The Trump administration sent Congress its civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. Asked what the deal permits, the president wrote: There will be no enrichment of material. His own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, has said the opposite. The agreement gives Riyadh a pathway to enrich uranium on its own soil, and in doing so the potential for a Saudi nuclear Bomb. To placate fears Wright has put enrichment years down the road but not in doubt. Wright is describing the document. Trump is describing a country he is at war with to prevent from doing exactly this.
The war is meanwhile six months old and the reader knows its shape. American and Israeli aircraft killed the Supreme Leader of Iran in February to end all Iranian enrichment and prevent Iran from ever building a weapon. It has not ended. A settlement deadline passed on 17 August with the president in no rush, and his Treasury Secretary now promises an economic D-Day, the toughest sanctions in the country’s history, on the concession that the bombing did not do what was promised. Enrichment is the thing the war is supposedly being waged for. It is also the thing the Saudi contract is for.
The agreement is a 123 agreement, the legal instrument that lets American firms build a foreign country’s nuclear program, and the Energy Department’s announcement calls it peaceful, upholding the highest standards of nonproliferation. Not so fast. Past American deals kept enrichment out of the recipient’s hands, because low-enriched fuel for a reactor and the highly enriched metal of a warhead come off the same cascades; the separative work that makes the first does most of the work of the second. The Saudi deal instead preserves the enrichment option and, on the reporting, opens a route to reprocess spent fuel, the plutonium road to a bomb that runs parallel to the uranium one. In place of international inspection it substitutes a bilateral arrangement whose terms are not public.
There is a standard for this, and it was set relatively recently and right next door. When a US firm built the Emirates’ reactors in 2009, the UAE volunteered the strictest safeguards on offer, renounced enrichment and reprocessing outright, and today draws a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power without owning a single centrifuge. Saudi Arabia has refused that bargain. It has declined to sign the Additional Protocol, the enhanced-inspection regime that 144 states accept and that lets the International Atomic Energy Agency hunt for undeclared sites, and in 2024 it rescinded even the small-quantities protocol it once held. The country being handed the fuel cycle is the one refusing the cameras. The country being bombed to give up enrichment, Iran, was under those cameras, and before the war the IAEA director general said there was no proof of a systematic Iranian move toward a weapon.
The American reassurances offered for the Saudi deal deserve scrutiny. The deal is called conditional: the president announced, the day after his own Secretary signed it, that it would proceed only if Saudi Arabia joined the Abraham Accords and normalized relations with Israel, a term absent from the agreed text. A condition attached by afterthought can be lifted by afterthought. The deal is called subject to congressional review: in practice, lawmakers have ninety days to pass a resolution killing it, the clock can be stopped and has been stopped before, and if the two chambers do nothing it takes effect. Congress must muster a veto-proof majority to halt what it never voted for. Silence is assent. Some of the members are not silent. In November a group of them wrote to the secretary of state warning that the deal could enable Saudi Arabia to produce a nuclear bomb, and reminding him that he had once, as a senator, demanded the gold standard himself.
To see why enrichment is a reason for war in Tehran and a business line in Riyadh, look at what Saudi Arabia has already bought. In September last year, days after Israel bombed Doha and Washington did nothing, the kingdom signed a mutual defense pact with Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state that never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and holds an estimated 170 weapons. Any attack on one, the pact says, is an attack on both. Asked whether it covered the arsenal, a Saudi official called it a comprehensive agreement encompassing all military means. Pakistan’s defense minister said the capabilities his country holds will be made available; once the sentence had done its work he said nuclear weapons were not on the radar. The saying and the unsaying are not a muddle to be resolved. They are the product. Riyadh takes the deterrent value of a Pakistani umbrella and the deniability of an official denial, and the world is left to guess. This is called strategic ambiguity and has been applied by Israel for decades. Three weeks ago the arrangement widened: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, extending the same all-for-one clause across three states, with Pakistani troops and aircraft already deployed on Saudi soil.
This is the government the United States has decided can be trusted with enrichment. Its crown prince has said, on the record and more than once, that if Iran gets a weapon Saudi Arabia will follow suit. Its own officials tie the nuclear question openly to Iran’s. It shelters under a foreign bomb it will not confirm and refuses the inspections Iran accepted. Nonproliferation experts read the deal for what it is, a US-blessed hedging strategy toward a bomb option, and say so.
There is one more fact, and it does not go in a footnote, because the war was sold on the memory of exactly this kind of fact. Fifteen of the nineteen men who flew airliners into American buildings on 11 September 2001 were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was born in the kingdom, a son of one of its richest families. None of the nineteen was Iranian. The state that produced the hijackers and the man who directed them is being handed a path to enrichment. The state that produced none of them is being currently bombed back into the stone age.
What connects the two decisions is money, and it runs through one family. Jared Kushner ran Middle East policy from the Trump White House and cultivated the Saudi crown prince throughout it. Six months after he left office, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund put $2 billion into his new and untested firm. The fund’s own screening panel had recommended against it, finding the operation unsatisfactory in all aspects and the fees excessive. It was overruled by the fund’s chairman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man the CIA concluded had ordered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and cut apart, and whom Kushner had defended. The kingdom pays Kushner’s firm about 1.25 percent of $2 billion a year on that money, – do the math. The House committee that examined the arrangement called it the appearance of a quid pro quo for his foreign-policy work. The president’s son-in-law draws a continuous income from the Saudi state while the president tells the public, falsely, the Saudi state is not getting the thing it wants most, enrichment.
No investigation, if there was one, has shown the money bought the policy. What can be set down is narrower and still hard to look away from. A denial as flat as no enrichment, said over a document that permits enrichment, by a man whose Energy Secretary confirms the pathway and whose family is on the Saudi payroll, is not the language of a president who has not considered the future the document contains.
Set the pieces in a row and the shape stops looking like contradiction. The United States is bombing one country to deny it enrichment while writing enrichment into a contract for another. It invokes nonproliferation in the press release for the act that proliferates. It strikes the state that admits inspectors and sells the fuel cycle to the state that turns them away. It bombs the country that produced no hijackers and arms the country that produced fifteen. Each decision has a reason, and the reasons are not the ones on the label.
The label is where the empire now does its work. A power able to enforce nonproliferation would not need to kill a head of state to attempt it, and would not find itself six months later reaching for sanctions because the strikes had failed. Its clients are interpreting the weakness for exactly what it is. They watched Doha burn and Washington stay silent, watched their own refineries burn and the guarantor offer only more war, and concluded that the protector cannot protect. So they bought a Pakistani deterrent and widened it into a three-state pact, and they extracted an American enrichment pathway as the price of a normalization the president wanted more than they did. The order the United States built and policed for eighty years is fraying at the hands of the government that claims to enforce it, and the fraying does not stop at the Gulf. The same erosion of trust in the American umbrella is visible in Seoul and in Warsaw. What a disarmament body called a tradable security service is what the end of an order looks like from inside it. The enforcer has begun to auction the thing it once forbade, because the auction is the leverage it has left.
No enrichment, the president wrote. In a few years, when the feasibility study is filed and the centrifuges the contract allows begin to turn, the sentence will read as the first official confirmation that the enrichment was always coming.
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