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Only days after the Trump administration celebrated what it called a landmark civilian nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia, the president himself appeared to place the entire arrangement in jeopardy. In a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump declared the deal “totally subject” to Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords and normalizing with Israel — a condition absent from the administration’s own announcement barely a day earlier. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt then confirmed that, without normalization, “the deal is off.”
The reversal was striking not simply because it resurrected a condition Washington had already concluded was ineffective, as Saudi Arabia has made clear that it will not normalize at this time. More importantly, it reflected a recurring feature of policymaking in the second Trump administration: Major strategic decisions appearing to evolve through improvisation rather than through a settled policy process. The normalization condition matters, but what matters even more is how and why it suddenly reappeared. One plausible explanation is that the condition functioned less as a genuine negotiating demand than as a political escape hatch: a requirement Riyadh was highly unlikely to accept, allowing the administration to avoid a bruising congressional fight over the agreement itself.
In an earlier piece for War on the Rocks, I described how Riyadh’s calculus on U.S.-Saudi relations had changed, and why normalization with Israel was no longer a crucial factor in that relationship. Overwhelmingly, this is due to Israel’s war on Gaza, which has been the subject of proceedings before the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention, as well as the broader Israeli project of regional paramountcy. It was clear that Washington had accepted this change, not because it agreed with it normatively, but because both the Biden and Trump administrations realized they could not compel Riyadh into normalization by withholding strategic cooperation. That was true under President Joseph Biden. It was also true under the first Trump administration. That helps explain why U.S.-Saudi ties have deepened further under the second Trump administration than they did under the Biden administration — even if the nuclear deal does not go through.
Washington still needs Saudi cooperation on energy markets, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, AI, and critical minerals. It still wants to prevent Riyadh’s nuclear program from anchoring itself in Chinese or Russian technological ecosystems. Nor was the nuclear agreement itself devoid of strategic logic. Even some specialists who criticized aspects of the reported terms acknowledge that Washington has struggled for years to reconcile its traditional nonproliferation preferences with the reality that Russia and China are willing to provide nuclear cooperation under less restrictive conditions. The broader question has increasingly become not whether greater flexibility is warranted, but how much flexibility is prudent.
None of that became less true between the July 22 signing and the Truth Social post on the next day. Rather, the appearance of improvisation may itself conceal a political calculation. Even if the immediate trigger was an ad hoc reaction to an agreement that appears to have advanced more quickly than the White House anticipated, the decision to reattach normalization may also have served a clear domestic political purpose: insulating the administration from an agreement that was always expected to face intense scrutiny in Congress.
Normalization with Israel is currently a red line for Saudi Arabia. As I noted, also in these pages, whereas there might have been a time when political normalization could be considered as part of a wider package deal, that is no longer the case. Normalization with Israel simply doesn’t make sense now. Without a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood, normalization would impose high political costs while delivering few meaningful strategic benefits. Led by its most far-right government in Israeli history, Israel is perhaps the most unpopular it has ever been in the region, as well as internationally.
It bears remembering that the original Saudi line was that normalization could only ever take place in the context of Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories, the realization of a Palestinian state with its capital in occupied East Jerusalem, and a just solution to the Palestinian refugee question — all in line with multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions and International Court of Justice advisory opinions. This outcome, however, has become less likely in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and the subsequent Israeli campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon.
Reversing its position now, without meaningful movement on Palestine, would cost Riyadh standing across the Arab and Muslim worlds for uncertain strategic return. As I told Agence France-Presse shortly after the announcement: “Would Saudi Arabia decide to do a complete 180-degree turn on what it has declared for the past three years? The past 30 years? Not likely.”
None of this is to dismiss the separate debate over the nuclear agreement’s substance. Critics have argued that the terms contemplated a pathway to future Saudi uranium enrichment, but relied on inspection arrangements that fell short of the Additional Protocol, and reportedly depended on unpublished side understandings. One could also counter that Washington has already been moving away from such a gold standard for years, particularly in light of commercial competition from Russia and China. In any case, these may be serious arguments — but they are analytically distinct from the question addressed here. Indeed, the expectation of exactly this kind of congressional debate strengthens rather than weakens the argument advanced here, because it provides an obvious domestic political incentive for the White House to reintroduce a condition it had every reason to believe Riyadh would not accept.
So, the more interesting question isn’t why Saudi Arabia would refuse. It’s why Trump chose to impose the condition at all, especially after the fact.
It’s understandable why many might see it as simply another impulsive move by an unpredictable president. Yet there is another, more strategic, reading. Several press reports over the past week or so hint at that possibility. CNN reporting suggested that parts of the Energy Department’s agreement advanced before receiving full presidential sign-off. If accurate, that would explain the appearance of policy improvisation. But it does not explain why normalization was chosen as the corrective. That choice appears better understood as a politically useful condition, one almost certain to be rejected by Riyadh.
If Riyadh rejects this rider — which it almost certainly will — the agreement dies before Congress must engage in a prolonged public battle to kill it, which would be incredibly embarrassing for the Trump administration. Instead, responsibility shifts to Riyadh and the Trump administration avoids a legislative defeat. If Riyadh somehow — incredibly unlikely — accepts, opponents of the deal would be completely neutralized, because only a minority in the House and the Senate would be politically able to oppose an expansion of Israeli normalization in the wider Arab world and Middle East region.
Either outcome improves the administration’s position. A simpler account — that the condition was reattached mainly to placate hawkish critics who felt the original deal gave Riyadh too much — can’t be ruled out. But it does not predict that the condition would be structured so that both possible Saudi responses leave the administration better off. That feature is more consistent with the rider having been chosen, at least in part, for its function as an exit rather than as a message.
One plausible reading is that attaching the rider offered the White House a politically convenient exit. Knowing the Saudis were unlikely to accept the condition, the administration could allow the agreement to collapse through Saudi rejection, rather than allow Congress to stall it indefinitely, or worse, vote it down outright. The prospects in that regard worsen over time, if one or both chambers of Congress swing to the Democrats in the midterm elections in November.
Several aspects of the administration’s subsequent public messaging are consistent with either interpretation, which is itself telling. Even as multiple reports indicated the agreement contemplated a pathway to Saudi enrichment capability, Trump flatly declared “there will be no enrichment of material,” contradicting the framework that had been publicly described only a day earlier. The statement reads equally well either as a concession to enrichment’s critics or as further distancing from a deal Washington no longer expected to survive. But that also sent a signal to Riyadh: not simply that Trump will fail to push this agreement through, but that Washington continues to be particularly erratic, irrespective of what is agreed or signed. Whether this reflected misunderstanding, tactical signaling, or an effort to distance Trump from the agreement, it conveyed to Riyadh that the White House itself was retreating from the bargain it had only just celebrated.
The broader consequences could be significant. If the agreement collapses, Saudi Arabia’s nuclear ambitions won’t disappear — nor will its electricity demand, its diversification of economy agenda, or its preference to preserve hydrocarbons for export rather than domestic use. The choice was never between an American-backed Saudi program and no program at all. It was always whether that program develops through American technology and oversight, or through Chinese, Russian, or other partnerships. Again, the Trumpian tactic here of adding the rider post-negotiations changes none of that.
After all is said and done, if Washington genuinely — and this is also quite dubious — believes it can compel normalization today by threatening to withhold strategic cooperation, it has forgotten a crucial lesson of the past several years: Riyadh has options, and they are not all American.
The episode may have begun as improvisation, but the normalization condition appears to have become a politically useful instrument for managing domestic constraints. Whether by design or rapid adaptation, the result was the same: One of the most strategically significant agreements in U.S.-Saudi relations was reshaped through short-term domestic political adjustments rather than any coherent strategy governing the underlying relationship. In effect, it transformed the agreement into one that Riyadh was highly unlikely to accept, allowing the administration to avoid a difficult congressional confrontation. The most consequential feature of this episode may therefore not be the normalization condition itself, but the extent to which domestic political considerations appear capable of reshaping major strategic policy in Washington after agreements have already been declared — producing policy adjustments that appear improvised even when they may serve a clear political purpose.
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 a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Formerly deputy convenor of the U.K. government’s working group on tackling radicalization and extremism, he has held positions at the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, and the U.K. Foreign Office.
Image: The White House via Wikimedia Commons
