The agreement has been finished since July. The reactors are AP1000s, the term is thirty years, and the bill is measured in tens of billions of dollars. The only thing missing is Riyadh's signature under something that has nothing to do with electricity: recognition of Israel.

Donald Trump has sent the civil nuclear energy agreement with Saudi Arabia to Congress, which has 90 legislative days to review it. The arrangement allows American companies to export civil nuclear technology to the kingdom. But a US official confirmed the condition remains unchanged: the deal moves forward only if Saudi Arabia joins the Abraham Accords.

Power for a signature

The Abraham Accords are the series of normalisation agreements between Israel and Arab and Muslim-majority states, brokered by Washington and signed in 2020 and 2021. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan went into that package. Saudi Arabia, the biggest fish, stayed out.

And that is where the story stalls. Riyadh wants an irreversible path to a Palestinian state before it recognises Israel. Diplomats assessed the kingdom was close to normalisation in 2023, until the war in Gaza changed every calculation. Since then the bill has looked different and nobody is in a hurry to pay it.

Nothing new under the sun

It is worth noting this is not a Trump invention. The previous administration pushed the same nuclear deal and tried to tie it to the same accords. So the difference between the two American policies here is style, not substance. Energy is the stick and the carrot at the same time, and that is a game the Balkans recognise without translation.

Who ends up making money? The AP1000 reactors are built by Westinghouse, a company owned by Canada's Cameco and Brookfield Asset Management. A thirty-year contract, tens of billions of dollars. Geopolitics is written in press releases, but it is signed on invoices.

And the question nobody asks out loud remains: how much does one recognition cost? If the answer is measured in reactors, then diplomacy stopped being about principles a long time ago.