David E. Sanger

speaker

1,917 appearances 16 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 23 Jul

David E. Sanger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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The Daily · Why Is the U.S. Building the Saudi Nuclear Program While Destroying Iran’s? · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

And the question was, how loose would those restrictions be?

Now, to be fair to President Trump, when the Biden administration was negotiating before October 7th, they were moving towards some pretty loose restrictions themselves.

So it's not clear to me that the terms would have been any tougher under President Biden.

That's right.

For President Biden, the idea of getting such a huge diplomatic breakthrough was worth taking a bit more nuclear risk.

For President Trump, the idea of getting a big business deal is worth taking a little more nuclear risk.

Well, certainly, as we've discussed, this was long brewing.

So there was some thinking, in fact, that the deal would be signed back in February.

But then the war broke out with Iran and the Saudis were angry at Washington for several reasons.

I remember having dinner with a very senior Saudi official just hours before President Trump ordered the first bombs dropped on Tehran in February.

And that official did not have much notice, if any, that the war was about to break out.

Then the Iranians took everybody by surprise by actually expanding the war to the Gulf allies and particularly hitting American bases.

And again, there was a lot of tension about whether the United States was putting enough effort into protecting Saudi airspace from these incoming missiles and drones.

So there have been a lot of points where the war in Iran has surfaced a lot of tensions between MBS and President Trump, even in the midst of a pretty solid alliance.

Right.

Certainly, Rachel, you could say that this is a way of helping solidify what's been a rocky alliance in recent times between the U.S.

and Saudi Arabia.

It establishes for 30 years a relationship that will be very profitable for the United States, presumably, and will get Saudi Arabia into the nuclear power game with some of the world's best equipment.

But the big question that's out there right now is, could Saudi Arabia exploit that technology for other purposes at some point in the future?

And that's what has so many in the region concerned.

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