuclear energy. It is, explicitly or not, a deal about nuclear weapons. Israel has them, Pakistan has them, Iran is dead set on getting them in the face of a U.S. war launched at least in part to prevent this, and Saudi Arabia cannot be the regional hegemon it aspires to be without matching regional capabilities. Controlling its own uranium enrichment is a necessity in the pursuit of that goal.

 

One very smart security thinker tells me that the way to think about Saudi Arabia’s nuclear ambitions is that Riyadh already has nuclear weapons—it just chooses to store them in Pakistan. He is referring to the Saudi-Pakistani mutual defense accord, which pledges Pakistan to defend Saudi Arabia against military aggression, presumably—presumably—putting the kingdom under Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella. But the text of the Saudi-Pakistani accord does not obligate those nuclear weapons explicitly, and Pakistan is an unreliable partner. It is an unfortunate fact that it often is not entirely clear whether Pakistan is a country with an army or an army with a country—or an army spy agency with a country: Its formidable Inter-Services Intelligence agency operates as a state-within-a-state, and the central government in Pakistan does not exercise uncontested power over the entirety of the country, which is plagued with constant border disputes and insurgencies in remote areas such as Balochistan. It is easy to see why Mohammed bin Salman et al. might think twice about relying on a parchment nuclear deterrent guaranteed by Islamabad.

 

Allow me to refresh your memory about some relevant history: Saudi Arabia was at the center of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden was a Saudi exile, and 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi subjects. Saudi “charities” and members of the kingdom’s financial elite provided financial sustenance to al-Qaeda, the Wahhabi-inflected ideology of which is largely a Saudi product. The Saudi national who provided assistance to some of the hijackers in California probably was a government operative. Other enablers were connected, if less directly, to Saudi intelligence.

 

It does not necessarily follow from this that the hijackers’ actions were sanctioned by the Saudi state, but neither is Riyadh off the hook: In August of last year, a federal judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence to allow a lawsuit brought against the Saudi government by the families of 9/11 victims to proceed. That litigation has been stymied by the Trump administration, as the families’ spokesperson tells the story: “Even with the FBI pushing back and President Trump invoking state secrets, we created an overwhelming picture of Saudi Arabia’s role in supporting the 9/11 hijackers,” he said in remarks reported by ProPublica.

 

It is not clear that the United States should be blessing the development of a Saudi nuclear energy program that is certain to be a covert nuclear weapons program in any case. But this deal under these conditions—about that, additional reservations are due: Having at first omitted the detail, Trump now says that the Saudis will be obliged to join the so-called Abraham Accords as a condition of the deal’s approval. The administration’s credibility here—having added the stipulation as an afterthought after considerable public criticism—is not exactly bombproof. And we know that Trump can be bought, or at least rented, by any tinpot Arab potentate with capital sufficient to purchase an airplane.

 

The Biden administration did much to alienate Saudi Arabia, and that was a mistake. The Trump administration is keen to hug the Saudis tight. Whether this is a case of keeping one’s friends close or one’s enemies closer is a matter open to interpretation.

 

And it may turn out that “follow the money” is the simplest explanation.