Trump's bizarre Saudi nuclear giveaway

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For the past decade or so, an important sub-plot in the geopolitics of the Middle East has been the long-term alignment of Saudi Arabia. As China has become more feared in Washington, Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman has openly toyed with the idea of moving out of the American orbit and into a closer embrace with Beijing. This set off alarm bells in Washington, D.C., where the Saudi regime is valued as a stable source of oil, a platform for military bases, and for its counter-terrorist cooperation.

And setting off alarm bells in Washington, D.C. was precisely what MBS was hoping to achieve. It’s an open question how far he would have really gone into the Chinese embrace, mostly because Beijing just doesn’t have the military capability to play the role of Saudi Arabia’s security guarantor like the U.S. does. But what MBS has been able to achieve by threatening to cozy up to Beijing is more attention, and concessions, from nervous American presidents.

This storyline quietly got much more interesting during the Biden administration. Joe Biden came to power in 2021 vowing to crack down on MBS for his brutal behavior towards dissidents, then backed off. Restrictions he imposed on arms sales were later lifted because the administration came to worry that if Riyadh wasn’t able to get its military hardware from the United States then it would start getting it from China.

After making nice with MBS at a summit in Jeddah in 2022, Biden then set about negotiating a general upgrade of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The idea on the U.S. side was to tie Saudi Arabia into the U.S. orbit permanently. As such, the Biden folks were willing to give Saudi Arabia a mutual defense treaty like NATO’s Article V, access to the crown jewels of the U.S. defense industry, and help with setting up a civilian nuclear power industry.

But they also wanted things from Riyadh in return. Most notably, they wanted Saudi Arabia to halt Chinese arms purchases and disallow Chinese investment in the country. But there were other things, too. Most notably, the Biden administration wanted Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. On top of all that, the deal was somehow supposed to ensure a credible pathway to a Palestinian state by somehow involving Israel as well (this part was hazy).

None of this ever came to a head because of the war with Gaza, but it was also the case that the treaty was never likely to pass the Senate. And passing the Senate was precisely what MBS was insisting upon, because he understood that if the agreement wasn’t written into a formal treaty then the next president could just walk away from it (see: the Iran deal). In the end, MBS had to content himself with some further lifting of restrictions on arms purchases and a political commitment, rather than a formal treaty, committing the U.S. to Saudi Arabia’s defense.

Trump’s turn

Then Trump got back into office, and MBS started trying again.

He made some strides, too - among other things, Trump last year designated Saudi Arabia as a “major non-NATO ally”, which is a legal classification which gives the highest possible level of access to the U.S. defense industry. But the formal treaty with the defense commitment seemed as far away as ever - it just wasn’t going to fly in the Senate.

But it’s pretty clear that when the U.S. started its war with Iran earlier this year, and when the war started to go disastrously, the U.S.-Saudi relationship began to deteriorate. U.S. credibility in the region was horrifically damaged, lessening its appeal as a security partner. Washington also began to need Saudi Arabia much more than before in order to execute its military plans. When Trump cancelled his plan to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year after just one day, it was because Saudi Arabia refused to let its airspace be used to support it.

This turmoil seems to have played a role in Trump suddenly announcing this week that the U.S. has reached an agreement to unilaterally give Saudi Arabia a big part of what it was asking for - American help in gaining access to civilian nuclear energy - without asking for anything in return. Unlike the formal security commitment, this can be done without Congress.1 But it’s been something that past presidents have never felt compelled to do. They’ve also been extremely leery of doing it, for a number of pretty good reasons.

The first is that there are well-founded fears that once it has a civilian nuclear industry, Saudi Arabia might try to take the next step and move on to developing nuclear weapons. It would take an intrusive inspection regime to stop that from happening, but Saudi Arabia has always opposed such a regime. And indeed, in the announcement the Trump administration just made, Riyadh is not going to let the International Atomic Energy Agency inspect its sites, relying instead on less intrusive U.S. inspections.

Secondly, it’s very hard to give Saudi Arabia access to civilian nuclear energy with American help while insisting that under absolutely no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have the same thing. There’s always a lot of hypocrisy involved in nuclear decisions - why are Israel’s nukes okay but Pakistan’s not? - but this is particularly blatant. The fact that a war was just started over Iran’s supposed nuclear ambitions makes it worse.

Thirdly, there’s a possibility that Saudi Arabia having access to nuclear energy - and particularly a credible pathway to nuclear weapons - might kick off a regional nuclear race. The Middle East is full of states - the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, and more, including Iran! - who might feel that in a neighborhood in which nuclear proliferation is occurring, they need to get in on the action themselves. This is one reason why American presidents have traditionally been very leery of encouraging proliferation: it kicks off arms races that can get out of hand.

But a final reason is even simpler: why give Saudi Arabia something that it desperately wants without getting something in return? Even the Trump administration seems to think that it misjudged here, because after the U.S.-Saudi deal was signed, Trump responded to criticism of it by suddenly saying that actually it is linked to Saudi normalizing relations with Israel. Probably someone pointed out to him that he’d gotten a much worse deal than Biden did, and he decided to change his stanc.

Why Trump made this decision in the first place is debatable. It may just be his general geopolitical ignorance, especially when he gets bedazzled by dollar signs (this deal would generate cash for the U.S. nuclear industry). It may be that he or people around him began to really fear losing their grip on Saudi Arabia given the debacle unfolding in the Middle East right now. It may even just have been workaday corruption and Trump’s love of autocrats.

But there’s also a common thread in Trump’s foreign policy, which is that for all of his boasting, he’s really, really bad at “deals”. He repeatedly does things that destroy his own leverage or gives other countries things they badly want for free. Sometimes the consequences are mercifully small, and sometimes they are very large. This might be one of the latter instances.