Nuclear non-proliferation policy was not designed to judge the intentions of current leaders but to limit the options available to their successors, whose intentions one cannot know.
For more than two decades, the policy of the United States toward the Middle East, regardless of the party holding power in Washington, rested on the proposition that certain nuclear technologies are too dangerous to spread in an undemocratic region where regimes are overthrown and strategic realities change overnight.
At the center of this policy sit centrifuges and uranium enrichment.
This week, the US signed a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia that opens a path to both uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing on Saudi soil.
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed the nuclear accord, in compliance with Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act, alongside a bilateral safeguards agreement whose contents were not disclosed.
The framework contemplates a uranium enrichment facility on Saudi territory, built by American firms, after a two-year joint study.
Congress now has 90 days of continuous session to review it, and only a joint resolution of disapproval carried by a veto-proof majority in both chambers can stop it.
No president has been overridden on one.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia cannot be exactly equated with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Saudi Arabia has been a sometimes strategic ally of the United States, apart from its involvement in the devastating 9/11 attacks, while Iran has spent decades financing terrorism and directly attacking American forces.
The question before the US Congress is not whether the two regimes are morally equivalent. They are not.
The question is whether uranium enrichment becomes inherently safe simply because today’s Saudi regime happens to be friendly.
Washington answered that question once, in the negative, on the basis of an experience it paid dearly to acquire.
In the mid-1970s, few countries appeared more firmly anchored in the American camp than the Imperial State of Iran under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who purchased advanced American weapons and was encouraged in his nuclear ambitions by US administrations that treated the alliance as a cornerstone of regional strategy.
A few years later, the Shah was gone, and the alliance was gone with him, while the reactors built by the US and Germany, the trained nuclear physicists and the institutional appetite for a nuclear program stayed where they were.
In Iran, what began as a civilian nuclear program of a trusted ally before 1979 became the longest-running nuclear proliferation crisis of the modern era.
The doctrine that emerged from that failure never rested on the assumption that allies cannot be trusted.
It rested on the recognition that no one can predict who will govern a country 20 or 50 years after sensitive technology has been transferred.
Nuclear infrastructure outlives the governments that acquire it and the administrations that approve it. Nuclear programs are measured in generations; political arrangements, in years.
The agreement signed this week authorizes a uranium enrichment capability that will survive this and future governments in Riyadh, in a region where the durability of governments cannot be assured.
Riyadh has never concealed how it thinks about this. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in 2018 that Saudi Arabia would pursue a nuclear weapon if Iran acquired one—a statement he has never retracted.
Whether that day comes is beside the point. The declaration establishes that uranium enrichment is understood in Riyadh through the lens of regional deterrence as much as energy policy, an unusual foundation on which to build a fuel cycle in a country floating on oil and natural gas.
There was a standard for exactly this situation, and Washington wrote it. When the United Arab Emirates signed its own nuclear agreement with the US in 2009, Abu Dhabi renounced uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing outright and accepted the IAEA’s Additional Protocol.
American officials spent 15 years citing it as proof that civilian nuclear power requires no domestic fuel cycle. The UAE’s only nuclear power plant, Barakah, runs on imported fuel.
Nothing in their reactors suffers from the absence of centrifuges.
Saudi Arabia declined those terms, and rather than hold the line, Washington moved it. The agreement, as described by the administration, leaves enrichment open and drops the Additional Protocol, whose purpose is to give IAEA inspectors the ability to detect undeclared activity.
The unpublished bilateral arrangement offered in its place is unlikely to be stricter than the regime Riyadh refused.
Enrichment itself is deferred to a two-year study of “commercial viability,” though nobody expects Saudi centrifuges to undercut the global nuclear fuel market.
A dozen Democrat lawmakers warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio in March that this was the direction of travel, and Rubio had himself co-sponsored legislation in 2018, with a Democrat colleague, requiring congressional approval of this kind of agreement.
The timing compounds the difficulty. American and Israeli aircraft struck Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025 and again beginning in February, on the stated grounds that Iran’s uranium enrichment constituted an intolerable threat.
IAEA inspectors have had no access to Iran’s declared enrichment sites for more than a year and cannot account for the 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60%—close to the level required for nuclear weapons.
Most of it is believed to be sealed in tunnels at Isfahan. Within 18 months, Washington went to war over centrifuges in one country and signed a contract to build them in another.
