Pakistan must manage its new three-way defense agreement with Turkey and Saudi Arabia to avoid upsetting other Middle East actors like Iran and the UAE.

Many recent reports have indicated that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan are increasingly serious about establishing a trilateral security framework centered on the Saudi-Pakistani Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA), signed in September 2025. Modeled loosely on collective-defense principles, the SMDA commits each party to treat an attack on the other as an attack on the rest, while remaining deliberately ambiguous about automatic military responses and the nuclear dimension.

What Is the Pakistani-Saudi-Turkish Trilateral Pact?

Ankara’s possible accession would signal a serious effort to recalibrate regional security at a moment of heightened geopolitical uncertainty, when Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan are increasingly concerned about a range of threats along their borders. Discussions about Turkey’s entry into this SMDA reflect a broader shift toward layered, flexible security architectures.

The prospective framework also carries distinct commercial and industrial logic. Modern security cooperation in the region is increasingly expressed through procurement flows, co-production agreements, logistics access, and financing structures rather than headline treaty clauses alone.

In this context, Pakistan’s nuclear capability and well-trained military provide a powerful deterrence perception, Saudi Arabia supplies capital and political weight, and Turkey contributes a mature defense industry and operationally experienced armed forces. Any tangible progress is therefore likely to appear first in quiet, measurable signals (joint exercises, export-credit mechanisms, industrial partnerships, etc.) well before dramatic declarations of collective defense.

Politically, the discussions unfold amid rapidly shifting regional alignments. Once-adversarial relationships between Turkey and Saudi Arabia have warmed since 2021, driven by converging interests in Syria, Sudan, and the wider Middle East, even as the Saudi-UAE relationship is fracturing.

Officials in Ankara have growing concerns about Israel’s borderless aggression, particularly in Syria, and see a growing Israeli threat to Turkey’s own geopolitical, economic, and security interests. Ankara has framed the talks as part of a wider vision for regional cooperation based on trust and strategic autonomy, not bloc politics. For Turkey, participation would expand leverage and optionality, complementing, but not replacing, its NATO membership while deepening defense-industrial ties with Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members and Pakistan.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, seems driven by a desire to broaden its security partnerships, hedging against the unpredictability of US commitments while still maintaining Washington as a central, but no longer exclusive, guarantor. Israel’s unprecedented attack on Qatar last September has undeniably factored into Riyadh’s calculation, underscoring the risks of overreliance on the United States for security, especially given that Washington did not shield Doha from Israel’s act of international aggression.

Pakistan’s calculus is more transactional, treating defense cooperation as a channel for arms sales, joint production, training, and financing arrangements.

“Pakistan already has bilateral defense relationships with both Riyadh and Ankara; the added value of a trilateral pact is institutionalization, such as standing mechanisms, combined resourcing, etc., not new friends. From Pakistan’s perspective, a Saudi-Turkey-Pakistan defense arrangement would primarily fill coordination and resilience gaps rather than replace existing bilateral ties,” Dr. Arhama Siddiqa, ​research fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad, told this author.

In the wake of the May 2025 conflict with India and amid escalating tensions along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, officials in Islamabad view a trilateral arrangement with Riyadh and Ankara as a potential means to strengthen Pakistan’s security.

“From Islamabad’s view, a trilateral pact plugs two gaps bilateral ties cannot. These are political-strategic signaling and coalition deterrence. Pakistan already has military capability against India, but Saudi financial-political backing and Turkish defense-industrial depth strengthen perceived resolve after May 2025, not raw force,” noted Dr. Gokhan Ereli, an Ankara-based independent researcher, in an interview with this author.

“On the Afghan frontier, the value lies less in direct intervention and more in intelligence coordination, funding resilience, and diplomatic insulation against isolation narratives. So, the frontier logic is not about intervention or alliance warfare. It is about reducing pressure, widening Pakistan’s margin for error and making sure crises on the Afghan border do not translate into international isolation on top of domestic insecurity,” he added.

Taken together, the emerging Turkish-Pakistani-Saudi dialogue is best understood not as the birth of a rigid alliance, but as an adaptive response to a fragmented, multipolar security environment. It illustrates how Middle Eastern security is evolving into a portfolio of overlapping arrangements that blend diplomacy, deterrence, and dealmaking.

“The pact is less about ideology and more about risk pooling in an unstable multipolar order,” explained Dr. Ereli.

Whether this formal trilateral pact ultimately materializes remains to be seen. Nonetheless, the enthusiasm itself signals a gradual but consequential shift away from singular security underwriters and toward interest-driven, flexible cooperation that will increasingly shape regional risk calculations and strategic behavior.

China Watches Pakistan Closely

Mindful of Beijing’s strong alliance with Islamabad and vested interests in Pakistan, it is necessary to consider China’s stakes. Put simply, China would most likely regard this security framework between these Sunni Muslim countries as acceptable, provided it reinforces Pakistan’s internal stability and avoids exacerbating India-Pakistan tensions in ways that could disrupt regional connectivity or jeopardize Chinese economic interests.

From Beijing’s perspective, the central concern would be whether the pact helps preserve a predictable security environment conducive to long-term infrastructure, trade, and investment initiatives, rather than introducing new strategic volatility. As long as the arrangement does not increase the risk of escalation between South Asia’s rival powers or invite external alignments hostile to Chinese interests, it would remain within the bounds of tolerability.

Crucially, China would be more comfortable if the pact were framed as pragmatic and defense-industrial—focused on capacity building, coordination, or material cooperation—rather than ideological or explicitly geopolitical. So long as it remains non-anti-Beijing and narrowly instrumental, China would have little incentive to oppose it.

It is reasonable to conclude that one of Pakistan’s motivations for deepening security ties with Saudi Arabia and Turkey is to achieve greater autonomy from China. In particular, Islamabad aims to diversify its defense procurement, seeking to acquire military equipment from countries beyond China, on which it currently relies for much of its defense imports.

“During the recent conflict with India in May 2025, many Chinese armaments and platforms did not perform as expected. Hence, Pakistan believes that by engaging in this defense agreement, it can secure funding to acquire advanced Western and US platforms, as well as technological expertise, primarily in the area of armed and surveillance drones from Turkey,” geopolitical analyst Manish Rai told this author.

This push for diversification should not be mistaken for strategic decoupling from China. Rather, it reflects Islamabad’s desire to reduce single-supplier vulnerability while remaining committed to its extremely close alliance with Beijing.

Pakistan’s Place in the Middle East’s Evolving Order

Whether Pakistan’s participation in this alliance with Saudi Arabia and Turkey serves to bolster Islamabad’s standing in the Middle East or leaves it more constrained from the standpoint of strategic flexibility while complicating the South Asian country’s relationships with other powers in the neighborhood, such as Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), remains an open question.

Dr. Salma Malik, an associate professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, believes that this arrangement could complicate Pakistan’s relationships in the neighborhood. She told this author that Islamabad would be set to “remain an outsider in the middle eastern security dynamics, and at best would play a policing role only, which may also cost Pakistan its integrity and goodwill with some of its Middle Eastern friends.”

Further echoing such concerns, Rai explained that the trilateral framework risks creating perceptions of Pakistan becoming a Saudi- and Turkish-employed “mercenary” that serves to advance Riyadh and Ankara’s own national interests in the Middle East.

“Furthermore, this security framework will compel Pakistan to take a position within the region, potentially leading to a decline in relations with other regional states,” he told this author, backing up that point by indicating a recent case of Abu Dhabi’s disapproval of Islamabad’s statement of support for Riyadh’s strikes against the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council in Yemen.

The strains with the UAE were further underscored in Pakistan’s economic and aviation dealings. In August 2025, Islamabad reached an agreement with the UAE to privatize and manage Islamabad airport, only for the deal to collapse recently after Abu Dhabi lost interest and failed to secure a local partner. Although the UAE did not frame its withdrawal in political terms, the timing reflected the growing divergence in regional alignments.

As Pakistan deepens its defense and strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi has been moving closer to New Delhi, signing new defense and trade agreements with India. The aborted airport deal illustrates how Islamabad’s pivot toward Riyadh is beginning to complicate its historical ties with the UAE, Pakistan’s longtime partner in economic, commercial, and aviation sectors, as the alliance between Saudi Arabia and the UAE experiences major problems.

Iran is likely to view the emergence of a trilateral framework through the lens of its long-standing fear of strategic encirclement, which could heighten sensitivities in Tehran about any arrangement that appears to consolidate regional alignments around its periphery. From the Islamic Republic’s perspective, such cooperation among neighboring states may be interpreted as reinforcing a sense of isolation or containment, even if it is not explicitly directed at Iran.

However, the degree of Iranian concern is not predetermined. All three participating countries are Sunni-majority states that, in recent years, have improved diplomatic relations with Tehran, signaling an interest in de-escalation rather than confrontation. These improved ties, coupled with sustained efforts to reassure Iran and clarify the limited scope, could significantly temper Tehran’s apprehensions and reduce the likelihood of a sharply negative reaction.

Viewed from Islamabad, the prospective trilateral framework is largely about strategic recalibration under acute pressure. Pakistan faces a crowded threat environment shaped by the May 2025 conflict with India, ongoing tensions with the Taliban, and economic constraints that limit fully autonomous defense planning. Institutionalized cooperation with Riyadh and Ankara offers a way to expand strategic flexibility.

Pakistan’s role is not that of a junior partner, but a pivotal actor whose military experience, deterrence credibility, and geography anchor the framework. Its value lies in signaling and resilience, enabled by Saudi political backing, Turkish defense-industrial support, and coordinated crisis mechanisms. All this buys Islamabad time, options, and leverage.

At the same time, Pakistan must avoid aggravating tensions with regional actors outside this trilateral framework, such as the UAE or Iran, or becoming trapped in regional rivalries. If managed prudently, this arrangement with Riyadh and Ankara could enhance Islamabad’s autonomy, diversify defense partnerships, and reinforce Pakistan’s standing as a central player in West Asia’s evolving security order.

About the Author: Giorgio Cafiero

Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO of Gulf State Analytics, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University, and an adjunct fellow at the American Security Project. He is a frequent contributor to Al Jazeera, Gulf International Forum, The New Arab, Responsible Statecraft, Stimson Center, and Amwaj.Media. Throughout his career, Mr. Cafiero has consulted with many public and private-sector entities, briefed diplomats from various countries on Gulf affairs, and worked as a subject-matter expert for multinational law firms. Mr. Cafiero holds an MA in International Relations from the University of San Diego. Find him on X:@GiorgioCafiero.

Image: Habibullah Qureshi / Shutterstock.com.

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