The Accords Leave the Gulf

GDCI Analysis & Editorial Essay · Thematic Pillar: Dialogue, Peace, and Conflict Resolution · August 2026

What does it mean for a peace framework to become, for the first time, a landlocked one?

On 6 November 2025, Kazakhstan announced it would accede to the Abraham Accords — the U.S.-brokered initiative that since 2020 has normalized relations between Israel and a growing list of Muslim-majority states. President Trump confirmed the news the following day from the White House, during a summit with Central Asian leaders. The accession itself changed little in practical terms: Kazakhstan and Israel have maintained full diplomatic relations since 1992, and cooperation between them — in irrigation, healthcare, energy — is old enough to have its own institutional memory. What changed was the map. For five years, the Abraham Accords had been a Middle Eastern and North African instrument: the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, joined more recently by conversations with Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan is the first former Soviet republic, the first Central Asian state, and the first accession that has nothing to do with the Levant’s own unresolved conflicts. Nine months later, a second and very different accession question — Saudi Arabia’s — has become the explicit precondition for a bilateral U.S. nuclear cooperation agreement worth pursuing on its own terms. Read together, the two episodes ask the same question from opposite ends: is the Abraham Accords still a peace process, or has it become something else — a membership test for a coalition whose founding logic increasingly resembles alliance-building more than reconciliation?

A joining that cost little, and meant more than it cost

It is worth sitting with how unremarkable Kazakhstan’s accession was, diplomatically speaking. Astana was not being asked to recognize a state it did not recognize, or to open an embassy where none existed. Tokayev’s government has been on record as sympathetic to Israel since before most of the Accords’ architects were in office — his was the first Central Asian government to condemn the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, at a moment when several of Kazakhstan’s own regional peers offered more equivocal statements. The Kazakh foreign ministry’s own framing of the move was correspondingly modest: accession was, in its words, “a natural and logical continuation of Kazakhstan’s foreign policy course — grounded in dialogue, mutual respect, and regional stability.” Nothing there strains credulity.

And yet modest is not the same as inconsequential. Andrew D’Anieri of the Atlantic Council read the move as “a smart pragmatic step to get positive attention from Washington,” and it is difficult to see it otherwise: the announcement landed during a Trump-hosted Central Asia summit that also produced mineral and trade agreements, and Kazakhstan — a state whose foreign policy has long been organized around a doctrine of balancing Russian, Chinese, and Western interests rather than aligning fully with any one of them — had every reason to bank the goodwill an easy accession could buy. Joseph Epstein, writing for the Atlantic Council’s MENASource within a day of the announcement, went further, arguing that critics who dismissed the Central Asian expansion as “largely symbolic” were missing what the symbolism was doing: transforming the Accords, in his phrase, into “a pro-US coalition of moderate Muslim countries devoted to tolerance and prosperity” — a coalition whose value lies less in any single member’s relationship with Israel than in the aggregate signal of alignment with Washington that accession now sends.

That is the pivot worth naming plainly. The Abraham Accords were conceived, and are still popularly understood, as an instrument for resolving the specific estrangement between Israel and its Muslim-majority neighbors. Kazakhstan’s accession did not resolve any estrangement, because none existed to resolve. What it did was extend the Accords’ membership logic — sign here, gain there — into a country whose relationship to the conflict the Accords were built to address is essentially nil. Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan are reportedly weighing the same move. If Central Asia’s own accession wave continues, the Accords will have quietly completed a transformation from a regional peace framework into something closer to a diplomatic bloc: a set of states signaling compatibility with a particular Washington-organized order, for which normalization with Israel is now more credential than cause.

Where the logic runs into resistance

Saudi Arabia is where that credentialing logic meets its limit, and the contrast is instructive precisely because Riyadh’s position is the mirror image of Astana’s. Where Kazakhstan had nothing to lose by joining, Saudi Arabia has staked real domestic and regional legitimacy on not joining without first securing a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood — a position the kingdom has held publicly and consistently since the Accords’ founding round in 2020, through multiple rounds of quiet negotiation that reportedly came close to a deal before the war in Gaza reset the terms of what Saudi public opinion, and the Kingdom’s own regional standing, could absorb.

Into that standoff came a nuclear cooperation agreement negotiated on its own separate track. On 22 July 2026, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed an agreement permitting American partnership in developing Saudi Arabia’s civil nuclear energy program — a deal that, notably, leaves open a pathway to domestic uranium enrichment even as President Trump insisted publicly that “there will be no enrichment of material!” The following day, Trump announced a condition that had not been part of the signed agreement itself: the nuclear deal, he said, would only proceed if Saudi Arabia joined the Abraham Accords. An administration official later confirmed the position was firm and unchanged. On 25 August 2026, the agreement was transmitted to Congress regardless — starting a statutory clock of ninety days of continuous session for congressional review — with the Abraham Accords contingency still attached as a matter of stated presidential intent rather than treaty text.

The sequencing here matters more than it might first appear. A nuclear cooperation agreement is not, in the ordinary run of diplomacy, made contingent on an unrelated normalization decision after the fact; the two tracks were evidently meant to be separable, and the retroactive linkage looks less like statecraft than leverage — an attempt to convert an agreement Riyadh already wanted into pressure toward an accession Riyadh has, for five years and across two Israeli governments and one devastating war, declined to make on the terms offered. Whether that leverage succeeds is a live and genuinely uncertain question; what is not uncertain is what the attempt reveals about how the Accords are now being used. Kazakhstan shows a framework absorbing a member for whom accession costs nothing and buys real goodwill. Saudi Arabia shows the same framework being wielded as inducement — arguably coercion — against a state for whom accession would cost a great deal, in a bid whose success is far from assured given how publicly and repeatedly Riyadh has tied its own position to Palestinian statehood.

A framework doing two different jobs

Put the two episodes side by side and a shape emerges that neither one shows alone. In Central Asia, the Accords function as a low-cost badge of alignment — a way for states with no history of conflict with Israel to signal partnership with Washington, at a moment when great-power competition in the region makes such signals valuable to send and to receive. In the Gulf, the same framework is being deployed as a bargaining chip in a negotiation over sovereign technology and regional legitimacy, attached to an agreement that had nothing to do with Israeli-Arab relations until a presidential announcement made it so. These are not two applications of one consistent idea. They are two different instruments wearing the same name — and the difference between them is not a matter of geography so much as of what “joining” is actually asking a state to give up.

For GDCI’s own purposes — tracking the mechanisms through which dialogue frameworks are built, sustained, and sometimes repurposed — this divergence is the more durable story than either accession taken individually. A framework that can expand costlessly into Central Asia while being used as leverage against Gulf holdouts is a framework whose institutional identity is still being negotiated in real time, nearly six years after its founding. Whether it settles into a genuine, if uneven, peace architecture, or hardens into something closer to a loyalty test administered by its principal sponsor, is not yet decided. It may not be decided by any single accession, Saudi or otherwise, but by the accumulation of cases like these two — each one quietly setting precedent for what the next state is understood to be agreeing to when it signs.

The question this essay opened with, then, is not really about geography at all, though it is worth returning to it as a geography: a framework born to resolve a conflict a few hundred miles wide has now been extended, and separately weaponized, across a continent it was never designed to reach. What kind of instrument does that make it? The honest answer, for now, is that it is still becoming one thing or the other — and the states weighing whether to join, from Tashkent to Riyadh, are each being asked to answer a slightly different question than the one the Accords were originally built to pose.

Sources: Joseph Epstein, “Kazakhstan joins the Abraham Accords — and redefines the geography of peace,” Atlantic Council MENASource, 7 November 2025 (atlanticcouncil.org); Frud Bezhan and Reid Standish, “Why Is Kazakhstan Joining the Abraham Accords?,” RFE/RL, 7 November 2025 (rferl.org); “Trump administration sends Saudi nuclear deal to Congress, but says still contingent on Saudi joining Abraham Accords,” ABC News, 26 August 2026 (abcnews.com).