WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said he expected an expansion of the Abraham Accords soon and hopes Riyadh will join the pact that normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and some Arab states.

Saudi Arabia is expected to sign a pact with the United States when Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman visits the White House next month, the Financial Times reported on Friday.

“I hope to see Saudi Arabia go in, and I hope to see others go in. I think when Saudi Arabia goes in, everybody goes in,” Trump said in an interview broadcast on Friday on Fox Business Network.

Trump said he had had “some very good conversations” as recently as Wednesday with states that have indicated their willingness to join the accords.

Upcoming MBS visit may yield US-Saudi defence pact, reports Financial Times

“I think that they’re going to all go in very soon,” Trump said in the interview, which was recorded on Thursday.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the accords in 2020 during Trump’s first term in the White House, breaking a longstanding taboo to become the first Arab states to recognize Israel in a quarter century. Morocco and Sudan followed suit.

Trump, who convened Muslim and European leaders in Egypt to discuss the future of the Gaza Strip on Monday, has presented his plan to end the war in Gaza as the catalyst for a wider regional peace settlement.

He said then that more countries would join the Abraham Accords initiative and even floated the idea of a peace deal between arch Middle East enemies Iran and Israel, telling the Israeli parliament he thought Iran wanted one: “Wouldn’t it be nice?”

Defence pact with Riyadh

Meanwhile, according to the Financial Times, a senior Trump administration official said there were “discussions about signing something when the crown prince comes, but the details are in flux”.

The newspaper reported the deal may be a defence agreement, along the lines of a recent US-Qatar pact that pledged to treat any armed attack on Qatar as a threat to the United States.

The US deal with Doha came after Israel last month attempted to kill leaders of Hamas with an air strike on its capital.

Riyadh also recently entered into a Nato-style security pact with Pakistan. Although the details remain sketchy, the accord envisions an attack on one partner as an attack on both.

The US State Department told the FT that defence cooperation with the kingdom was a “strong bedrock of our regional strategy”, but declined to comment on details of the potential deal.

The US State Department, the White House and the Saudi government did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the FT report.

Saudi Arabia has long sought guarantees similar to the Qatar deal as part of Washington’s efforts to normalise relations between Riyadh and Israel.

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2025