There was no need for a translator for the cable from Riyadh. A top Saudi official was on Al Arabiya echoing the Saudi line, which has not budged from for the past three years, that no Saudi‑Israeli normalisation without an "irreversible pathway" to a Palestinian state within hours of Donald Trump declaring on Truth Social that six Muslim‑majority countries must "simultaneously" sign onto the Abraham Accords as the price of any Iran settlement. The reaction was more pointed from Islamabad. No Pakistani official told Reuters that the Iran ceasefire and the Accords were "not interlinked and cannot be made so" and Pakistan was "under no compulsion to adhere to any such demand.

This after-feeding frenzy of the most ambitious diplomatic package of Trump's second term hit the political arithmetic of the Muslim world.

The American president had been on the phone this weekend with the Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Pakistani, Turkish, Egyptian, Jordanian and Bahraini leaders, as well as Benjamin Netanyahu, putting together terms with Iran to end a war that began with the joint US–Israeli strikes of late February. The format that is being swirled around Washington, Doha and Muscat, is not as expansive as Trump's rhetoric sixty days of a ceasefire, the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, a return of Iranian oil to the world markets, and a parallel negotiation over the nuclear file. In its own right, it's a holding action to prevent Brent crude breaking back through three figures, where it had been for most of March.

Trump wants more. In his Monday post, he increased the package to something closer to a regional MOU, declaring the Accords a "Financial, Economic, and Social BOOM" and saying the holdouts must join or be “cut out of the Iran deal.” As an aside, he floated the possibility of Iran itself joining an unlikely scenario indeed, which was mainly to indicate how far he is willing to go in securing a legacy that contrasts with Barack Obama's 2015 JCPOA.

The economics he's referring to is real, but it’s also one-sided. Israel and the UAE signed a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement in 2020 that aims to increase bilateral trade to over $10 billion by 2028, from approximately $1.2 billion in 2021. Total trade between Israel and the Accords partners as well as Egypt and Jordan increased 127 per cent between 2021 and 2024. The Kazakhstan accession to the Accords last November also included $17 billion of deals signed in Washington. Even before the Gaza war blasted the UAE temperature, the UAE alone had set aside $10 billion to invest in Israeli energy, fintech, water and healthcare.

It's the brochure. The fine print is instead dirtier. Bahrain has yet to replace its ambassador to Israel since April 2025. Sudan never formalised its signature. Trading with Israel by Morocco is still small. But the bloc that Trump is now crushing Riyadh, Doha, Ankara, Islamabad has been doing the opposite for nine months.

The turning point was in September 2025, when Israeli warplanes attacked Hamas negotiators in Qatar. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement, whose mutual‑attack clause was quickly interpreted throughout the region as a Saudi practice of “sleuthing under Islamabad's nuclear umbrella.” The deal, which was signed at the UN General Assembly by Iran's president, is the basis for a new security architecture. Then Turkey openly joined the discussion for a trilateral version of the same deal. The signatures that Trump now wants to place are those of capitals which have been hard‑wiring themselves into a parallel system over the past eight months in order to prevent, deter and block just the kind of unilateral Israeli action that has been the purpose of the Accords.

It is at this point that the demand begins to resemble more than statecraft, less like wish‑casting. The kingdom is keen to join in, but with a serious plan to Palestinian statehood with East Jerusalem as capital, Mohammed bin Salman has explained publicly even to Trump in the Oval Office last November. The Palestinian situation, as one widely circulated analysis in the Israeli press put it earlier this year, is "a wall that protects the crown prince from his own people" and no man with his eye on the throne will write a document that his own people read as betrayal, after eighteen months of footage from Gaza have hardened, not softened, public opinion against him. With a forecast budget deficit projected at $27 billion in 2025 even as oil prices have dropped, Saudi Arabia's finance ministry has all the motivation to reap the economic dividend a deal could deliver. Nevertheless, it remains immobile without political backing.

The refusal of Pakistani is another ball game. Islamabad is also on an eight‑hundred‑mile border with Iran and has a Shia population in the tens of millions, and just pledged collective defence with a Saudi state that is itself somewhat nervous about being perceived as having dropped the Palestinian card. The Pakistani defence minister also noted on TV on Monday that the Pakistani passport did not list Israel as a destination. Tying the Iran settlement to normalisation demands Pakistan to pick between a neighbour which it can't afford to alienate and a US administration that has just referred to the army chief in a post on Truth Social, without mentioning the PM.

However, Qatar is in a more behind-the-scenes yet more pivotal role. Doha has been the indispensable mediator in the Gaza file for the past 18 months, on the hostage file and now in the Iran track. It's leverage is that it's not normalised. Qatar becomes a less useful interlocutor for Washington and thus an Accords signature makes Qatar instantly less useful to the president.

There's also a colder read available. Trump's accord is undermining the strategic calculus that led to the original Accords in 2020, namely Sunni Arab states move closer to Israel to balance Iran. The shared threat that always prompted Riyadh and Jerusalem to get closer to one another weakens if Tehran returns its oil to market, opens up Hormuz, and even accepts "face‑saving" limits on enrichment. What it's been replaced by, in the most important reading, is a race for regional leadership in which Israel is a natural ally but could become a competitor; and in which the Gulf has every reason to be wary of all but keeping its options open with Tehran. The incentive structure behind why the Accords worked in the first place, has been turned on its head by Trump: sign the Accords or be left out of the Iran deal.

None of this sounds good to Israel. Netanyahu is battling a domestic fight over a cancer diagnosis, a corruption trial that has been indefinitely postponed for “security reasons,” and the unpalatable reality that the prime minister himself has been effectively demoted to the sidelines of the negotiations that will decide whether his Iran war accomplished anything. Trump made no reference to Israel in the post from Monday. One Israeli official briefed on the Saturday call told CNN that the president had "assured Netanyahu that he will stick to the issue of dismantling Iran's enrichment infrastructure. Tehran denied ever having made such a pledge and on Monday Washington launched new strikes on Iranian ships in the strait.

So the least dramatic scenario is most likely to happen this week. A thin memorandum of understanding with Iran, which could be completed in days, that secures two months of quiet on the oil markets and gives the White House a foreign‑policy victory on the eve of summer. The Accords expansion that Trump is attaching to will quietly unplug. Saudi Arabia will reiterate its Palestinian condition. Pakistan is to be a non-participant. Qatar will continue to mediate. Turkey will continue construction of the triangle with Riyadh and Islamabad. But the Accords themselves, useful as they are, will remain what they've always been, and as of 2026 will not be able to force the rest of the Muslim world into its embrace by fiat.

In general, Trump's gut feeling that linkage provides leverage is correct. This is wrong, this in these particular capitals, in this particular month. The scales tip the other side. The key to the Iran deal is the leaders he is publicly attempting to coerce, and they know it.