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When President Donald Trump repeatedly pressed regional leaders on Abraham Accords expansion late last month — framing Arab-Israeli normalization as a debt owed and a condition for a settlement to end the Iran war — he apparently commented there had been silence on the other end of the line.

Arab and Muslim states are not silent because they lack a position on normalization. Indeed, collectively they have already articulated one through the Arab Peace Initiative ­— the 2002 proposal that offered normalized relations between Israel and over 50 countries. In exchange, it required Israel to fully withdraw from occupied territories, agree to an independent Palestinian state, and resolve the Palestinian refugee issue. Israel rejected the offer, despite repeated attempts for more than 24 years.

The silence of regional leaders is hardly surprising, but it reflects a familiar American mistake: treating Arab and Muslim states as though they are passive recipients of the right U.S. inducement rather than active players with their own strategic interests, domestic constraints, and cultural memories. Senator Lindsey Graham has made the case repeatedly for linking U.S. deals in the region to Accords expansion. Graham is but one U.S. senator, yet his focus on expanding the Abraham Accords reflects a genuine and institutionalized bipartisan consensus: one that tends to treat Accords expansion as a replicable model, without adequately accounting for any divergence of positions within even the Gulf itself. The Senate Abraham Accords Caucus was cofounded with prominent Democratic co-chairs alongside Republican ones, and its House equivalent was similarly bipartisan.

Even though the 2020 Abraham Accords were a specifically Trumpian achievement, the Biden administration made it clear that expanding them was a priority, identifying their expansion as a key focus in the 2022 National Security Strategy.

What is distinctively Trumpian is not the goal of expanding the Accords, but the specific escalation: framing that expansion as a mandatory condition of the Iran deal and invoking the language of debts owed. That move — weaponizing the Accords as leverage rather than treating them as a shared regional aspiration — is where Trump departs from the broader Washington consensus.

Outside Washington, the view is rather different, especially within the region itself. Trump may present himself as being “owed” a debt, but in the region, capitals see the United States as responsible for cleaning up a mess it made, against the desires of its own partners most affected by the fighting. Before the war, several Arab states lobbied against the United States and Israel attacking Iran. Now, more than three months later, the region doubts the credibility of U.S. security assurances while it has absorbed the brunt of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Too much of this seems to be lost on the U.S. president.

Beyond the fact that the Arab Peace Initiative — now on the table for 24 years — would result in widescale Israeli normalization, there is the obvious diplomatic difficulty of normalizing with this Israeli government. Since 2023, public opinion toward Israel has deteriorated sharply across much of the world — including in countries that had previously held relatively favorable views — owing to this government’s policies, which continue to be widely criticized, especially due to the remarkable devastation wrought on Gaza. Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that he had instructed the Israeli military to take control of 70 percent of the territory, squeezing Palestinians there into a tiny sliver of land. At present, the occupied West Bank is annexed in all but name, the Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem is under constant harassment, and Israeli forces now occupy more territory in Lebanon than they have in 20 years and more territory in Syria than they ever have.

These developments have provoked the ongoing genocide case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice and legal proceedings at the International Criminal Court. Even within the United States, where support for Israel has historically been strongest, public attitudes have become increasingly divided, with younger Americans in particular expressing significantly more critical views than in previous years. In this context, it’s hardly likely more countries will seek to normalize relations with Israel. Those who may argue that the absence of a Palestinian state didn’t stop the Abraham Accords in the first place ignore a simple fact: This is 2026, not 2020, and after the Gaza war, not before it. The inflammatory rhetoric — that it should be “mandatory” for more countries to join the Accords as part of an Iran deal and that “they owe that to us” — reflects a pattern: the administration treating regional states as variables in a Washington-designed equation, rather than as actors with strategic logic and historical memory of their own.

A little over a year ago, I argued in these pages that Saudi-Israeli normalization was beyond reach in the foreseeable future — a scenario that became certain within a few weeks of the Israeli assault on Gaza beginning. A normalization deal had already been difficult to imagine before Oct. 7, but today, the gap is so wide, it should be regarded as an insurmountable chasm. Riyadh currently sees little strategic rationale for normalization and has stated repeatedly that a credible Palestinian statehood pathway remains a prerequisite. If anything, the Iran war and its associated political fallout have reinforced Saudi Arabia’s decision-making rationale. Riyadh has no interest in strengthening the hand of a state — Israel — that sacrificed regional stability to pursue a war against Iran, waged against the Gulf states’ wishes.

Beyond the Gulf, Trump even asked the likes of Egypt and Jordan to sign up to the Abraham Accords — a telling request, considering Cairo was the very first Arab capital to make peace with Israel in 1979. Amman followed suit in 1994. While there is a precedent for countries that have already normalized with Israel to accede to the Abraham Accords — Kazakhstan did so last year — it’s unclear why Egypt or Jordan would do so now. For Cairo and Amman, joining a framework originally designed to bring new states to normalization would carry no strategic benefit and considerable domestic political cost.

As for Trump naming Pakistan as another country that should sign up to the Accords, this perhaps was the most bizarre request of all. Pakistan’s population is among the most consistently pro-Palestinian publics in the Muslim world, and shortly after Trump’s demand on May 25, the country’s army chief publicly stated that Pakistan “stands by its principled stance on the indispensability of the two-state solution” and an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

Even if Washington did believe there was potential to broaden Israeli normalization in the Muslim world, it would be strange to think that the Abraham Accords would be a likely vehicle, at least in Arab countries, and especially in the Gulf. Gulf Arab states would probably want to fashion their own deal, instead of being misinterpreted as joining an older initiative. In particular, it’s not likely that Riyadh — especially given the current rivalry between the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia — would simply accede to the Abraham Accords.

The Trump administration appears to have absorbed far too little of this regional picture when it comes to pushing Abraham Accords expansion. The rhetoric around expansion has less to do with reestablishing regional stability and more to do with boosting Trump’s image as the preeminent dealmaker, who brought the accords about in his first term. It’s understandable why Trump would seek to do so. What is less clear is why anyone would expect the Gulf states to come along for the ride.

If anything, the desire to expand the Abraham Accords probably has an unintended consequence in the region: broadening the conversation for what a Gulf-centered security architecture looks like, rather than one that is dependent on an American patron that clearly has very different — and often counter-productive — priorities. When the U.S. president makes declarations like this, he is reiterating that he views a vision of Israeli paramountcy in the region positively, and there isn’t a Gulf, Arab, or Muslim country that would agree. The more the White House pushes this kind of rhetoric, the more it excludes itself from wider conversations in the region. Washington is ironically responsible for the Gulf recalibrating and thus lessening American importance.

None of this forecloses Arab-Israeli normalization permanently. If nothing else, there is a truism that regional politics are fluid. But any realistic path runs through fundamental changes in Israeli policy toward the Palestinians — changes the current government has shown no indication of making. But for Riyadh and other capitals, the Palestinian question is a fundamental condition to be discussed.

The silence on that call with Trump was not a negotiating posture. It was a surprise that an American president, yet again, was ignoring the audience — and what that audience had already offered. The pursuit of Abraham Accords expansion as a vehicle for regional transformation — which cannot be delivered by such expansion — should be put to rest. As for Israeli normalization, the choice for that lies squarely with the Israelis, not the Arab and Muslim states on that call.

H.A. Hellyer, Ph.D., has operated at the nexus of government policy and think tanks for the past 20 years, focusing on geopolitics and security in the wider Arab world, Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia. He is senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Formerly deputy convenor of the United Kingdom government’s working group on tackling radicalization and extremism, he has held positions at the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, and the United Kingdom Foreign Office.

Image: The White House via Wikimedia Commons