An impeachable quid-pro-quo that could kill millions of Americans.
The Biden administration and the Saudis are reportedly cooking up a deal.
Under the terms of the agreement, the Saudis will get nuclear capability, defense guarantees and a terrorist state inside Israel. And what will the United States get? Temporarily lower prices.
The Saudis are not offering to boost oil production to bring down prices as a favor to America, but to Biden. And it’s an election quid-pro-quo that may cost millions of Americans their lives.
After draining the strategic petroleum reserve ahead of the midterms, Biden has been unable to refill it because his environmentalist allies and the Saudis have kept prices high. The Saudis had rejected requests to lower oil prices for anything short of assistance in building their own nuclear program. Shortly before the Hamas attacks of Oct 7, the Saudis had offered to temporarily boost production if it would make it easier to sell Congress on a defense agreement.
Back then the Saudi deal had been portrayed as an extension of the ‘Abraham Accords’ and offered ‘normalization’ of diplomatic ties with Israel. Whether the Saudis were ever serious about normalization is debatable but since Oct 7, any such agreement has been conditioned on an internationally recognized.Islamic terrorist ‘Palestinian’ state affiliated with Saudi Arabia.
The current expectation is that a deal between Biden and the Saudis will drop the Israeli component and focus on a defense agreement and nuclear power in exchange for cheap oil.
Whether Israel is or isn’t on board, a Saudi nuclear agreement is a bad deal for America.
The United States is more than capable of producing its own oil. The only obstacle in the way of American energy independence is Joe Biden and his party who are determined to push ‘green energy’ that only makes us equally dependent on Muslim terror states and Communist China.
Nuclear energy could help solve our energy problems, but the Saudis, who are the world’s largest oil producers, certainly don’t need to go nuclear to fix any energy shortfalls. Nor do they care about the environment. A civilian nuclear energy program makes about as much sense for Saudi Arabia as it does for Iran. And the only reasonable argument for enabling the Saudis to go nuclear would be to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but rather than averting a nuclear attack, that could double the risk and the possible vectors for nuclear armageddon. --->READ MORE HERE
How to Rein in Riyadh’s Nuclear Ambitions
Last year, less than a month before Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel changed everything, Israel and Saudi Arabia were negotiating an agreement to normalize ties. After decades of icy relations, Riyadh’s price for peace was admittedly high: in addition to U.S. security guarantees and at least token Israeli concessions on Palestinian sovereignty, Saudi negotiators were demanding access to civilian nuclear technology. Today, despite a fresh push by the Biden administration, such an agreement remains only a remote possibility. With the Israel-Hamas war raging on, even if Saudi officials were interested in talking to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they would likely find it impossible to negotiate a lasting peace while Arab publics, including their own, are outraged at the humanitarian crisis Israel’s military campaign has created in Gaza. Although negotiations may never resume, they remain an important source of potential leverage in the U.S.-Israeli relationship—one that officials in Washington believe could not only help facilitate a cease-fire in Gaza but also induce broader Israeli concessions on Palestinian statehood.
As the United States thinks through how to promote stability in the Middle East, both during and after the war in Gaza, the issue of the Saudi nuclear program will loom large. If Washington hopes to dangle the carrot of Saudi normalization to motivate Israeli policy, it will need to consider Riyadh’s demands for civilian nuclear cooperation and defense requests—a development that could dramatically alter the regional security picture, particularly if Saudi Arabia could eventually want a weapons program, too. For now, the proposed Saudi nuclear program would involve civilian nuclear reactors managed under a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But Riyadh has historically voiced unease with even those standard limitations, and peaceful nuclear programs are often the first step toward acquiring nuclear weapons. Although Saudi Arabia does not yet have substantial nuclear infrastructure of its own, it is constructing a small nuclear research reactor on the outskirts of Riyadh and building ballistic missiles with China’s help.
Saudi Arabia may well stick to civilian nuclear development for the time being. But given the looming threat of an Iranian bomb, it may be tempted to move toward military nuclearization in the future. The United States must work to mitigate that risk. It is a difficult line for Washington to toe: cooperate too little, and it could lose Saudi support for normalization with Israel and cede influence to rivals such as China; grant unconditional support for Saudi nuclear-enrichment capabilities, and Riyadh could seize the opportunity to develop a nuclear weapons program down the road. Washington must therefore accept Saudi Arabia’s peaceful nuclear ambitions but insist on strong measures and strict regulations to preempt Saudi proliferation—and prevent a regional arms race.
GATEWAY TECHNOLOGIES
Although Saudi Arabia’s current nuclear ambitions are ostensibly for peaceful purposes, civilian programs can be a prelude to military ones. Iran, North Korea, Libya, Iraq, and Syria all clandestinely pursued nuclear weapons programs while pretending to adhere to safeguards. These examples demonstrate the challenges of detecting and preventing covert nuclear proliferation if countries have enrichment capabilities as part of their civilian nuclear programs, underscoring the urgent need for strict verification protocols.
A civilian nuclear program could facilitate a nuclear weapons program by giving Saudi Arabia dual-use technologies such as fuel rods, reprocessing facilities, and advanced reactor designs. The reactors and uranium-enrichment capabilities would provide the kingdom with the infrastructure and knowledge base necessary for advancing its nuclear capabilities through a diversion of materials or expertise toward military applications. Riyadh could then use its advanced enrichment technologies, such as gas centrifuges, to produce weapons-grade uranium, evading detection by international inspectors through concealment and deception. Saudi Arabia could also separate the uranium isotopes needed for highly enriched uranium within civilian facilities, making it challenging for inspectors to detect the existence of a military program. Enriched uranium necessary to fuel nuclear reactors could also be diverted and further enriched to levels suitable for a nuclear explosion. A Saudi civilian nuclear program would therefore amount to a latent nuclear capability—the technical capacity to proliferate if it desired to do so. With that, Saudi Arabia would join 31 other states, including Brazil, Egypt, Germany, and Japan, that have held this status throughout history.
The next and more aggressive step would be to escalate from latency to nuclear hedging—the strategic use of a civilian nuclear program as a bargaining chip—or to direct adversarial behavior (as North Korea, for instance, has done). Saudi Arabia could enrich uranium, increase its production of centrifuges, buy nuclear material and equipment from other states, or garner domestic political support for nuclear weapons possession, all with the hope of increasing its bargaining power. --->READ MORE HERE
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