Donald Trump has approved a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia that could hand Riyadh the ability to enrich uranium on its own soil. The deal is expected to run three decades, be worth tens of billions of dollars, and give American firms the lead role in building out the kingdom’s nuclear infrastructure. It also appears to exempt Saudi Arabia from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol, the inspection regime that gives international monitors real visibility into a country’s nuclear activities.
That last detail is the one that should worry anyone paying attention. The United Arab Emirates built its own civilian nuclear program, the Barakah plant, without ever asking for enrichment rights, and nonproliferation experts have held that restraint up for years as the model every other Gulf state should follow. Saudi Arabia just got a US president to hand it something the UAE never even sought.
A Regime That Has Told Us Exactly What It Would Do
This isn’t a hypothetical risk being manufactured by critics. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has said openly that if Iran builds a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia will match it. Enrichment capability is the single hardest technical barrier between a civilian program and a weapons program. Everything else — detonation engineering, delivery systems — is comparatively solvable once a state can produce weapons-grade material. Handing Riyadh enrichment rights while stripping out the Additional Protocol’s inspection regime is not a safeguard. It’s a head start, wrapped in the language of nonproliferation.
And this is the same government that a U.S. intelligence assessment concluded approved the assassination of a journalist inside its own consulate. The same government that has spent a decade running a war in Yemen with a civilian death toll in the tens of thousands, that jails dissidents and clerics for tweets, and whose “reform” agenda has never extended to tolerating an actual opposition. Mohammed bin Salman does not run a stable, rules-bound state. He runs a court, and the court’s priorities can shift with his mood and his rivalries — including, notably, with Iran, whose government he has alternated between confronting and quietly courting depending on what serves him at the moment. That is not the profile of a partner you hand a fast track to enrichment.
The Administration’s Case Doesn’t Hold Up
The White House’s argument, reduced to its essentials, is that if Washington doesn’t build Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program, Russia or China will, and better an American-built reactor with American oversight than a Chinese one with none. There’s a real strategic logic buried in there. But that logic argues for the UAE model — American technology, no enrichment, full IAEA inspections — not for waiving away the exact safeguard designed to prevent weaponization. Trump didn’t have to choose between “no deal” and “this deal.” He chose the version that removes the guardrail, and it is difficult to see what the enrichment concession bought the United States that the safer version wouldn’t have.
Congressional critics have already flagged this gap between rhetoric and substance, and they’re right to. A president who spent his first term walking away from the Iran nuclear deal on the grounds that it left Tehran’s enrichment infrastructure intact has just approved a deal that builds equivalent infrastructure for a government with a far worse record of regional adventurism and a crown prince who has publicly floated matching Iran bomb for bomb. If enrichment capability was too dangerous to leave in Iranian hands, it is not obviously safer in Saudi ones. The through-line here isn’t nonproliferation strategy. It’s which capital writes the bigger check.