The story of the Accords in 2025 and 2026 is one of contrasts: quiet, steady deepening among the countries already inside the tent, paired with a very public and increasingly tense standoff over the one country whose signature would transform the entire architecture — Saudi Arabia.

The Foundations Are Holding

Diplomatic, trade, tourism, and security relationships between Israel and its original Accords partners have not merely survived the turbulence of the past three years — they have grown. Despite the wars that followed the October 7, 2023 attacks and the Israel-Iran conflict of 2025, trade between Israel and its Arab partners was higher in 2025 than it was the year before. Officials on both sides describe the relationship as having moved past the “honeymoon” stage of 2020 into a more mature, functional partnership built on shared economic and security interests rather than headline-grabbing signing ceremonies.

Security Cooperation Deepens

Much of the momentum in 2026 has shifted from new memberships to hard security integration. In January, U.S. Central Command stood up a new Middle East Air Defense Combined Defense Operations Cell, designed to knit together the air-defense capabilities of regional partners into a more coordinated shield — a direct response to the missile and drone threats that have repeatedly rattled the region since the Iran war. Morocco and Israel, meanwhile, signed a joint military work plan for 2026, while defense sales and intelligence-sharing arrangements with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco have continued largely out of the public eye.

Kazakhstan: The First New Member of Trump’s Second Term

The single clearest expansion win for the administration came not from the Middle East at all, but from Central Asia. On November 6, 2025, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced Kazakhstan’s accession to the Abraham Accords during a Washington visit that coincided with the C5+1 summit of Central Asian leaders, joining a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to seal the arrangement. Trump hailed it as the “first Country of my Second Term to join the Abraham Accords,” framing it as proof the initiative could expand well beyond the Arab world.

Kazakhstan’s move carried more symbolic than substantive weight — Astana has maintained full diplomatic relations with Israel since 1992 — but analysts noted it positioned the oil-rich, Muslim-majority nation as a bridge between the Islamic world and the West, while deepening its technology and agricultural ties with Israeli firms. Notably, Tokayev traveled to Moscow just days later to sign a new strategic partnership with Vladimir Putin, underscoring Kazakhstan’s careful balancing act between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing.

Somaliland’s Historic Recognition

In a separate but related development, Israel became the first country in the world to formally recognize Somaliland in December 2025, opening the door for the breakaway territory to eventually seek its own place within the Accords framework — a move that added a new, if unconventional, front to the normalization drive.

Saudi Arabia: The Prize That Keeps Slipping Away

No single relationship carries more weight for the future of the Accords than the one between Washington, Riyadh, and Jerusalem — and none has proven more stubbornly unresolved. Saudi Arabia remains the linchpin the Trump administration has chased since its first term, and the kingdom’s inclusion is widely seen as the move that would trigger a cascade of further normalizations across the Muslim world.

In July 2026, the United States and Saudi Arabia signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement — a so-called “123 Agreement” that would allow American companies to build AP1000 reactors inside the kingdom as part of a decades-long, multibillion-dollar energy partnership. But almost immediately, Trump attached a political price tag to the deal: normalization with Israel through the Abraham Accords. On August 25, 2026, Trump formally submitted the nuclear agreement to Congress for the mandatory 90-day review required under the Atomic Energy Act, while a senior administration official reiterated that “the president’s position has not changed” — the pact will only take effect if Riyadh joins the Accords.

The linkage has drawn sharp scrutiny in Washington. Nonproliferation experts have criticized the agreement for not barring Saudi Arabia from enriching uranium or reprocessing nuclear waste — safeguards the UAE accepted in its own 2009 civil nuclear deal, often referred to as the “gold standard.” Some lawmakers, including Rep. Brad Sherman, have pushed legislation requiring affirmative congressional approval before any U.S.-Saudi nuclear pact can take effect, warning of proliferation risks in an already volatile region.

A Parallel Alliance Emerges: The Mecca Agreement

While Washington has been pressing Riyadh toward Jerusalem, Saudi Arabia has simultaneously been building an entirely different kind of security architecture — one that pointedly does not include Israel. On August 7, 2026, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, a mutual-defense pact stipulating that an armed attack on any one signatory would be treated as an attack on all three — language explicitly modeled on NATO-style collective security.

The trilateral pact builds on a bilateral Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed in September 2025, and arrives amid heightened regional anxiety following Iranian drone strikes on Saudi territory during the 2026 Iran war. Together, the three nations field nearly 1.4 million active-duty personnel and combined annual defense budgets exceeding $124 billion, according to the Global Firepower Index. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said Ankara wants the pact to grow further, and Syria is reportedly exploring membership — raising the prospect of an expanding, Israel-free security bloc running in parallel to, and potentially in tension with, the U.S.-led Accords framework.

Syria, Lebanon, and the Slow Road Beyond the Gulf

Elsewhere, the picture is one of cautious probing rather than breakthrough. Talks have continued with Syria’s post-Assad government under Ahmed al-Sharaa and with Lebanon, including a U.S.-brokered framework agreement reached in June 2026 aimed at curbing Hezbollah’s influence within the Lebanese state. Yet full Abraham Accords membership for either country remains a distant prospect, constrained by fragile domestic politics and lingering mistrust. Further afield, nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia continue to tie any normalization to tangible progress on the Palestinian question, a condition that has shown little sign of being met.

The Bottom Line

Taken together, the picture as of late August 2026 is one of a framework that is simultaneously succeeding and stalling. The original Accords are holding and deepening in the areas that matter most in practice — trade, tourism, and above all security cooperation — even as the headline goal of dramatic expansion has slowed to a crawl. The Trump administration is now betting its most valuable diplomatic chip, a multibillion-dollar Saudi nuclear partnership, on forcing the issue. Whether that gamble succeeds may depend less on Washington’s leverage than on events far outside its control — chiefly, whether credible movement on Palestinian statehood ever materializes, and whether the Mecca Agreement hardens into a genuine alternative to the American-led order or remains, as Pakistani officials insist, a “purely defensive” arrangement open to all.

For now, the region is doing what it has often done best: hedging. Gulf and South Asian capitals are keeping one hand extended toward Washington and Jerusalem, and the other firmly wrapped around each other.