WASHINGTON—The new agreement announced Wednesday by the United States and Saudi Arabia that will accelerate the Saudi civilian nuclear program and reportedly could open the door for domestic uranium enrichment is both a triumph for Saudi diplomacy and a signal that the US has now shifted to a “Plan C” for preventing nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
Before examining this agreement, some history is in order. One of the most consistent and generally successful US foreign policy objectives for decades has been limiting the global proliferation of nuclear weapons, including specifically to the Middle East. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program sought to promote nuclear energy while preventing nuclear weapons and led to the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Call it “Plan A” for nonproliferation. In the Middle East, Israel and Iran were among the primary beneficiaries, and the latter’s program lasted until the 1979 Iranian revolution. But the US wasn’t the only potential provider of nuclear expertise to the region.
In the 1960s, Washington learned of France’s decision to provide Israel with a nuclear reactor (a collaboration that arguably led to both countries’ nuclear weapons programs) and heard reports of West German scientists working with the United Arab Republic (as Egypt was then known). These discoveries led President John Kennedy to publicly express his “strong opposition to the introduction or manufacture of nuclear weapons in the Middle East,” while also opining that, “I can see the possibility in the 1970s … of a world in which fifteen or twenty or twenty-five nations may have these weapons.” At the time, many shared his fear.
And yet, this prediction turned out to be vastly overstated. More than eighty years after the US ushered in the nuclear age, only eight additional nations have joined the nuclear weapons club. This is a tremendous success of US policy, by any reasonable measure. In all, thirty-one countries generate electricity from nuclear power, and domestic uranium enrichment is far more limited. Today, Iran is the only country with clear nuclear weapons ambitions that also seeks to domestically enrich its own uranium.
Of the nine states understood to possess nuclear weapons, eight of them are formally acknowledged and only one—Israel—is officially ambiguous. Nevertheless, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently stated when asked if Israel possessed nuclear weapons: “if we’re speaking frankly, most of the world assesses that they do.” And while its neighbors went to war with Israel three times in the twenty-five years immediately after Israel’s establishment, once they assessed that Israel possessed nuclear weapons, any future large-scale conventional attacks were effectively deterred.
Kennedy’s prediction proved wrong because the US eventually adopted a “Plan B” to prevent proliferation, which required much greater direct action by the US or its partners, including especially in the Middle East. At times this has necessitated military action to halt or delay such programs, such as Israel’s 1981 strike on Saddam Hussein’s reactor in Iraq (built with help from France, Italy, and Brazil), Israel’s 2007 strike on Bashar al-Assad’s reactor in Syria (built with help from North Korea), and the US-Israel joint 2010 cyberwar and subsequent combined 2025 military strikes against Iran’s nuclear program. Ever since the US supplanted the Europeans as the primary external power in the region and adopted this “Plan B,” no additional Middle Eastern country has successfully developed nuclear weapons, despite several efforts to do so.
US diplomacy also played a critical role in “Plan B” efforts to limit nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. In 2003, in the wake of the US war that overthrew Saddam Hussein and following joint US-British covert negotiations, Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi announced that he would be abandoning his longstanding nuclear ambitions, which had been previously abetted by Pakistan. In 2009, at the very end of the George W. Bush administration, the US and the United Arab Emirates announced an unprecedented, so-called “gold standard” agreement that provided for nuclear power but completely foreswore any domestic enrichment. That agreement was signed by the Obama administration the following year with the hope that it would be a model for the region, and the resulting nuclear power plant began operations in 2020 with assistance from South Korea.
Then in 2015 President Barack Obama announced an agreement with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that promised to limit Tehran’s nuclear program for a decade. And finally, when the Biden administration began talking to Riyadh about a potential agreement to allow a Saudi civilian nuclear program, it made such a deal contingent on achieving other US objectives, specifically achieving what would have been a groundbreaking diplomatic normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
A shift under Trump
Thus the US “Plan A” for nonproliferation in the Middle East that ran from the 1950s to the 1970s was characterized by global, multilateral approaches and was challenged by European countries driving key bilateral proliferation decisions in the region. The result was a nonproliferation failure in Israel, but one that actually served to help stabilize the region. The US “Plan B” for the region, beginning in the 1980s and lasting until recently, required Washington to take on a much greater responsibility for stopping regional nuclear weapons programs through diplomatic, covert, and military means. This prevented both regional friends and foes from becoming nuclear weapons states. During both phases, non-US companies dominated the contracts on any nuclear business in the region, including both civilian and military projects.
Notwithstanding its inherent limitations, the JCPOA attempted to address two interconnected problems simultaneously, preventing both an Iranian nuclear weapon and the resulting threat of a region-wide nuclear arms race. Its effectiveness on the first objective was subject of endless debate in Washington, but the agreement undoubtedly helped mitigate the second risk while it was in effect. When President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, the risk of a regional arms race rose significantly. Nevertheless, Trump continued to operate under the general direction of “Plan B,” seeking a “better deal” from Iran and, failing that, ordering US military strikes to degrade Iran’s nuclear program.
Unfortunately, the war that Trump began in February has thus far failed to force Iran to abandon its nuclear program. Indeed, the Memorandum of Understanding that Trump signed last month acquiesced on this point, instead affirming that “the Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program.” Thus, unless the current conflict with Iran escalates far more than it has to date, when this war is “over” Iran will be left with its nuclear weapons aspirations, expertise, and perhaps capabilities still intact, to some degree, and the threat of its ability to produce a nuclear weapon will grow over time.
Since Iran has now attacked virtually every country in the region this year, the leadership of each of its victims will logically begin to consider how they might be able to deter a future nuclear-armed Iran from expanding its military aggression. Many will likely conclude that they, like Israel before them, would benefit from a nuclear deterrent of their own.
Judging “Plan C”
By approving this deal with Saudi Arabia, Trump appears to be moving to a “Plan C.” This differs from “Plan B” in that it reportedly opens the door to eventually abandoning the previous US principle of forbidding any further domestic enrichment in the region. According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal launches “a two-year US-Saudi study to examine the value of enrichment for Saudi Arabia, including whether it would be commercially viable to enrich uranium on Saudi soil instead of relying on imported fuel.” On Thursday morning, however, Trump walked back from this by claiming that “there will be no enrichment of material.” But the devil is in the details, and the actual text hasn’t yet been released. It is also quite plausible that Trump is reflecting on the reported “black box” arrangement that is intended to preclude technology transfer but would allow US firms to enrich on Saudi territory using locally sourced uranium ore.
In any case, few will be surprised that this deadline is scheduled to arrive before the end of the second Trump term. The agreement also requires that any new power reactors and other nuclear technology would be provided by American companies, another clear divergence from “Plan B.” And finally, this deal reportedly abandoned the linkage required by the Biden administration for normalization with Israel, though Trump called that into question Thursday morning. It is unclear whether Trump’s latest statement was driven by his views on policy or by his assessment of domestic politics in the US and Israel—we will know the answer if his positions holds after the elections in both countries later this year. No matter how long it takes before this deal is finalized, it seems that the direction is clear and the outcome is highly likely: Well before the end of the Trump administration a US-Saudi nuclear agreement will be signed. That will be a triumph for Saudi diplomacy.
It is only a matter of time before other US partners in the region seek similar agreements with Washington, and some are likely to sign such accords in the years to come. Therefore, it appears that the US will now seek to achieve its nonproliferation objectives through deep political and commercial integration with partners’ nuclear programs—that will be the defining element of “Plan C.”
Only time will tell whether “Plan C” will be successful. It certainly carries with it far greater risks than the previous approaches, including the risk that partners may deceive the United States about their true aspirations for nuclear weapons, as Israel did to Kennedy, or that a current nuclear partner may eventually become an adversary, as happened after the Iranian revolution.