After a series of American and Israeli military successes in the Iran war, starting with the killing of the Supreme Leader, President Donald Trump agreed to a ceasefire with the Islamic regime on 8 April. This was supposed to be a two-week arrangement allowing time for negotiations to reach a peace agreement that formally ended the conflict. Six weeks later, the war remains in a state of suspended animation. On Saturday, Trump announced that a long-term ceasefire was close to agreement. Overnight, however, the American military struck targets in Southern Iran. The US has clearly struggled to convert tactical military gains into strategic political achievements, yet now Trump has introduced new and even more complicated dimensions to the negotiations.

It was reported over the weekend that during a call with the rulers of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, Trump said that upon his reaching a deal with Iran, he “expects” the governments which have not normalized relations with Israel to do so. This, naturally, did not go down well. “There was silence on the line, and Trump joked and asked if they are still there,” one US official said.

For some of the countries on the call, this is hardly a problem. Bahrain and the UAE normalized relations with Israel in 2020 via Trump’s Abraham Accords initiative, and Egypt and Jordan recognized Israel decades ago. The comments were instead directed at Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which have never had any official contact with Israel, as well as Qatar and Turkey, which have had various kinds of diplomatic relations with Israel but have since severed them.

On Monday, Trump went public with this demand in a rambling 500-word Truth Social post. “[I]t should be mandatory that all of these Countries, at a minimum, simultaneously sign onto the Abraham Accords,” he wrote. It “should start with the immediate signing by Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” he went on, adding menacingly: “If they don’t… it shows bad intention.” The post concluded by saying “it would be an Honor” to have the Iranian regime join, too.

The problem is that this is simply unworkable. Iran joining the Abraham Accords is a non-starter: a central goal in the ideology of the Islamic Republic is to destroy the Jewish state, and that will never change. The situation is hardly any better with Pakistan, which is also an Islamic republic and a similar source of jihadist ideology and terrorism. Turkey’s Islamist leadership has been more flexible in the past regarding relations with Israel, while Qatar and Saudi Arabia already cooperate quietly with the Jewish state. But normalization looks impossible given the current inflamed mood in the region after the Gaza war. This factor applies to Egypt and Jordan as well, no matter that joining the Abraham Accords would be a cosmetic step.

Even without these structural and contingent difficulties, however, the idea of doing this now and tying it to the US-Iran negotiations is preposterous while the two nations remain in a stalemate. Tehran is refusing to budge on the nuclear weapons issue, and the US is unwilling to try to force a change by returning to war. It is therefore unlikely that Trump can secure a deal with Iran any time soon without humiliating American concessions. It is ludicrous to believe that diverting US diplomatic energy into six new sets of negotiations with allied governments about relations with another state will do anything to help break the impasse.