The United States is bombing Iran to destroy its nuclear enrichment capability. At the same time, the Trump administration has signed a civilian nuclear deal that may let Saudi Arabia, a country whose de facto ruler has said he would pursue a bomb if Iran got one, enrich its own uranium.
The contradiction is so stark that even the deal’s architects seem unsure what they actually agreed to.
On July 22, US Energy Secretary Christopher Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman signed an agreement that reportedly allows US companies to build a uranium enrichment facility on Saudi soil, housed in a black-boxed facility where inspectors would have limited access. The deal runs for 30 years. It does not require Saudi Arabia to sign the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol, the gold standard for intrusive nuclear inspections that the United Arab Emirates accepted in its own 123 agreement with Washington.
One day later, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the deal required Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords and insisted there would be no uranium enrichment on Saudi soil, a statement that directly contradicts the deal his own energy secretary had just signed.
Former US ambassador to Egypt Daniel Kurtzer and Carnegie Endowment senior fellow Aaron David Miller, writing in Foreign Policy, described the episode as diplomatic malpractice. They argued that the deal undermines decades of US nonproliferation policy and reflects the absence of adult supervision and sound decision-making.
The timing is the problem. The US-Israeli war on Iran, launched in March 2026, was justified in part by the need to eliminate Iran’s enrichment and weapons capability. While Iran has agreed to dilute its enriched uranium stocks under the June 2026 interim peace deal, the US is now effectively blessing what Iran was bombed for doing, enriching uranium on home soil, for a different Middle Eastern power.
Saudi Arabia has long wanted enrichment. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who could rule for decades, pursues a 360-degree foreign policy that keeps the kingdom close to Russia and China as well as the US. After Israel attacked Qatar in the earlier phase of the war, Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact, and Pakistan’s defense minister said the country’s nuclear program would be made available to Saudi Arabia if needed.
The historical lesson is grim. In 1957, the US gave Iran a research reactor and highly enriched uranium under its Atoms for Peace program. After the 1979 revolution, that infrastructure became a 47-year security nightmare. Kurtzer and Miller noted that current reliability is no guarantee for the future.
The deal faces congressional review, where lawmakers from both parties have voiced opposition. But Trump has shown little patience for congressional restraint on foreign policy.
There is an irony here. By adding the normalization with Israel condition after the fact, effectively killing his own deal, Trump may have accidentally done nonproliferation a favor. But the signal has already been sent: the United States is willing to trade away its nonproliferation principles for strategic partnerships, even while waging a war ostensibly fought to stop exactly this kind of program.