Tom Cotton says he doesn’t think two-state solution is a priority for Saudi Arabia
‘It's not a tenable situation for Israel to accept and frankly, I'm not sure it's one that Saudi Arabia would really insist upon itself’ as part of a normalization agreement, Sen. Tom Cotton said

MEAD
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) speaks at the MEAD summit, Sept. 9, 2024.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) on Monday downplayed the need for progress toward a two-state solution as a prerequisite for a widely sought-after normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Despite long-running public reporting that Saudi Arabia has demanded a concrete pathway to a two-state solution as a condition of normalizing relations with Israel, Cotton, who is a potential contender for a top national security post in a second Trump administration, called the Biden administration’s push for two states unacceptable for Israel and unhelpful for the Arab world.
“It’s not a tenable situation for Israel to accept, and frankly, I’m not sure it’s one that Saudi Arabia would really insist upon itself,” Cotton said at the inaugural MEAD Summit in Washington, D.C. “They don’t view that — as far as I can tell — as the critical issue for them in the region. The critical issue, as it is for almost every nation, is Iran and Iran’s predatory behavior.”
He also said that providing any “irreversible timeline for a two-state solution,” as has been discussed, would only cause the leadership in Gaza and “Judea and Samaria,” whether it be Hamas, Fatah or another faction, “to be more intransigent, to make more demands and be more violent.”
Cotton strongly backed the prospect of a normalization agreement, describing Saudi Arabia as a critical and reliable partner that is “key to our regional alliance structure against Iran,” which has made significant progress in recent years.
He defended the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy, largely brushing off the former president’s intemperate and unpredictable actions on the world stage, saying, “You may not like his methods, you may not like his tweets, but in the end, we largely had peaceful and stable relations.”
The Arkansas senator said the U.S. should pursue a renewed maximum-pressure sanctions campaign and new sanctions, with the goal of stopping all illicit oil shipments from Iran. He also called for a more aggressive approach to the Houthis’ continuing attacks on U.S. military personnel in the Red Sea.
Cotton questioned whether a Biden or Harris administration would actually respond forcefully or substantively to an Iranian nuclear weapon and speculated that a Harris administration could move toward unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state.
“I worry that ultimately someone like Harris in office, an instrument of the far-left of the Democratic Party — you can see what’s happened with Spain and Norway and Ireland, and just unilaterally trying to recognize a nation in those places,” he said, referring to Gaza and the West Bank.