The Daily Populous Thursday July 23rd, 2026 evening edition
Authored by ynetnews.com and submitted by NotSoSaneExile

President Donald Trump said Thursday that a planned civilian nuclear agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia will move forward only if Riyadh joins the Abraham Accords and normalizes relations with Israel.

Trump said the agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and Saudi Arabia concerns only peaceful nuclear use and will not include uranium enrichment.

“The Civil Nuclear Deal being made between the United States Department of Energy and Saudi Arabia, which 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,” Trump wrote.

“The United States is not opposed to Civil (Non-Enriched) Nuclear Facilities,” he added.

The statement marks a shift from previous discussions surrounding a potential US-Saudi nuclear agreement, which had raised concerns in Israel over whether Riyadh could gain access to uranium enrichment technology.

Trump emphasized that the program would be limited to civilian purposes and compared it to nuclear facilities already operating in countries including the United Arab Emirates.

The Abraham Accords, brokered during Trump’s first term, led to normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries, including the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco.

Saudi Arabia has long been viewed by Washington and Jerusalem as a potential candidate to join the agreements, but talks have been complicated by Riyadh’s demands regarding security guarantees, nuclear cooperation and the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Trump’s announcement came after months of negotiations over a broader US-Saudi package, which included economic cooperation, security ties and nuclear energy development.

The Saudi nuclear issue has been closely watched in Israel, where officials have expressed concern that allowing uranium enrichment capabilities in Saudi Arabia could contribute to a regional nuclear race.

Trump’s latest statement appeared to rule out such a possibility by explicitly stating that the agreement would not permit enrichment.

Fed_Austere on July 23rd, 2026 at 14:21 UTC »

SA was going to normalize relations with Israel a few years ago. Hamas moved up the date to start war with Israel in order to prevent that

coolsupposition66 on July 23rd, 2026 at 12:50 UTC »

The strategic logic here is messier than the White House is letting on. Conditioning civilian nuclear cooperation on Abraham Accords membership assumes Riyadh sees American technology as irreplaceable, when the Saudis have already made it clear they will talk to Beijing and Moscow if Washington draws red lines on enrichment. That bargaining chip weakens the moment MBS can credibly point to a Chinese-built reactor as a fallback.

There is also the gap between "no enrichment" as a US demand and what Saudi Arabia considers a sovereign right under any NPT framework it might sign. Publicly accepting a no-enrichment ceiling at home would be politically difficult for the crown prince, especially given how the deal is being framed in the region as transactional rather than principled. Israel gets its preferred outcome, but the long-term incentive structure for nonproliferation arguably gets worse, not better. Pushing a major Gulf state toward Chinese or Russian nuclear vendors does not exactly strengthen the nonproliferation regime.

EternalMayhem01 on July 23rd, 2026 at 12:27 UTC »

Such a move will likely push the Saudis to get their nuclear energy technology from China or Russia.