5 min readJul 31, 2026 06:23 AM IST First published on: Jul 31, 2026 at 06:23 AM ISTCurrent US policies seem tailored to engender a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Donald Trump recently approved an agreement with Saudi Arabia (KSA) nominally for the transfer of nuclear energy technologies, but one that notably lacked the types of safeguards against non-proliferation that the US normally attaches to such agreements. There has thus been unease that there are no controls in place preventing KSA from enriching fissile materials, especially in light of reports that KSA has announced it would match Iran’s nuclear programme.Does the President know about the apparent deficiencies in this agreement regarding non-proliferation safeguards? Part of the difficulty in answering this question is that this administration famously eschews those with technical or scientific expertise. The US Secretary of Energy, who signed the agreement with KSA, is a former oil executive and major donor to the Republican Party with no known expertise in non-proliferation issues. This is in sharp contrast to Barack Obama’s Secretary of Energy, who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal. He was a nuclear physicist and a professor at MIT before being appointed to the cabinet. Meanwhile, Trump has not had an ambassador in Riyadh since he returned to office.AdvertisementThe US-Israeli war on Iran, too, threatens to increase proliferation in the region. It must have dawned on the current leaders in Tehran that it was a blunder for their late Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, not to order the building of a nuclear arsenal with all due haste. Instead, he authorised an agreement with the Obama Administration that limited Iran’s enrichment and included a rigorous inspections regime by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran remained in compliance, putting whatever nuclear ambitions it may have had on hold, only to see Trump withdraw from that agreement during his first term. Then, without any credible imminent threat, Trump undertook a bombing campaign in June 2025 and a more comprehensive war in February 2026, which is still ongoing.This situation is in sharp contrast with Trump’s treatment of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, who sits atop a nuclear arsenal amassed in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Trump met repeatedly with Kim in his first term and never mentions North Korea now. The message is clear: If you want respect, build a bomb.Leaders in other Middle Eastern capitals are no doubt also taking note. Israel is currently the only country in the Middle East known to be a nuclear-armed state, and it has been for at least 40 years, having developed its nuclear capabilities in collaboration with apartheid-era South Africa. So long as the US provided the security guarantees for allied Middle Eastern states, those states could be relatively sanguine about Israel’s nuclear arsenal. But since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Israel has attacked at least seven countries in the region, including Qatar, which houses America’s largest air base in the region. The US has not uttered a peep.AdvertisementEgypt and Turkey may well come to the same conclusion as Saudi Arabia and Iran. To safeguard against Israel, America, or other regional players, the safest bet is to adopt the nuclear option. The UAE already relies on nuclear energy for 25 per cent of its electrical grid. Jordan has significant uranium deposits and certainly would not need to rely on any outside power. Even Iraq, which denounced the acquisition of WMDs in its current constitution in light of its execrable history of using poison gas on its own Kurdish citizens as well as Iranian forces during the Iran-Iraq War, could reconsider if the entire region begins to explore the nuclear option.you may likeTrump did, in the end, have second thoughts. The day after announcing the US-Saudi nuclear agreement, he announced he would only honour the agreement if KSA normalised with Israel. No doubt Benjamin Netanyahu had something to do with it. This means the Saudi deal is stalled for the foreseeable future. Before Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, it had been Netanyahu, not KSA, who was dragging his feet on normalisation. And after Israel’s response — which a UN commission characterised as genocide in Gaza — since October 7, KSA likely cannot normalise with Israel for the foreseeable future due to domestic considerations and the extreme unlikelihood of Israel recognising a Palestinian state anytime soon. But that will not necessarily delay KSA’s nuclear ambitions, whatever they may be. Russia or China will be willing to fill the void on the theory they are merely transferring energy technology — as the US has claimed. And if those states are too queasy to provide the necessary resources, perhaps Pakistan, which has just signed a mutual defence treaty with KSA, might step in.Some security specialists have argued that nuclear proliferation makes the world safer because nuclear-armed states are less likely to go to war with one another. If US policy remains on the path Trump has set, that theory may be tested in the not-distant future. Given the history of conflict in the Middle East in the last century, one can be forgiven for viewing these prognostications with trepidation.The writer is founding director of the Centre for the Study of the Middle East at Indiana University, Bloomington