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With the Saudi Deal, Trump Risks Aiding and Abetting a Nuclear Arms Race

jinsa-shavdala — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:24:45 +0000

Last week, the Department of Energy announced that Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and his Saudi counterpart had signed a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement along with a bilateral safeguards pact. The former is commonly known as a 123 agreement because, under Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, it is subject to congressional review.

But before the required review process could take place, a wave of criticism from nuclear nonproliferation experts and conservative pundits led the administration to backtrack. By Thursday morning, President Donald Trump had knocked the deal into a cocked hat with a Truth Social post insisting the agreement would not entail the enrichment of nuclear material and would be “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.”

Riyadh’s interest in energy diversification and nuclear energy in particular is not new. The Biden administration engaged in protracted discussions over its last two years on this and other issues as part of its effort to entice the kingdom into joining the Abraham Accords, a U.S.-brokered deal to normalize relations between Israel and a number of Arab states. Those discussions ultimately foundered on Saudi reluctance to adhere to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol (which expands the atomic inspection authorities to detect undeclared nuclear activities), potential restrictions on uranium enrichment, and Riyadh’s insistence that it would not normalize relations with Israel while Gaza remained occupied. Wright’s announcement last week appeared to drop the requirement that Saudi Arabia normalize ties with Israel, but the president’s post appears to have reinstated it. The Saudis, for their part, have indicated that the agreement was signed before the normalization prerequisite was added, leaving the pact in limbo.

The likely delay in the agreement’s implementation provides an opportunity to consider the broader implications of a nuclear cooperation agreement with Riyadh as dispassionately as one can. At the outset, it is important to note that the text of the deal has not been made public and that critics (and advocates) have been reacting to leaks in the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets. Therefore, commentators should proceed with caution about the details until they are clearly spelled out. That is the gravamen of a lengthy X post by nuclear proliferation expert David Albright, in which he poses the question of whether the proposed deal is a “new approach to stop proliferation or a proliferation-prone mistake.” He notes that Saudi Arabia has long been considered a potential candidate country for nuclear proliferation, with its leaders vowing to pursue a bomb if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon (a position I heard articulated explicitly by King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s monarch until his death in 2015, when I visited the kingdom as a government official for defense cooperation meetings in 2006). Concerns about Riyadh’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon were recently reinforced by the conclusion of a mutual defense agreement between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, given the latter’s well-known record of promoting proliferation in North Korea, Libya, and Iran.

Albright, whose proliferation credentials are impressive, offers a framework for judging the deal once its text actually becomes available. The most controversial element, he notes, is the potential for Saudi uranium enrichment, given media reports indicating that “the agreement does not include an outright ban on uranium enrichment, but it does not include an outright provision [for enrichment] either.” But if an enrichment plant is built on Saudi soil, he adds, “it would reportedly be controlled by the United States and involve U.S. centrifuge technology.” To keep these capabilities out of Riyadh’s hands, “the plant should be run by U.S. personnel, cleared by U.S. clearance processes. Such a plant would be consistent with the view of no nationally controlled enrichment plants in the region.”

Moreover, Albright notes, the agreement reportedly stipulates that no enrichment plant would be built before the completion of a two-year study on the commercial viability of enrichment in Saudi Arabia—a prospect about which he is clearly skeptical. The outcome of the study may turn on whether enrichment is intended to solely meet Saudi needs or whether enriched material would be exported to serve other countries’ civilian nuclear power programs. Albright also addresses Saudi Arabia’s past reluctance to sign the IAEA Additional Protocol, and on that issue, he is unequivocal: U.S. bilateral inspection arrangements are not enough; Riyadh must agree to robust international monitoring.

On balance, Albright thinks U.S.-Saudi cooperation might be a superior alternative to the Saudis pursuing a nuclear program with another partner, like Pakistan. A cooperation agreement that gives the U.S. significant leverage over Saudi enrichment may be the least bad outcome.

Albright may, however, be overly sanguine here. While details remain scarce, there is good reason to be concerned that the deal would not only be a departure from longtime U.S. policy but also have the potential to upend the traditional U.S. strategic objective of attempting to slow, halt, and reverse the adoption of nuclear weapons. The U.S. might inadvertently make itself into a handmaiden for a nuclear proliferation cascade that would break a nonproliferation regime that is already under enormous stress from a range of geopolitical forces.

The deal as described in press accounts would mark a distinct departure from traditional U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia and nuclear power. As a Congressional Research Service review notes, “longstanding U.S. policy has linked a U.S.-Saudi 123 agreement to a requirement that the kingdom accept enhanced international safeguards and forgo pursuit of the most proliferation-sensitive nuclear facilities—those for enriching uranium or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to obtain plutonium.” These undertakings would essentially block the two paths to a nuclear weapon.

They also are the essence of the “gold standard” 123 agreement that the U.S. reached with the United Arab Emirates in 2009. That agreement provided that the U.S. could terminate its nuclear cooperation with the UAE if the latter developed sensitive nuclear technology on its territory or engaged in enrichment or reprocessing activities. An agreed minute to the deal stipulated that its terms “shall be no less favorable in scope and effect” than U.S. cooperation with other Middle Eastern countries and provided for consultations, at Abu Dhabi’s instance, “regarding the possibility of amending” the agreement to provide “equally favorable terms.” This nuclear equivalent of most-favored-nation status means that proceeding with a Saudi agreement that allows for enrichment or eschews IAEA inspections could open the door to the UAE following suit.

For some years, Saudi officials have indicated that they wish to have access to the full nuclear fuel cycle and intend to use the kingdom’s ample uranium reserves to produce low-enriched uranium. Although Saudi Arabia has been a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for almost 40 years and has a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA, it has curtailed some of its cooperation with the watchdog agency in recent years. While the guardrails that Albright has suggested might assuage concerns about enrichment activity, it is not at all clear that such protections exist in the signed agreement. Nor would they (as he himself notes) mitigate concerns about IAEA inspections or soothe Emirati concerns about equal treatment, with potential knock-on effects with other countries in the region down the road.

In sum, between its apparent concessions on enrichment and temporary reversal of the Biden administration’s attempts to make a nuclear pact contingent on normalization with Israel, the Trump team’s deal has abandoned key policy objectives with little in the way of compromises from the Saudis. The president’s Truth Social post may block the agreement for now, but, given the inconstancy of his positions articulated via social media, this injunction could be lifted at any time.

Probing the Saudi nuclear agreement more deeply, it appears not only to upend 20 years of U.S. policy across four administrations—both Republican and Democratic—but also to compromise a key U.S. strategic objective reaching back to the dawn of the nuclear age. American statesmen, after the initial use of atomic bombs to force Japan’s surrender in 1945, have always been chary about other countries getting their hands on nuclear technology. The initial efforts at international nuclear arms control in 1945-46 foundered on precisely this issue, and America’s concerns were not exclusively directed at U.S. adversaries. Washington cut off British access to nuclear technology after the war’s conclusion (despite the fact that the initial development of nuclear weapons had been a joint wartime effort) and was notoriously unsympathetic to France’s nuclear advances.

As Johns Hopkins scholar Francis Gavin argued in 2015, the U.S. government has gone to “extraordinary lengths since the beginning of the nuclear age to inhibit — that is, to slow, halt, and reverse — the spread of nuclear weapons and, when unsuccessful, to mitigate the consequences.” The tools that Washington uses to accomplish this he calls “strategies of inhibition.”

American policymakers developed and adapted the tools of statecraft to execute this strategy because they feared the unconstrained spread of nuclear weapons to an unknown number of states would lead to an unstable world in which the odds of nuclear use were exponentially higher. RAND scholars at the end of the 1950s identified this as the “nth country problem,” which carried with it the threat of “catalytic” nuclear war.

In February 1963, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara provided President John F. Kennedy with his assessment of the dangers of the spread of nuclear weapons to other powers with or without a test ban treaty. Echoing many of the concerns expressed by the RAND experts, he noted that “the continued diffusion of nuclear weapons is clearly not in the interest of the US. Even if these weapons are not used, diffusion will make existing disputes more acute and will generate new ones. And although their use by a weak power will be irrational, such action cannot be ruled out.” Although some so-called realist scholars have argued for the benefits of additional nuclear proliferation on the basis that the more countries that have nuclear weapons, the more world leaders will be deterred from using them, American policymakers have shared McNamara’s assessment since the 1960s.

Kennedy, shortly after receiving McNamara’s memo and just months before his tragic assassination, was asked at a press conference about the prospects for a nuclear test ban, and his response suggested that he had thoroughly assimilated McNamara’s argument: “I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be 10 nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, 15 or 20.” But in 1968, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, negotiated the NPT and with it established the nonproliferation apparatus that has limited the number of nuclear weapons states to nine. That effort, in fact, marks the single greatest accomplishment of arms control in our time.

Despite its successes, that treaty regime has been under continuous stress. In the 1970s, Sweden, Australia, and South Korea all gave up their aspirations for nuclear weapons. In the 1980s, the Israeli raid on the Osirak reactor delayed an Iraqi nuclear program that was then further precluded by the first Gulf War and the Iraq War. India and Pakistan both tested nuclear weapons in the late 1990s, but they were never signatories to the treaty (nor was Israel, which maintains a policy of strategic ambiguity). The nuclear program of North Korea, a former NPT signatory, has bedeviled policymakers for 30 years, representing the most serious challenge to the viability of the treaty yet. And ongoing concerns about the Iranian nuclear program have revolved around the idea that an Iranian weapon would set off a “chain reaction” of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, upending the last major achievement of the effort to control nuclear weapons.

Saudi Arabia, of course, has been the linchpin of speculation about a “chain reaction” due to its understandable fears about the Iranian nuclear program. These fears help explain why Saudi leaders were quite content to see Operation Midnight Hammer’s strikes on the core elements of Iran’s program in June 2025. The Saudis have been less enthusiastic about the current round of warfare initiated by President Trump on February 28, 2026, particularly as Iranian retaliatory strikes target Saudi soil and amid the prospect of Houthi attacks on the kingdom’s infrastructure. In this context, it is not at all surprising that Saudi officials have supported the mediation efforts of Pakistan, Qatar, and others to end the fighting or that they would, in light of the U.S. failure to completely defend the kingdom from Iranian attacks, pursue a hedging strategy with regard to their own nuclear weapons capability.

Given Saudi apprehension about the course of the conflict and the potential of Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, it is also not astonishing that the Trump administration might see concessions on the nuclear issue as mollifying the kingdom. The irony, however, is that these concessions might very well prompt the kind of nuclear cascade that has animated fears over the Iranian program in the first place. As Andrea Stricker of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies wrote of the Saudi deal, “We could quickly see Turkey, Egypt, potentially others like Qatar and Oman lining up for similar treatment.” In Stricker’s view, providing Riyadh with access to enrichment technology, even under conditions that deny Saudi personnel access, would also “risk Saudi espionage or seizure, potentially forcing a future president to destroy it.”

If the agreement ultimately does move forward, Congress should examine it with a fine-tooth comb, and if it is as flawed as current descriptions suggest, it should reject it with a veto-proof majority.

Although the issues surrounding the Saudi nuclear deal are mired in technical details, the broader policy and strategic implications are momentous. Proceeding with the agreement would open the door to the very nuclear cascade that American policymakers have tried for years to prevent by limiting or destroying the Iranian nuclear program. One can hope the president’s current posture of linking the deal to normalization with Israel will keep U.S.-Saudi nuclear cooperation from proceeding on the terms as we currently understand them. But even normalization with Israel will not fix the issues of enrichment and inspections that could well open a Pandora’s box of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, realizing six decades of policymakers’ fears.

Amb. Eric Edelman is a JINSA Distinguished Scholar and the former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

Read the original piece in The Dispatch.

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Taking Out Iran’s Pickaxe Nuclear Site is Key — Here’s How Trump Can Do It

Yoni Tobin — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:37:32 +0000

At Pickaxe Mountain, Iran thinks it has built a nuclear fortress America can’t destroy. President Donald Trump can’t afford to let that illusion survive another week.

Fortunately, he has options.

Tehran has followed the same playbook for decades, secretly building underground nuclear sites that become the workhorses of its drive for the bomb.

Pickaxe appears to be the latest and potentially most dangerous.

Back in 2020, Tehran’s nuclear chief warned that workers were excavating the site for “a more modern, vaster, and inclusive building” — “working 24/7 to move all our sensitive work into the heart of this mountain.”

Since then, Iran has spent six years carving Pickaxe into what it hopes will be an indestructible nuclear sanctuary.

This is more than double the time it spent secretly building its enrichment plants at Fordow and Natanz before being caught.

Both those sites were already in “an advanced stage of construction” when inspections occurred.

Inspectors still have never been to Pickaxe, and it appears unlikely they ever will.

Satellite imagery suggests the facility may well be large enough to reconstitute many, possibly all, of Iran’s core nuclear activities: centrifuge storage and production, uranium enrichment and stockpiling and even weaponization.

This is helped by Iran’s technological advances in recent years, which minimize its need for floor space, and time, to dash for a bomb.

A recent report says Iran might now be moving enrichment centrifuges to Pickaxe; it’s been observed working on the site in recent months.

Trump himself warned this year that Iran was undertaking new activities at a site “protected by granite.”

Yet Pickaxe went untouched in Operations Midnight Hammer last year and Epic Fury in the spring.

Iran is banking on the site being impenetrable in a way that its other subterranean sites were not.

Initial estimates suggested it could be even further underground than Fordow, Iran’s most sensitive and deepest-buried enrichment plant at the time it was struck in Midnight Hammer.

Hence Iran’s refusal to negotiate over the site. No new nuclear deal will bring to light, let alone shut down, this key node in the regime’s undimmed nuclear ambitions.

Every month Pickaxe remains intact gives Tehran more time to move equipment, rebuild enrichment capacity and shorten the path back to a nuclear weapon.

The president recognizes the urgency: “That’s where the action is. We’ll be hitting that area pretty soon and very heavily.”

Now he needs to follow through. Targeting it would shatter Tehran’s belief that one mountain can preserve its nuclear ambitions from American airpower.

Midnight Hammer showed that America’s most powerful Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker busters could severely damage even a deeply buried facility like Fordow.

These weapons relied on smart tactics, precise targeting and fuses that enabled these weapons to drill sequentially through weak points, like ventilation shafts, before detonating to full effect.

That same operation also showed that blocking access to a site can be nearly as effective as burrowing into it.

With Iran’s highly enriched uranium sitting at Isfahan, in storage tunnels potentially beyond reach of bunker busters, salvos of low-flying Tomahawk cruise missiles were used to collapse the entrances and entrap the “nuclear dust” instead.

In the more than a year since these attacks, Iran has poked around but not reentered the site.

Striking Pickaxe could combine elements of what worked best in last summer’s operation, seeking both to maximize direct damage and minimize Iran’s ability to access it afterward.

The site was designed, and construction started, long before Midnight Hammer revealed innovations enabling the MOPs to create and exploit new structural vulnerabilities.

This would entail a mix of bunker busters, cruise missiles and possibly other munitions to attack Pickaxe at multiple points, and from multiple angles.

The facility’s ventilation shafts and tunnel entrances are key. Israeli airstrikes on other Iranian nuclear sites show that disabling their power supplies can add to the effectiveness.

What comes after the strikes would be equally important. Working with Israel and its incredible intelligence capabilities, the United States would need to monitor the site closely and make clear it will conduct follow-on attacks if Iran tries to access it.

Trump has already upended many of Iran’s beliefs about what American presidents will or won’t do.

Now he can confound the expectation that its nuclear program can survive U.S. military action.

Jonathan Ruhe is Fellow for American Strategy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA).

Read the original piece in the New York Post.

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Tehran Committed to Rebuilding Nuclear Program Despite Heavy Damage, Experts Tell JNS

Nolan Judd — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:35:42 +0000

The Iranian nuclear program has not recovered from the devastating blows it absorbed during successive military campaigns by Israel and the United States. Yet, intelligence assessments indicate that Tehran remains deeply committed to clandestinely reconstituting its nuclear capabilities in the long term.

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Jonathan Ruhe, Fellow for American Strategy at the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told JNS that Iran has spent years preparing Pickaxe Mountain “as its main backup option for enrichment-related activities, long before Israel-U.S. airstrikes on Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. Recent efforts to fortify the site only reinforce these concerns.”

Ruhe emphasized that Western defense planners must evaluate Tehran’s actions through the lens of decades-long patterns of deception.

“American and Israeli planners should assume Iran intends to reconstitute key activities clandestinely, including centrifuge manufacturing and storage, as well as uranium conversion, enrichment, stockpiling and metallurgy,” Ruhe argued. “This would be entirely in keeping with three decades of Iranian behavior, where its nuclear program always has covert subterranean dimensions.”

Notably, he added, International Atomic Energy Agency director Rafael Grossi has consistently said that his inspectors “cannot fully account for Iran’s uranium stockpiles, centrifuges, and related capabilities,” even before the two Iran wars.

“Two things are equally plausible right now. On one hand, Iran’s nuclear program has been set back significantly in three rounds of conflict since October 2024, and it likely cannot restore or salvage enrichment sites that were severely damaged in those conflicts,” Ruhe assessed. “But to borrow President Trump’s terms, the program has not been ‘obliterated,’ and securing the ‘nuclear dust’ at Isfahan does not solve this larger problem. Iran has spent decades building this program to survive military attacks.

“The real question is not, ‘Can Iran rebuild?’ but rather, ‘How quickly?’ and ‘Can we detect it in time?’” said Ruhe.

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Read the full piece in JNS.

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U.S.-Saudi Nuclear Deal Faces Swift Backlash on Multiple Fronts

Nolan Judd — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:11:42 +0000

The Trump administration faced immediate backlash from non-proliferation advocates and supporters of Israel on Wednesday after news broke of a nuclear cooperation deal signed between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

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John Hannah, Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), said the reported details of the energy deal raise more questions than answers, including why the U.S. gave up enormous leverage to secure Israeli-Saudi normalization by moving forward solely with Riyadh’s nuclear demands.

“If Saudis can get everything they seek from the US, no matter how politically difficult and strategically risky, without biting the bullet on normalization, what incentive will they have to take the risk with Israel later?” he asked.

Hannah, who served in foreign policy positions in Republican and Democratic administrations, said Trump could be calculating that Israeli-Saudi normalization is a nonstarter given the fallout from Israel’s war against Hamas following the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks.

He also raised the possibility that the U.S. is seeking to keep Riyadh from reaching out to China on nuclear technology, or that talks on Saudi-Israeli normalization are still happening behind the scenes.

Hannah worried the deal could undermine the push to constrain Iran’s nuclear program, a key point of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war, and give license to Russia and China to do their own deals around the world, circumventing IAEA protocols.

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Read the full piece in The Hill.

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Trump’s Hands Are Tied in Hormuz. Here’s ‘Plan B’

Nolan Judd — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:28:31 +0000

By attacking Iran, President Donald Trump triggered a crisis over the Strait of Hormuz that he’s struggled to resolve as commander-in-chief. His only way out now may be as a statesman — but the window to avoid uncontrolled escalation could be closing.

Multiple U.S. troops were recently killed in Iranian missile strikes. The memorandum of understanding whose key job was reopening the strait lies in tatters. The sides are now exchanging expanded strikes to impose their competing visions of Hormuz’s future. The prospect that the war could enter an even more dangerous phase is growing by the day.

Shutting down Hormuz has been Iran’s greatest achievement of the war. A successful U.S. operation to liberate it would represent a huge strategic reversal — not just dramatically strengthening Washington’s leverage in future negotiations but transforming the conflict’s current narrative of U.S. defeat into one of American success in restoring deterrence.

Given those advantages, if a unilateral U.S. military option exists that could, with high confidence and acceptable cost, free Hormuz and — crucially — keep it free, Trump should give the order. The problem is that despite knowing for five months how central the strait’s disposition is to the war effort and America’s global standing, the order hasn’t come.

Which strongly suggests that the option doesn’t exist — in no small part because as Trump has observed, one “guy with a drone can shut [the strait] down.” Last week, Vice President JD Vance offered his version of the dilemma: “You can bomb them, you can take away their radar, you can take away some of their drones and some of their missiles,” he said, “but it’s just too easy to fire at ships in the straits.”

The likely costs of seizing Hormuz are daunting. The battle could take months, involving ground forces, high casualties, and the dangerous depletion of critical munitions stocks. Iran could unleash its remaining firepower to devastate Gulf energy infrastructure, while its Houthi allies shut down shipping through the Red Sea — potentially ruinous for the global economy. Meanwhile, any U.S. military gains could be undone by Trump’s “guy with a drone.”

There is a fundamental asymmetry of interests and pain thresholds at work. For Iran’s rulers, the stakes in Hormuz are existential — the essential lever they need to deter future attacks once this war concludes. They seem determined to fight as long as necessary, absorbing devastating costs without regard to the immense suffering of their own people.

The United States, in contrast, is a democracy with midterm elections looming. Trump’s war has been deeply unpopular from the start, exacerbated by spikes in gas prices and inflation. Expanding the war now would carry enormous military, economic, and political risk, with no guarantee of sustainable victory.

If the honest assessment is that a military solution remains unavailable at a price either Trump or the American people are prepared to pay, the clear-eyed response is to accept reality, however regretfully, and develop an alternative strategy to make the best out of a horrible situation.

That strategy would use aggressive diplomacy to weaponize the widespread international consensus on restoring freedom of navigation. Washington’s most powerful allies in the Gulf, Europe, and Asia already reject Iranian control of Hormuz and are primed to be forged into a more forceful multinational coalition.

The missing piece has been China, which vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on Hormuz in April on grounds that America’s military attacks and blockade of Iran should end. Nevertheless, Chinese officials have repeatedly called for a rapid return to free, safe, and unimpeded navigation, rejecting efforts to militarize the strait or charge tolls.

Between 40% and 50% of China’s oil imports transit the Gulf, and its economic relations with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman dwarf its ties to Iran. Once the guns fall silent, a U.S.-organized, Gulf-led offensive to pressure and incentivize Chinese cooperation might succeed in isolating Iran by shifting the dynamic from Iran vs. Trump to Iran vs. the world.

The sequencing might work as follows: an initial Security Council resolution calling for the urgent restoration of Hormuz as a free and open international waterway and authorizing a multinational naval coalition to work with Iran and Oman in clearing it for safe passage. Britain and France have already volunteered to lead such an effort. Should the coalition report back that Iran is impeding the resolution, the Security Council would reserve the right to take additional action, including condemnation, sanctions, and, ultimately, authorization to reopen Hormuz by force.

It would not be easy or quick. It would require tremendous diplomatic skill, patience, and presidential leadership — none of which have been hallmarks of this administration. Even then, pulling it off will be a long shot. But in a world of terrible options, where further military escalation courts disaster and success in equal measure, a Plan B focused on an American diplomatic push could be the least bad path forward.

John Hannah is the Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. He served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, including as former Vice President Cheney’s national security advisor.

Read the original piece in the Washington Examiner.

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Lawmakers Split on Whether Trump Should Have Tied Syria Sanctions Relief to Israel Normalization

Nolan Judd — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:20:01 +0000

As the Trump administration moves to end the diplomatic isolation of Syria, dismantling decades of U.S. sanctions in the process, lawmakers are offering mixed assessments of whether Washington should have conditioned that relief on steps toward normalizing relations with Israel.

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John Hannah, a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, agreed that normalization with Israel “hasn’t been on the agenda.”

“In Syria’s eyes, and certainly in the eyes of [Syrian President Ahmad al-]Sharaa and the ex-jihadists who came to power with him, normalization without recovering the Golan Heights is an absolute non-starter and would be widely viewed as abject and unacceptable surrender and capitulation,” Hannah said. “Of course, it goes without saying that any discussion about withdrawing from the Golan is equally anathema in Israel. So I just don’t see normalization as being in the cards right now.”

Israel formally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, after capturing the territory from Syria in the 1967 War. The IDF has held additional territory in southern Syria as a security zone since the collapse of the Assad regime.

President Donald Trump reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month to pull back IDF troops from Syria.

Still, Hannah noted that al-Sharaa has shown “no interest whatsoever in fighting with Israel” since rising to power and has taken positive steps toward Jerusalem.

“On the contrary, for most of 2025 [al-Sharaa] was practically begging Israel to resurrect, update and strengthen the Israel-Syria disengagement agreement of 1974,” Hannah said. “Indeed, for the first time in 25 years, al-Sharaa, the former Al-Qaida leader, authorized direct Israel-Syria negotiations under U.S. auspices to reach a new security agreement.”

Hannah suggested the U.S. still has an opportunity to “play some hardball” and use rolling back Syria’s State Sponsor of Terrorism designation as leverage. Trump formally initiated the process to lift the designation, which has been applied to Syria since 1979, earlier this month.

The White House could press “for an expansion of security, economic and social relations with Israel,” Hannah said. “That’s separate from a demand for full normalization, which I just don’t see as realistic under present circumstances.”

Al-Sharaa has worked to earn the overtures from Washington by cooperating with U.S. priorities, Hannah argued.

“He ensured Iran and Hezbollah’s eviction from Syria and has systematically fought their efforts to maintain Iran’s land bridge to Lebanon, engaging in several firefights with Hezbollah units trying to smuggle weapons across the border,” Hannah said. “He directed his security forces to work closely with CENTCOM in combating ISIS, cooperated with the U.N. to come clean on Assad’s chemical weapons program and constrained the ability of Palestinian terrorist groups to operate from Syrian soil.”

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Read the full piece in Jewish Insider.

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Winning Before the Battle Ends

Yoni Tobin — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 05:06:03 +0000

Lt Gen David Harris, USAF (ret.) is a Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) Generals & Admirals Program Participant and the former Deputy Chief of Staff of U.S. Air Force Futures Directorate. He also has served as Director for Strategic Plans, U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC).

Click here to read the full piece in The Hill.

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The Long, Dark Shadow of the Iran Nuclear Deal

Jonah Brody — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 16:28:05 +0000

Excerpt below:

History is nothing if not ironic. Donald Trump left the Obama-negotiated Iran nuclear deal eight years ago, vowing a far better replacement. Today, even as the two nations have resumed hostilities after the collapse of the ceasefire, he remains open to negotiations that, if fulfilled, threaten to duplicate the 2015 accord. Meanwhile, supporters of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) trot out their counterfactual in which the deal magically solved Iran’s nuclear challenge and stabilized the Middle East—all while slamming Trump for trying to reprise the original agreement.

Such irony tends to bring things full circle. Tortuous negotiations, untenable agreements, recurrent conflicts, and Iranian intransigence are as familiar today as a decade ago. All of that owes much to how the JCPOA was negotiated and the world it brought about. So deep is the legacy of that agreement that two once-unimaginable wars in the past year have done more to reaffirm these patterns than disrupt them. In the absence of a volte-face, the JCPOA’s fallout will continue to define and confound attempts to solve the Iran problem. This will hold true whether the two sides return to full-scale war, secure a new nuclear deal, or settle back into some middling gray zone.

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Jonathan Ruhe is the Fellow for American Strategy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.

Read the full piece in the Dispatch.

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Vote on U.S. Aid to Israel Exposes Sharp Divide in Congress

Nolan Judd — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:29:45 +0000

Israel’s war in Gaza and its joint military operation with the U.S. against Iran are fueling deep divisions on Capitol Hill, especially among Democrats. Wednesday, more than half of House Democrats voted to end U.S. military funding for Israel. A separate provision aimed at strengthening U.S.-Israel cooperation is also exposing sharp differences. Lisa Desjardins reports.

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I spoke with Jonathan Ruhe at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, and he says this actually could benefit the U.S.

Jonathan Ruhe, Jewish Institute for National Security of America: So it’s in the U.S. interest in terms of how it helps us deal with threats to our military, to our homeland defense, because Israel ends up being a laboratory, much like we’re seeing also in Ukraine right now, where they — Israel is forced almost to develop cutting-edge technologies.

So Israel has a much faster turnaround, not only to produce cutting edge technologies for defense, but also to test them on the battlefield.

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Watch the entire episode from PBS News Hour.

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U.S.-Israel Partnership “One of the Most Valuable Operational Relationships We Have Anywhere in the World”

Nolan Judd — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:48:32 +0000

JINSA Senior Fellow John Hannah, former National Security Adviser to Vice President Cheney, joined I24 News’s American View to assess the state of the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship in the aftermath of Operation Epic Fury, offer a candid verdict on the MOU, and make the case for deepening military-to-military cooperation as direct financial aid gradually phases down.

Hannah called the operational military cooperation between the U.S. and Israel during the war “a qualitative leap forward,” describing it as “Israel’s first war in English” and saying the IDF proved itself “not only one of the finest militaries in the world but clearly one of America’s most valuable operational military partnerships anywhere in the world.” On the war’s strategic outcome, he was candid: it was “a mixed, ambiguous picture” that fell well short of the total victory both leaderships previewed. On the MOU specifically, he said it was “overwhelmingly within its four corners on Iranian terms, not American terms,” attributing this to Iran presenting the president with two military problems CENTCOM lacked optimal kinetic solutions to — closing Hormuz and holding Gulf partners at existential risk — which effectively “checkmated” the administration and made an off-ramp “almost inevitable.”

On the future of the relationship, Hannah argued the case for Israel is straightforward: no partner anywhere in the world offers the same combination of military capability, intelligence penetration of adversaries, high-tech innovation, and willingness to project power against common enemies. He endorsed a gradual phase-down of direct financial aid paired with deeper integration — joint R&D in AI, missile defense, cyber, and quantum computing, and expanded American military basing in Israel to gain strategic depth away from Iranian reach. He pointed to Israel’s integration into CENTCOM since 2021 as “a game-changer” that made the war’s operational achievements possible, and expressed optimism that Gulf states, having seen what Israeli and American capabilities can do together, will want more of that integration rather than less going forward.

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