The United States has presented its new nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia as a gift: reactors, technology, investment, prestige, and the radiant promise of a peaceful atomic future. Washington is forever giving gifts of this kind. Curiously, they tend to arrive fitted with surveillance equipment, political conditions, and a discreetly concealed choke chain. This is not merely a civil nuclear agreement. It is a disciplinary instrument aimed at Mohammed bin Salman — a strategic summons issued to a crown prince who has recently behaved less like an obedient client and more like the ruler of an indispensable state.

The United States has presented its new nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia as a gift: reactors, technology, investment, prestige, and the radiant promise of a peaceful atomic future. Washington is forever giving gifts of this kind. Curiously, they tend to arrive fitted with surveillance equipment, political conditions, and a discreetly concealed choke chain. This is not merely a civil nuclear agreement. It is a disciplinary instrument aimed at Mohammed bin Salman — a strategic summons issued to a crown prince who has recently behaved less like an obedient client and more like the ruler of an indispensable state.

Its message is simple: Saudi Arabia may diversify its economy, its diplomatic partners, and even its wardrobe of alliances, but it may not diversify the source of its ultimate protection. That franchise still belongs to Washington. The agreement therefore concerns nuclear energy only in the same sense that a prison contract concerns architecture. Its deeper purpose is to reconstruct American authority over a kingdom that has begun imagining life beyond the imperial security nursery. Riyadh has committed three increasingly intolerable offenses.

First, it has moved too close to Pakistan. The Saudi–Pakistani relationship is hardly new: money, soldiers, intelligence cooperation, religious patronage, and strategic ambiguity have bound the two states for decades.

First, it has moved too close to Pakistan. The Saudi–Pakistani relationship is hardly new: money, soldiers, intelligence cooperation, religious patronage, and strategic ambiguity........

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