Trump Links Iran Nuclear Deal to Abraham Accords as Oil Prices Drop and Dollar Debate Heats Up

The Trump administration is pressing negotiators in the Iran nuclear talks to sign onto the Abraham Accords as part of any final agreement, while oil markets signal their own verdict on the odds of a deal and commentators warn of a dollar reckoning if Iran pivots to the Chinese yuan.

By Moemedi Michael Poncanamena5-minute read25 May 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

On May 25, 2026, President Donald Trump declared that US-Iran negotiations were "progressing smoothly" and issued what his administration framed as a mandatory request: any country sitting at the nuclear negotiating table should sign the Abraham Accords immediately, with the offer extended to Tehran itself if a deal is struck. The statement, reported via Truth Social and picked up by Cointelegraph, represented the sharpest US diplomatic condition attached yet to what has become the most consequential diplomatic negotiation of the current administration. One day earlier, on May 24, oil markets delivered their own verdict: prices fell nearly 5 percent to a two-week low as traders priced in an elevated probability of a successful outcome.

The linkage between a nuclear agreement and the normalisation of Arab-Israeli relations is not new in form, but its explicit bundling — with the word "mandatorily" attached — marks a departure in tone from the Biden-era approach, which kept the Accords and the nuclear file on separate tracks. Whether that tonal shift constitutes leverage or overreach depends on who you ask inside the room, and the sources do not yet disclose the internal Iranian response.

Oil Markets Read the Room

The crude price reaction on May 24 provided a clean, data-based signal of what traders think is happening. Brent and WTI both fell by approximately 5 percent, reaching their lowest levels in two weeks, according to market reporting carried by Cointelegraph and consistent with broader commodity wire coverage of the same session. That is not a marginal move. It suggests that a meaningful portion of the market believes Iranian supply could return to global markets relatively soon — or that the geopolitical risk premium baked into prices over the past three years is beginning to compress.

The counterargument, often raised by Gulf-state analysts and some within OPEC+ briefings reported by regional wire services, is that a deal does not automatically translate into production increases. Iranian oil output has already recovered substantially under the informal sanctions easing of recent months. A formal agreement would remove the remaining insurance and banking obstacles, but the capacity to ramp up quickly — and the political willingness of Riyadh and Moscow to accommodate a new Iranian supplier in an already oversupplied market — is not guaranteed. The sources do not yet resolve whether oil traders are correct to be optimistic or whether they are pricing hope over capacity.

The Dollar Question

Complicating the picture is a separate development that intersects with the nuclear talks in ways the Trump administration has not publicly addressed. Robert Kiyosaki — the Rich Dad Poor Dad author and frequent commentator on dollar-related financial matters — flagged on May 25 what he called the biggest development in world financial history: Iran has begun accepting Chinese yuan for oil payments, moving away from dollar-denominated settlement. Cointoselegraph carried Kiyosaki's characterisation of this shift on May 25.

The framing is polemical in Kiyosaki's register, but the underlying structural point is real and has been documented in broader financial reporting over the past two years. Iran and China have deepened energy trade ties under the auspices of a broader strategic partnership, and yuan-denominated oil contracts are a documented feature of that relationship. Whether Iran is abandoning the dollar entirely or diversifying its settlement currencies is a distinction the sources do not fully clarify. But the direction of travel — away from dollar exclusivity in at least one bilateral energy relationship — is not in dispute.

The dollar's reserve currency status does not turn on a single country's bilateral choices. But each such instance adds a data point to an argument that has been building quietly in central bank reserve data for a decade: the dollar's share of global reserves has declined from roughly 71 percent in 1999 to under 58 percent in recent years, a trend that accelerates in periods of US financial weaponisation of the sanctions regime. A restored Iran, rejoining global energy markets but settling in yuan with its largest trading partner, is not an existential threat to that architecture — but it is a structural irritant that the Treasury Department tracks closely.

The Abraham Accords Gambit

Trump's insistence that deal-adjacent countries sign the Abraham Accords before or alongside a nuclear agreement is a deliberate attempt to consolidate the diplomatic architecture of his first-term normalisation achievements. The Accords, signed in 2020 between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, were the centrepiece of a Gulf engagement strategy that the Biden administration never substantially expanded and occasionally appeared to treat as a settled baseline rather than a platform.

Extending the offer to Iran is geopolitically provocative. Tehran has historically viewed the Accords as a US-driven effort to marginalise it regionally — and nothing in the source material suggests that Iranian negotiators have softened that position. The condition may be designed less as a realistic near-term ask and more as a pressure signal: it tells Gulf Arab states that the price of Washington's goodwill is explicit alignment, and it tells Israel that the administration is tying the nuclear file to a broader normalisation matrix in which Tel Aviv has a stake.

The risk for Washington is that bundling too many conditions onto a deal already viewed as politically delicate in Tehran makes an agreement harder to close. The Iranian negotiating position has consistently required that sanctions relief be verifiable and staged — a demand that sits uneasily alongside simultaneous demands for regional diplomatic commitments.

What Remains Open

The sources do not disclose the current state of Iranian internal deliberations, the specific sanctions relief package on the table, or whether the yuan-for-oil arrangements are a settled bilateral infrastructure or a contingency being explored alongside dollar settlement options. The oil price move is consistent with a deal but does not confirm one. Trump's framing of "progressing smoothly" is the kind of language administrations use both when they mean it and when they are managing expectations.

The structural frame is clear enough: this is a negotiation about nuclear proliferation, regional influence, oil supply, and the architecture of dollar dominance, all compressed into a single diplomatic process. The market has priced optimism. The administration has priced the Abraham Accords into the ask. What happens inside the room between now and whenever the next formal round is announced will determine whether those prices hold.

This publication tracked the Iran-nuclear and oil-market developments from Cointelegraph and Disclose.tv as the primary wire inputs, with Kiyosaki's commentary cited as a public commentator's framing rather than independent reporting.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://t.me/Cointelegraph/26942
https://t.me/Cointelegraph/26944
https://t.me/Cointelegraph/26943
https://t.me/disclosetv/18451
https://x.com/disclosetv/status/1924187460129832987