COMMENTARY: By Lim Tean
Wednesday: The United States signs a civil nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. A “decades-long, multi-billion-dollar partnership,” Washington calls it.
Thursday: The President Trump logs onto social media and reneges — unilaterally slapping on a new condition that was never part of the deal he just signed.
The condition is that Saudi Arabia must sign on to the Abraham Accords and recognise Israel.
No phone call to Riyadh first. No consultation. Just a Truth Social post, blindsiding the very partner he’d shaken hands with 24 hours earlier.
And here’s the part Washington seems not to grasp: this precondition is dead on arrival.
MBS has said it again and again, most recently as an official rejection just weeks ago — no normalisation with Israel without an independent Palestinian state, East Jerusalem as its capital, full stop.
The Saudi Foreign Ministry has called it “non-negotiable”. Trump is demanding surrender to a position Riyadh has never once wavered from.
Not statecraft
This is not statecraft. This is not deterrence. This is a superpower treating a sovereign signature as a rough draft — and then attaching a condition it knows, or should know, will never be met.
Ask Kyiv. Ask Tehran. Ask now Riyadh: what is an American signature actually worth?
The Legitimacy Principle is simple — power without consistency is not strength, it is liability.
A state that cannot honour its own agreements within a day, and cannot read its own partner’s red lines, cannot lead a rules-based order. It can only bully one, until the world stops showing up to sign.
Washington is agreement incapable.
Trump’s undercutting of the nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia shortly after it was signed by adding the requirement that the Saudis recognize Israel (they won’t) signals everyone including the Iranians that you can’t trust a deal with Trump. https://t.co/8QoDnZdBNF
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) July 26, 2026
Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.
