By: Khushbu Ahlawat, Consulting Editor, GSDN
Introduction
The US-Saudi civil nuclear agreement signed on 22 July 2026 has been described, accurately, as a landmark: a 30-year Section 123 agreement that could give Saudi Arabia the enrichment rights Washington spent two decades denying it, granted at the precise moment the Kingdom sits inside a live regional war and beside a nuclear-armed defence partner of its own. What has received less attention is how confused, contradictory and improvised the deal actually looks up close — and how that improvisation, more than the enrichment clause itself, is the clearer signal of where Gulf security is actually headed. Saudi Arabia is not simply acquiring one nuclear pathway through Washington. It is assembling several deterrents at once, deliberately keeping each one ambiguous, and the American deal is only the most visible of the three.
A deal even its own negotiators didn’t see coming
Start with the basic confusion at the heart of the agreement as submitted to Congress. President Trump signed the 123 agreement on 22 July, then declared the following day that it would only take effect if Saudi Arabia joined the Abraham Accords and normalised relations with Israel — a condition that, according to CNN’s reporting, surprised the administration’s own nuclear negotiators and appears nowhere in the text that was actually transmitted. When the White House formally sent the agreement to Congress in late August to start the mandatory 90-day review clock, officials confirmed the Abraham Accords linkage remained in force even though the document itself carries no such requirement, and even though the Saudis have publicly said normalisation requires a credible path to Palestinian statehood first — a precondition Israel’s current government has shown no appetite for meeting. Two administrations’ worth of Gulf-nuclear diplomacy has, in effect, been condensed into a deal that can legally take effect on its own terms in 90 days regardless of what Trump says about it, creating a genuinely open question about whether the enrichment provisions the agreement contains will ever actually be exercised, or remain a legal shell hostage to a separate and much harder diplomatic track.
Compounding the confusion, the substance of what was actually agreed is not fully public. Sources familiar with the matter told the Associated Press that the entire text submitted for congressional review was classified at a level unprecedented for a 123 agreement — previous civil nuclear pacts have occasionally carried classified annexes, but never a fully sealed core text. Trump has meanwhile insisted publicly, in a social media post, that “there will be no enrichment of material” under the deal, even as CNN’s reporting on the submitted document describes an agreement that does include an enrichment pathway. Senator Tim Kaine has pointed out that, unlike the 2009 UAE agreement, which required Abu Dhabi to accept the IAEA’s Additional Protocol as a condition of forgoing enrichment, the Saudi text appears to include no equivalent inspection guarantee. It is entirely possible for Washington’s public description of a deal and the deal’s actual legal content to diverge this sharply only when the process behind it has been driven by urgency and improvisation rather than a settled nonproliferation strategy — which is precisely the environment a war with Iran, and a scramble to keep Riyadh inside the American orbit rather than Moscow’s or Beijing’s, tends to produce.
The other deterrent nobody will confirm or deny
If the American track is confused, the Pakistani track is deliberately so. When Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed their Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement in Riyadh in September 2025 — the bilateral predecessor to the trilateral Mecca pact that added Turkey the following August — the published text committed both states to treat an attack on either as an attack on both, but made no mention of nuclear weapons. Ambiguity took over almost immediately from there. Pakistan’s defence minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, told GeoTV days after the signing that Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities “will be made available” to Saudi Arabia under the agreement, only to later walk the comment back by saying a nuclear umbrella was “not on the radar.” A senior Saudi official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, described the pact as “comprehensive” and covering “all military means” — language that, read generously, could mean anything, and read less generously, was designed to mean exactly that.
Expert opinion has split accordingly. Chatham House concluded the pact “sets a precedent for extended deterrence” by a nuclear-armed state operating outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, comparing it loosely to the kind of assurance the United States has long extended to Japan and South Korea. The Belfer Center’s Rabia Akhtar has pushed back hard against that reading, arguing the agreement is “far more a political signal than an operational transformation” and noting that Pakistan’s declared nuclear doctrine has always been calibrated specifically against India, with no institutional or doctrinal basis for extending that deterrent to a Gulf patron. The Asia-Pacific Leadership Network reached a similar conclusion, calling the arrangement “paper promises” built more on decades of financial and technical entanglement — Saudi Arabia’s historic role bankrolling elements of Pakistan’s own enrichment programme, and its $11 billion balance-of-payments lifeline to Islamabad in 2023 — than on any credible new military commitment. What neither camp disputes is that the ambiguity itself is doing real work: Riyadh gains a deterrent signal against Iran without Pakistan ever having to specify what, if anything, it would actually do, and Islamabad gains continued Saudi financial and political backing without formally contradicting a nuclear doctrine it has maintained since 1998.
Three tracks, one strategy
Read together, these are not competing explanations for how Saudi Arabia intends to secure itself against a nuclear-capable or nuclear-threshold Iran. They are complementary layers of the same hedging strategy, pursued simultaneously and left deliberately unresolved. The American track supplies the legal and technological foundation — a civilian enrichment capability that, however murky its current congressional status, establishes domestic know-how and infrastructure that did not exist before, and that Riyadh has wanted since it approved its National Project for Atomic Energy back in 2017. The Pakistani track supplies an ambiguous but repeatedly gestured-at extended-deterrence signal, cheap to maintain precisely because neither government has to define its limits. And a third, quieter track functions mainly as leverage over the first two: the standing possibility, raised explicitly in multiple analyses of the American negotiations, that Saudi Arabia could turn to Russian or Chinese nuclear vendors if Washington’s terms prove too restrictive or its domestic politics — an Abraham Accords condition Riyadh may simply refuse to meet — kill the deal outright. Each track alone is deniable. Mohammed bin Salman can tell interviewers, as he told 60 Minutes in September 2023, that Saudi Arabia would “have to get” a nuclear weapon only if Iran obtained one, framing everything as contingent and reactive, while the underlying infrastructure and relationships that would make a rapid pivot possible are assembled in the meantime, track by track, deal by deal.
What this means for the rest of the region
This is the mechanism through which the Saudi deal’s proliferation risk actually spreads outward, and it is a more precise mechanism than a simple domino narrative. Turkey and Egypt are unlikely to demand identical enrichment rights from Washington tomorrow — neither has anything like Saudi Arabia’s leverage as a swing oil producer facing direct Iranian missile fire, and both have their own separate nuclear relationships already in motion, Egypt’s with Russia’s Rosatom at El Dabaa and Turkey’s own long-stated nuclear ambitions layered atop its new formal defence pact with a nuclear-armed Pakistan under the Mecca framework. What the Saudi precedent actually does is lower the political cost of pursuing exactly this kind of multi-track ambiguity elsewhere. If Riyadh can hold a classified, contested, publicly-mischaracterised civil nuclear agreement with Washington in one hand and an unconfirmed, semi-denied extended-deterrence relationship with Islamabad in the other, and suffer no serious diplomatic penalty for the contradiction, the lesson available to every other capital in the region is that strategic ambiguity works — that a state does not need to choose between a declared weapons programme, which invites sanctions and IAEA censure, and genuine restraint, which the UAE’s 2009 agreement to forgo enrichment entirely represents. It can instead accumulate capability and coalition partners across several ambiguous tracks at once, and let uncertainty itself do the deterrent work.
There is also a UAE-specific dimension to this that deserves more attention than it usually gets. Abu Dhabi accepted the “Gold Standard” in 2009 — forgoing domestic enrichment entirely in exchange for a faster, less politically fraught path to American nuclear cooperation — on the explicit understanding that this represented the regional norm Washington would hold every Gulf state to. If Saudi Arabia now secures enrichment rights that the UAE was denied, even amid all the current confusion over whether those rights will actually be exercised, the UAE has a legitimate grievance and a real incentive to revisit its own restraint. Emirati officials have not said publicly that they intend to renegotiate their 2009 agreement, but the structural incentive to do so — matching a neighbour’s capability rather than being left the more constrained party in a region where relative nuclear standing increasingly functions as a marker of great-power backing — will only grow the longer the Saudi deal’s actual terms remain contested. A nonproliferation framework that depends on early movers being rewarded for restraint works only as long as later movers are not rewarded more generously for holding out; the Saudi case, whatever its ultimate outcome, has already put that logic under visible strain.
The Iranian variable nobody controls
Underlying all three tracks is an assumption that has itself gone strangely unexamined: that Iran’s own nuclear trajectory will remain the fixed point against which Saudi Arabia calibrates its hedging. It will not. Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent — a short technical step from weapons-grade — has existed since the collapse of the 2015 deal, but the 2026 war has made the status of that stockpile, and of the facilities capable of further enriching it, considerably harder to track than before. Strikes on Iranian nuclear sites during the conflict have not eliminated Tehran’s programme so much as scattered and obscured it, and IAEA access has been intermittent at best amid active hostilities. Riyadh is therefore hedging not against a known, static Iranian capability but against a moving and increasingly opaque one — which is precisely the condition under which strategic ambiguity, rather than a declared threshold or a formal treaty commitment, becomes the rational posture for every other regional actor as well. Mohammed bin Salman’s 2018 formulation, that Saudi Arabia would seek a weapon only “if Iran obtained one,” always assumed a discrete, verifiable Iranian crossing point that outside observers could confirm. A war that has degraded transparency into Iran’s programme rather than clarified it removes exactly the kind of clear trigger that formulation depended on, leaving Riyadh to hedge against a range of possible Iranian outcomes rather than a single defined one.
This is also why the three-track strategy makes more sense as a permanent posture than as a temporary bridge to some future, calmer settlement. If Iranian capability becomes durably harder to verify, there is no clean off-ramp at which Saudi Arabia could credibly stand down its own hedging without appearing to unilaterally disarm against an adversary whose true status nobody, including the IAEA, can fully certify. American, Pakistani and Russian-Chinese options each become not sequential fallback plans but standing insurance policies to be maintained indefinitely and adjusted incrementally as the regional picture shifts — a posture that is, by design, resistant to the kind of clear-cut congressional votes, IAEA verification milestones or treaty ratifications that have historically given outside observers confidence that a given proliferation risk has been contained rather than merely managed. The region is not moving toward a moment when these questions get resolved. It is settling into a structure where they remain permanently and deliberately unresolved.
Conclusion
The debate over whether the US-Saudi 123 agreement will “ignite” a Middle East arms race treats the enrichment clause as the trigger and everything else as context. The more accurate picture, once the Pakistani and improvisational dimensions are put back into the frame, is that the arms race this deal might contribute to is already partly under way, running through channels far murkier than a congressionally reviewed civil nuclear pact: a defence minister’s contradicted television remarks, a defence pact whose text has never been published, a 123 agreement whose core terms are classified even as the president publicly mischaracterises them, and a conditionality clause that surprised the people who negotiated the deal it was attached to. None of this proves Saudi Arabia has decided to build a weapon, and every expert cited here who has examined the Pakistani option in detail concludes that a genuine, operational nuclear umbrella remains unlikely given Islamabad’s own doctrine and interests. But a region where the most consequential nuclear-adjacent commitments are made through anonymous official statements, deliberately unclear defence-minister interviews and classified texts that contradict their own signatories’ public claims is a region where the normal guardrails against proliferation — public agreements, verifiable inspection regimes, congressional and parliamentary scrutiny — are being quietly hollowed out from several directions simultaneously. That erosion of clarity, not any single enrichment percentage written into a single American document, is the more durable legacy this moment is likely to leave behind, and it is one that will outlast whatever happens to the Abraham Accords condition currently holding the headline deal in limbo.
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