When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stood in Mecca on August 7 to sign a joint defence pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the optics were almost jarring. This is the same Erdoğan who has spent a decade positioning himself as heir to a neo-Ottoman order, supporting political-Islamist movements that Riyadh regarded as a threat. And this is the same Saudi Arabia whose modern identity and religious legitimacy are deeply tied to its control and custodianship of Mecca and Medina after the collapse of Ottoman rule. The union was barely two days old when Yemen’s Houthis, whose truce with Riyadh had already collapsed, claimed a drone strike on Saudi Aramco’s Jazan refinery — proof that whatever this pact is, it isn’t yet a deterrent.
To understand the desperation behind this pact, you need to understand a little Islamic history. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire controlled the Hijaz—home to Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina. After World War I, the Ottoman territories were dismantled and redrawn by European powers, creating much of today’s Middle East. Modern Turkey embraced secularism, while the House of Saud emerged as custodian of the Hijaz; but the rise of Saudi Arabia and the transformation of secular Turkey into Erdoğan’s increasingly Islamist, neo-Ottoman power project have created two competing centres of influence in the Sunni Muslim world. Erdoğan invokes the Ottoman legacy and Turkish influence, while MBS seeks to position Saudi Arabia as the modern centre of the Muslim world. Pakistan’s desperation to join this pact is understandable after its stunning military defeat against India—but the real story is the desperation of two historic rivals, Riyadh and Ankara, putting old competition aside and joining hands.
So why the sudden embrace? The honest answer is that this isn’t a marriage of shared vision — it’s three parties, each in genuine trouble, pooling their weaknesses and calling it strength. Tehran, for its part, wasted no time saying as much. Iranian MP Ebrahim Rezaei, a member of its parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, wrote on X that “Saudis must know that a paper agreement with Türkiye and Pakistan will not bring them security, just as years of one-sided nursing to the Americans did not bring them security,” adding that Riyadh should “reform your policies so that you do not need to beg for security from others.” Coming from the country these three governments have implicitly organised against, the jibe lands with unusual precision.
A Pattern of Contempt and Failure
Strip away the ceremony and the underlying relationship looks less like partnership and more like a patron humiliating its client while still finding it useful. Saudi Arabia deported roughly 24,000 Pakistanis rounded up as beggars through 2025, on top of a formal warning to Islamabad, even as the two governments prepared to call each other strategic allies. That is the real texture beneath the pageantry: Pakistan as a source of cheap labour and expendable manpower, not an equal.
Pakistan’s attempt to buy relevance by mediating between Washington and Tehran collapsed just as predictably. Any serious observer could have told you Islamabad had neither the leverage over Iran nor the standing with Washington to broker anything durable — it had no cards, only geographical proximity and an eagerness to be useful to Donald Trump. Islamabad nonetheless plastered its own capital with posters celebrating a ceasefire it claimed credit for, only to watch the truce unravel within weeks as the wider Iran war reignited. It ended up looking exactly like what common sense predicted: a messenger running errands for a bigger power, mistaking the errand for a diplomatic triumph, and exposing to the whole region how little actual weight it carries.
The pact itself has already failed its two real tests, despite a Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement Riyadh and Islamabad signed as recently as September 2025. When a militant ambush killed twenty Pakistani soldiers in October 2025 and Islamabad struck back at targets inside Afghanistan, plunging into open conflict with the Taliban government in Kabul, Saudi Arabia offered mediation and nothing more — no material or military backing for its supposed ally. Then the reverse happened: as Iran rained missiles and drones on Saudi territory during the escalating regional war in 2026, Pakistan’s contribution was its foreign minister publicly reminding Tehran that a defence agreement existed. Not troops. Not aircraft. A phone call citing a clause. Whatever this arrangement is, it isn’t collective security in any meaningful sense. A pact signed with fanfare produced, in both directions, nothing more than words when it actually mattered.
The Muscle That Isn’t There
Look closely at who’s supposed to supply the actual defence in this new triangle, and the logic collapses further. In May 2025, after a terror attack in Pahalgam, India launched Operation Sindoor, striking nine terrorist camps deep inside Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir in a matter of minutes.
When Pakistan attempted retaliation, India escalated further, hitting a string of Pakistani military air bases with near-total impunity. Within days, it was Pakistan’s own military that picked up the hotline to plead for a ceasefire.
A country that had to implore for a ceasefire after its air defences were exposed and its bases struck at will is not in a position to guarantee anyone else’s security.
The economics tell the same story. Pakistan has spent the past two years inside an IMF bailout programme just to keep its economy from collapsing outright, and even that has needed constant Gulf life support. In 2026, with a $3.5 billion loan repayment to the UAE coming due and its foreign reserves under severe strain, Islamabad had to turn around and ask Saudi Arabia for fresh money — Riyadh deposited $3 billion directly into Pakistan’s central bank, money that went straight back out the door to settle what Islamabad owed Abu Dhabi. One has to wonder what does a state that has to borrow from one Gulf capital to settle its debt to another Gulf capital bring to the table if not hired foot soldiers. Add to that a resurgent militant insurgency along the Afghan border, the eight decades old freedom movement in Pakistan-occupied Balochistan intensifying, growing unrest in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir over sheer economic neglect, and the picture is of a state fighting for its own survival on three fronts internally. Whatever value Pakistan brings to this pact, it clearly isn’t credible defence — at best it is bodies and a nuclear flag that can be pointed at, at most the Houthis, nothing more.
That, ultimately, appears to be the real backdrop to Saudi Arabia’s sudden warmth toward old rival Turkey and a de facto failed state like Pakistan. Its oldest Gulf partnership is fraying — Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have gone from wartime allies in Yemen to open rivals, clashing directly over rival factions in Aden and the country’s east, which explains why the Kingdom may be attempting to hedge with whoever it can, rather than trusting a Gulf Cooperation Council that can no longer agree with itself.
Saudi Arabia in fact had made a request to Pakistan in 2015, asking for fighter jets, naval ships and ground troops for its Yemen war, but Nawaz Sharif’s government then wisely declined, mindful of Pakistan’s sectarian sensitivities and sizeable Shia population. However, a decade later, Pakistan’s economic and strategic desperation has changed the calculus, enabling Riyadh to use Pakistan’s military as a source of manpower for conflicts it may prefer not to fight directly.
Meanwhile Washington’s security umbrella looks thinner than it has in decades: Iran put missiles into Al Udeid air base in Qatar, the largest American air base in the region, in June 2026, and saturated Saudi, Emirati, and other Gulf skies with drones and missiles for weeks without a conclusive American answer — a visible marker of receding US deterrence that is pushing Gulf states into a chaotic security situation.
And Turkey arrives at this table not as a rising power but a desperate one: the Turkish lira has suffered a spectacular collapse against the dollar over the past seven years leaving Erdoğan’s Ottoman ambitions dependent on Gulf money he cannot raise at home.
Pakistan’s desperation to be part of such a pact is understandable after the bludgeoning it received from India and the unravelling of its nuclear bluff—but the pact offers no reassurance: Turkey is unlikely to materially alter the stark military asymmetry with India which is among the world’s most powerful militaries while Saudi Arabia is unlikely to shoot itself in the foot by jeopardising a strategically and economically important relationship with New Delhi for the sake of Islamabad. India is Saudi Arabia’s second-largest trading partner, with bilateral trade reaching US$41.88 billion in FY2024–25—while Pakistan’s entire annual goods exports are only around US$32 billion so you can do the maths.
Put together, this isn’t a Sunni bloc, a civilizational alliance, or a rising axis of power. It’s three governments, each cornered by a different crisis — a fraying Gulf order, a collapsing currency, a state fighting itself on three fronts — signing a document that had already failed its first real tests before the ink was dry, and one that Tehran itself is happy to dismiss as paper.
Strip away the religious and civilizational language, and what’s left is transactional to the point of bluntness. Turkey needs money it cannot print its way out of needing. Saudi Arabia needs hired soldiers and diplomatic cover as its own Gulf order fractures and Washington’s guarantee looks shakier by the month. And Pakistan, staring at an existential crisis on three internal fronts and a treasury that survives on borrowed cash, has effectively put its military up for hire. That’s not an alliance. It’s a desperate transaction dressed up as one.
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