(CNN) — On Wednesday afternoon, officials gathered at the downtown Washington headquarters of the Energy Department for an event more than two decades in the making: the signing of a civilian nuclear agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
Two sets of American and Saudi flags were placed on stage and on the table where Energy Secretary Chris Wright was seated. A large screen beamed in his Saudi counterpart from Riyadh. After months of delay, the arrangement was finally signed.
The Saudis had won much of their wish list for the deal.
But as quickly as it was announced, it seemed to fall apart. Thursday morning, Trump said in a social media post that the deal was subject to a new condition: Saudi Arabia would have to join the Abraham Accords, an initiative dating back to Trump’s first administration that led to several Arab countries normalizing their diplomatic stance toward Israel. Trump also denied that the agreement would allow uranium enrichment.
The president, according to a source familiar with the matter, was already angry over the unveiling of the deal, which Wright had not told Trump he would be announcing.
Trump’s frustration was then exacerbated, sources told CNN, after a flurry of criticism from experts and conservative media outlets. This included skeptical coverage on his preferred channel, Fox News, and on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal that questioned why the deal was made absent a normalization agreement — something both outlets pointedly noted President Joe Biden had been seeking.
The new condition, which the White House insisted was long a goal of Trump’s and shouldn’t have shocked anyone, surprised the administration’s own nuclear negotiators, for whom the Abraham Accords condition was unexpected, two sources briefed on the matter told CNN.
As confusion took over, White House officials pointed the finger at their colleagues at the Energy Department, according to one source, who said the White House had asked the Energy Department not to roll the agreement out on Wednesday. But Wright, who White House officials have complained in the past got over his skis, went ahead anyway, including in an interview on Fox Business.
The deal, in the mind of some Trump aides, was not finalized since letters required to be sent to Congress hadn’t gone out. And the president and many of his senior staffers were livid at the decision to roll out the deal, the source said.
“President Trump’s energy team is fully aligned, and always has been: the civil nuclear deal being brokered between the United States and Saudi Arabia is contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the successful Abraham Accords, which will help bring true peace to the Middle East,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement.
The Energy Department stressed its close coordination with the White House. “This is fake news. The Department of Energy has closely coordinated the negotiations and then announcement of these agreements with the White House and the State Department. Any suggestion otherwise is false,” press secretary Ben Dietderich said in a statement, adding that the deal and the Abraham Accords “achieve a common goal — delivering lasting peace through commerce, not conflict.”
The White House’s ire grew when the Thursday press briefing was dominated by questions over the deal. Karoline Leavitt noted that Trump was the “final dealmaker” when asked why the new condition had not been part of Wednesday’s announcement.
Trump’s Truth Social post Thursday morning also blindsided the Saudis, for whom the nuclear deal — which did not include the normalization requirement — had been a major triumph. The accord would permit uranium enrichment on Saudi soil once certain conditions were met while limiting a UN watchdog agency’s ability to inspect suspected covert nuclear sites. CNN has reached out to the Saudi embassy.
A long-awaited deal greeted by largely negative reviews
The move was a last-minute twist in a years-long diplomatic effort.
Nearly two decades after the US and Saudi Arabia first announced their intent to cooperate on nuclear energy, the two countries reached a tentative agreement in October of last year, when Wright and his Saudi counterpart made a joint statement.
The Trump administration submitted a waiver report to Congress soon afterward due to the deal not requiring the Saudis to sign a standard agreement called the Additional Protocol with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But after the initial waiver request to Congress, the deal languished for months without Trump’s approval to proceed, CNN previously reported. Sources attributed the delay to concerns over the Iran war and fears that Congress could disapprove the agreements.
Energy officials believed they received Trump’s blessing late last week, according to a source familiar with the matter, and the department launched its long-planned media rollout. (The Wall Street Journal first reported the deal’s approval on Tuesday evening.)
Another source noted that while Trump may have blessed a “tentative” bargain, it was not a green light to finalize or unveil the deal.
Early expert reaction to the agreement’s reported terms was largely negative. Nuclear nonproliferation experts were alarmed by the deal’s enrichment provision, as well as by its lack of commitment to the enhanced Additional Protocol safeguards.
Proponents focused on the deal’s commercial benefits and strategic calculus: the Saudis want a nuclear program on their terms, and the US should partner with Riyadh and gain influence over Saudi safety and nonproliferation practices — lest China or Russia step in.
The criticism initially did not deter the administration, which argued that the agreement and its bilateral safeguards “uphold the highest standards of nuclear safety and nonproliferation.” The Energy Department pressed on with its formal signing ceremony Wednesday.
After things changed the next morning, many close to the administration immediately suspected a late intervention from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose suspicions around a Saudi nuclear program are well known. (Israel, which possesses nuclear weapons, opposes any arrangements that could allow an Arab country to get a nuclear bomb.)
Two Israeli sources told CNN that Netanyahu hoped to influence the deal, with one adding that the prime minister intended to push Trump to include normalization with Riyadh – or at least progress towards it – as part of the deal.
Yet the White House said later that Trump and Netanyahu had not spoken — “Not to my knowledge,” Leavitt told reporters — and that Trump was simply reiterating a long-held stance about Riyadh normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel.
Skepticism from conservative media
The coverage in conservative media proved influential in the president’s decision to block the agreement in its current form, according to people familiar with the matter.
“This deal’s origins are in the Biden Administration, which held out nuclear cooperation as a reward if the Saudis were to join the Abraham Accords,” the Journal’s editorial board — often skeptical of Trump — wrote Thursday. “Riyadh has resisted pressure to do so, but its reward now arrives from the Trump Administration anyway. One has to hope the Saudis have offered something more.”
Fox News, at the top of the 7 a.m. hour, offered skepticism in the same vein. Host Brian Kilmeade called the deal “a bit of a surprise” and noted that such an arrangement was considered during Biden’s administration.
“During the Biden years, they said we’ll think about it. But before we do that, we need you to sign on to the Abraham Accords,” Kilmeade said, sounding puzzled since Prince Mohammed bin Salman got along much better with Trump than with his predecessor.
Another Fox host, Kayleigh McEnany, who served as press secretary during Trump’s first term, also questioned whether Saudi-Israeli normalization was being left out.
“When I was leaving the first Trump administration, I was told we were pretty close to a normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia,” she said.
Indeed, Biden administration officials did work to advance those normalization efforts and were in intensive negotiations with Saudi officials about the parameters of a civilian nuclear deal that would accompany an announcement normalizing relations with Israel.
But the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel halted that progress. Israel’s response, widely perceived as disproportionate in the Arab world, led Biden-era negotiators to seek “less-for-less” from the prospective nuclear deal, according to the source familiar with the matter. An agreement was never reached.
And since then, Prince Mohammed has plainly stated he cannot agree to diplomatic ties with Israel without a viable pathway to Palestinian statehood.
Yet Trump reimposed that condition in a 7:52 a.m. social media post, mere minutes after the Fox panel discussed the issue.
Leavitt said later that morning that Trump had not spoken to the powerful crown prince — the kingdom’s de facto leader — in the hours before or after his abrupt announcement of new conditions on the deal.
She suggested the terms should not come as a surprise.
“The president has spoken directly with the Saudis about this in numerous conversations in the past, and the administration will continue to engage in those conversations,” she said.
Davis Winkie’s work at CNN is supported by a partnership between Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners (JFP). CNN retains full editorial control of the reporting.
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