Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkiye Sign Mutual Defence Pact
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- Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkiye signed a mutual defence agreement in Mecca pledging that an armed attack on any one will be treated as an attack against all three — a provision reminiscent of NATO's Article 5, though full terms have not been released.
- The Trump administration offered no official response in the hours after the pact was signed, a muted reaction analysts say underscores the multilayered and still-emerging implications for US strategy.
- The pact builds on a September 2025 Saudi-Pakistan mutual defence deal reached days after Israel struck Doha, Qatar — a sequence that highlighted concerns about Washington's ability to restrain its closest Middle Eastern ally.
- Nawaf Obaid of King's College London called the deal the clearest sign yet of a shift away from an "American-designed regional security order," arguing the US-Iran war exposed the vulnerability of US basing in the Gulf by forcing repositioning of substantial combat forces.
- Sina Toosi of the Centre for International Policy said the pact likely sets back Arab-Israeli normalization under the Abraham Accords, noting that three Muslim powers are now seeking greater strategic autonomy rather than the regional integration Washington had hoped to accelerate.
- Asli Aydintasbas of the Brookings Institution and Burcu Ozcelik of RUSI countered that the pact aligns with US goals for burden-sharing among allies, consistent with Trump's demands for higher NATO spending and regional solutions — a view the article presents as the likely US interpretation.
- The three signatories bring distinct capabilities to the arrangement — Turkiye's second-largest NATO army, Saudi Arabia's financial weight, and Pakistan's status as the only nuclear-armed signatory — though all three stressed the pact supplements, rather than supplants, their other alliances.
Why it matters: The pact tests whether Trump can sustain a US-anchored Middle East architecture — built around the Abraham Accords and roughly 50,000 US troops across 19 regional sites — while simultaneously pushing allies to shoulder more security costs. Saudi Arabia, already absorbing Iranian retaliatory and Houthi strikes since the February 28 US-Israeli war began, now has a nuclear-armed mutual defence backer, which complicates Washington's leverage on Gulf security policy and normalization timelines.
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