US President Donald Trump told leaders across the Muslim world that signing the Abraham Accords should be a condition of any peace settlement with Iran, and that Saudi Arabia and Qatar should sign on immediately. If the pitch lands, it would be the most sweeping realignment the framework has seen since its 2020 launch.
Trump made the case during a conference call with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Pakistan Army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, and Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. He described Iran nuclear negotiations as “proceeding nicely,” then warned that a collapse in talks could send the region back to the “battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before.”
The economic argument came next. Trump framed the Accords not as a political concession but as a financial windfall, arguing the agreement had delivered a “Financial, Economic, and Social BOOM” for the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and Kazakhstan — the five countries that normalised ties with Israel when the original pact was signed. Countries involved in any future Iran peace settlement, he said, “should be mandatory” signatories to the framework.
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Trump then floated the prospect of Iran itself eventually entering the Accords, saying the leaders on the call “would be honoured, as soon as our Document is signed, to have the Islamic Republic of Iran as part of the Abraham Accords.” That Tehran, a long-running adversary of Israel, might one day join a normalisation framework built around ties with the Jewish state was the most striking claim of the call.
It was also the one that stopped several participants cold.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan have each withheld formal recognition of Israel, citing the unresolved Palestinian issue, and the three governments were reportedly caught off guard by the proposal. Trump’s call for expansion to begin with “the immediate signing by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and everybody else should follow suit” was met with silence from several leaders on the line. According to Axios, one US official noted that Trump joked and asked if they were still there.
The silence is a measure of the political distance still to be covered. Riyadh has long conditioned any normalisation with Israel on tangible progress toward Palestinian statehood, a bar that no phone call can lower on its own. The administration has already directed representatives to begin work on bringing additional countries into the Accords framework, suggesting the push is now being prosecuted at the leadership level.
Whether the leaders on that call treat Saturday’s pitch as a serious opening or a pressure tactic is another question entirely.
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