The Mideast Is Baffled by Trump’s Call to Expand Abraham Accords

 

The Mideast Is Baffled by Trump’s Call to Expand Abraham Accords

 

The president said more countries should be required to recognize Israel as part of a deal to end the war with Iran. Analysts say the chances of that happening are close to zero.

 

Vivian NereimI sabel Kershner Elian Peltier

By Vivian NereimIsabel Kershner and Elian Peltier

Vivian Nereim reported from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem and Elian Peltier from Kabul, Afghanistan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/world/middleeast/trump-abraham-accords.html

May 28, 2026

Updated 9:26 a.m. ET

 

The social media post by President Trump made it sound straightforward. The United States would orchestrate a deal to end the war with Iran and, in exchange, a slew of countries across the Middle East and South Asia would join an agreement, called the Abraham Accords, establishing relations with Israel.

 

In fact, he said, that “should be mandatory.” But half of the countries he named — such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey — already have relations with Israel. And the other half — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan — have no interest in establishing them anytime soon.

 

As a result, the meandering ultimatum that Mr. Trump shared on Monday was met with a mix of silence and bemusement across the Middle East. Regional analysts said they were not even sure that they understood the rationale behind his proposal. Why would ending the war, which the United States and Israel initiated by bombing Iran on Feb. 28, provide an incentive to recognize Israel for countries like Qatar, which had lobbied desperately to prevent the war in the first place?

 

“It’s just bizarre,” said Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel. “What’s the connection between a deal with Iran and that? I’m honestly puzzled.”

 

Two Western diplomats in the region said that no one was really taking the idea seriously. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomacy.

 

Asked to explain the connection between peace negotiations with Iran and expanding the Abraham Accords, a White House spokeswoman did not answer directly. Instead, she referred to remarks made by Mr. Trump on Wednesday, when he suggested that U.S. agreement on a deal with Iran could be made contingent upon countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar agreeing to recognize Israel.

 

“I think those countries owe it to us,” he said. “I’m not sure we should make the deal, if they don’t sign.”

 

The Saudi and Qatari governments did not respond to requests for comment.

 

Under the Abraham Accords — a deal brokered by the first Trump administration in 2020 — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco agreed to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. A wide range of American politicians have portrayed the pact as a major diplomatic achievement, and have frequently referred to the accords as a “peace deal.”

 

Scholars from the region say that is merely a turn of phrase, belying the fact that there has never been a war between Israel and Bahrain or the Emirates. In effect, the deals bypassed the central conflict — between Israel and the Palestinians — declaring harmony between parties that were not fighting.

 

Since then, the Abraham Accords have created opportunities for expanded trade, security cooperation and tourism between the countries that signed them. The Emirates, the Arab architect of the accords, has grown especially close to Israel. But the accords did not usher in a new era of regional peace — far from it — and the Emirates’ warm ties with Israel have increasingly made it an outlier in the Middle East.

 

For Israel, the crowning of the Abraham Accords would be the normalization of diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, the largest Arab economy and home to Islam’s holiest sites. Saudi Arabia does not formally recognize Israel, although successive U.S. administrations have made it their goal to change that.

 

Few consider that a possibility now. Over the past couple of years, Saudi officials have consistently predicated ties with Israel on the creation of an independent state for Palestinians. Israel’s current government — the most right-wing in the country’s history — vehemently opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state and is unwilling to even talk of a pathway to one.

 

“Saudi Arabia will not be rushed into a historic decision that ignores Palestinian statehood,” said Salman al-Ansari, a Saudi political analyst. “Saudi Arabia’s commitment to a two-state solution is not a slogan, and it is not a bargaining chip.”

 

Mr. Trump’s language implied that he was giving an order, not making a request.

 

“It should start with the immediate signing by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and everybody else should follow suit,” he said. “If they don’t, they should not be part of this Deal in that it shows bad intention.”

 

Perhaps even Iran — Israel’s archenemy — could join the Abraham Accords, Mr. Trump mused.

 

“Wow, now that would be something special!” he wrote.

 

Soon after, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who had recently slammed the potential deal with Iran, wrote his own post on social media calling it a “simply brilliant” idea to link the deal with the expansion of the Abraham Accords.

 

“I expect our Arab allies to embrace this,” he wrote.

 

If taken at face value, those statements would seem to indicate an ignorance of political dynamics in the Middle East, analysts said. An association with Israel — never popular among Arab populations — has become even more toxic for many governments in the Middle East as a result of the devastating wars that Israel has waged in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran since the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023.

 

The more that American officials push for normalization as an imposition rather than as part of a mutually beneficial deal, “the more unpalatable it becomes,” said Abdulaziz Alghashian, a Saudi scholar and senior nonresident fellow at the Gulf International Forum, a research organization.

 

Under the Biden administration, the Saudi crown prince had been seeking substantial incentives from the United States in exchange for establishing ties with Israel, including access to American nuclear technology and a U.S.-Saudi defense pact.

 

The extent to which Mr. Trump’s mandate came across as a complete non sequitur in the Middle East made Mr. Alghashian think that the Abraham Accords were possibly “the only clear strategy the U.S. has in the region,” he said.

 

A deal with Iran appears shaky at best, and fighting has continued to flare as diplomats have negotiated the details. In Israel, Mr. Trump’s linkage between that deal and an expansion of the Abraham Accords has been largely met by baffled silence.

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has not reacted publicly to Mr. Trump’s pronouncement. Analysts have said that the phased deal with Iran the president has proposed would most likely be hard for Mr. Netanyahu to swallow. If the bid to include an expansion of the Abraham Accords were meant as some kind of sweetener, the Israeli prime minister was not letting on.

 

Asked about the Abraham Accords becoming part of any Iran deal, or if Mr. Netanyahu had discussed this issue with Mr. Trump, the Israeli government responded with a statement saying only that “Israel is keen on expanding the circle of peace, which will be most beneficial to all signatories of the Abraham Accords.”

 

With Israeli elections expected this fall, and Mr. Netanyahu’s political future on the line, the prospect of Saudi Arabia or other Muslim-majority states handing him such a prize appears even more remote.

 

“Those countries won’t take a step before the elections in Israel and before seeing what the deal with Iran yields,” Mr. Guzansky said, adding, “We are still in such a fog of war.”

 

Mr. Trump even suggested that Pakistan — which has mediated between the United States and Iran to end the war — should join the accords.

 

In Pakistan, one of the world’s most populous Muslim-majority countries, officials and analysts greeted that call with a flat no. Pakistan does not recognize Israel, and its passports explicitly state that holders are barred from traveling there.

 

Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, said on local television that joining the accords would clash with the country’s “fundamental ideologies.”

 

Mr. Trump’s statement might have been an attempt to please parts of his domestic audience — such as Iran hawks who view the potential deal with the Iranians as a disappointment — Pakistani analysts said. They called the proposal a distraction from the peace negotiations between the United States and Iran.

 

“Trump may be trying to divert attention with his Abraham Accords statement, but it is a poor effort at that,” said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States and the United Nations.

 

In the end, Mr. Trump appeared to give himself an offramp — raising questions about why he had made the proposal in the first place.

 

“It may be possible,” he wrote in the post, that some of the countries he named have acceptable reasons for not recognizing Israel, he said.

 

But the rest of the countries, he said, should be ready to join in — making his settlement with Iran “a far more Historic Event than it would, otherwise, be.”

 

Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Adam Rasgon from Tel Aviv.

 

Vivian Nereim is the lead reporter for The Times covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. She is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

 

Isabel Kershner, a senior correspondent for The Times in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.

 

Elian Peltier is The Times’s bureau chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan, based in Islamabad.