Don't believe the hype: The modest reality of the Saudi-Pakistani defense pact

The Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement, signed on September 17, 2025, is a significant regional development. MEI has published several articles that provide different perspectives on the defense pact. For other analysis, please see John Calabrese’s “Silent leverage, quiet gains? China and the Saudi-Pakistan defense pact” and Naade Ali and Marvin Weinbaum’s “Pakistan’s strategic defense pact with Saudi Arabia: A new security architecture in the wider Middle East.”
 

Following the Israeli strike on Hamas officials in Doha, Qatar, in early September, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a mutual defense agreement just over a week later, on September 17. According to the Pakistani prime minister’s office, the pact stipulates that “any aggression against either country shall be consideration an aggression against both.” Officials on both sides implied that Pakistan would even use its nuclear weapons to defend the kingdom, though Pakistani officials later walked back that implied commitment. The agreement generated a wave of overheated commentary about Saudi Arabia now residing under a Pakistani nuclear umbrella and how a new strategic reality was in the offing in the Persian Gulf and South Asian regions. Analysts need to slow their roll. Extended deterrence is an extremely difficult thing to pull off. The devil is in the details, about which we know nothing. Just how Islamabad will react to the kinds of military threats Saudi Arabia actually faces remains extremely uncertain. Equally uncertain is how Riyadh, which has a significant economic relationship with India, will act during the next round of India-Pakistan military exchanges. The Saudi-Pakistani defense pact is better understood as a more modest agreement. Pakistan is always looking for a stronger relationship with Saudi Arabia for financial reasons. Saudi Arabia, in the wake of the Israeli attack on Qatar, is signaling to the United States that it has other options for security partners if Washington cannot restrain Israel from bombing other American allies.

The quick takes on the Saudi-Pakistani agreement

It is understandable that both Riyadh and Islamabad would want potential enemies to believe that Pakistan would go to the limit in defending Saudi Arabia; that is what extended deterrence is about. A Saudi official, asked about the nuclear element of the agreement, responded elliptically that the deal “encompasses all military means.” The Pakistani defense minister told a television interviewer that Pakistani capabilities “will be made available” to the Saudis. Later, however, that same official said that the nuclear element was “not on the radar.” The only official statement on the agreement, issued by the Pakistani government, did not mention a nuclear commitment.

This ambiguity did not stop some analysts from declaring that Saudi Arabia was now under Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella. Stimson Center analyst Mohammad Salami said that under the agreement “Saudi Arabia gains access to a nuclear umbrella and potentially nuclear weapons.” Riad Kahwaji, a long-time defense analyst in the Gulf, wrote bluntly that the pact “now puts Riyadh under the nuclear umbrella of Pakistan.” Respected Islamic historian and commentator Prof. Juan Cole called the agreement an “Islamic NATO” and hypothesized that Pakistan would be willing to use nuclear weapons against Israel if the latter did to Riyadh what it did to Doha (though others have been more skeptical of the nuclear implications of the deal, as I am).

Slow your roll! The complexities of extended deterrence

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have long-standing defense and security ties. Were Saudi Arabia the victim of a classic invasion, it is likely that Pakistan would do what it could to help defend the kingdom. Pakistan sent 11,000 troops to Saudi Arabia in 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and has had a military presence in the country, on and off, for decades, implementing defense and military training agreements signed in 1967 and 1982. At one point in the 1980s, 20,000 Pakistani troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia. However, a full-scale invasion of the country is hardly in the cards. The real external threat to Saudi security, and Gulf state security more generally, comes from missile and drone strikes. Iran launched such a strike on key Saudi oil installations in September 2019 and struck the American airbase in Qatar in June 2025, after the Israeli-American attack on Iran that month. The Houthis in Yemen made a number of such strikes on Saudi and Emirati targets in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Israel’s air-launched ballistic missile attack on Qatar in September 2025 was only the most recent such assault on a Gulf state.

Would Pakistan go to war against Iran, Israel, or the Houthis in response to a missile and/or drone attack on Saudi Arabia? That is highly unlikely. Pakistani military assets are devoted to their primary task of deterring and, if necessary, fighting India. Alienating Iran, an important neighbor, by responding to an Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia like the one in 2019 would open up the possibility of real tensions on Pakistan’s southwestern border. That would require at least some shifting of Pakistani military assets away from their primary threat to the east. A Pakistani attack on Israel, another nuclear power, in response to a hypothetical Israeli attack on Saudi Arabia seems even more risky and thus even less likely. Islamabad would hazard not only an Israeli response but also serious repercussions in its relationship with the United States. Stationing of Pakistani nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia, under some kind of dual-key arrangement, would subject part of the Pakistani arsenal, which is devoted to deterrence and defense against India, to possible Iranian or Israeli attack. Such a move could also create complications for Islamabad with the US. It is hard to see Pakistan taking these kinds of gambles.

A Pakistani attack on the Houthis is much less risky. However, the appetite in Islamabad to dedicate even a small amount of its military capabilities to what is a marginal area for it, far from its major security interests, would likely be limited. In 2015, when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched their military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, the kingdom asked Pakistan to join their coalition. Pakistan, albeit under a different government then, very publicly refused.

An ironclad extended deterrence commitment from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia would likely embroil Islamabad in conflicts with countries that it currently does not see as enemies and divert its military energies from the one country, India, which is most certainly its enemy. Would Pakistan take such risks in response to a one-off missile strike on Saudi Arabia? There are myriad reasons to doubt it. It certainly would not be “automatic.” The American nuclear commitment to its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies during the Cold War was directed against a Soviet Union that was already Washington’s global rival, and Western Europe was a key and direct American interest. Even with all that, the European allies always wondered if the US would come to their defense with nuclear weapons. The United Kingdom and France doubted it so much they got their own nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia has even more reason to question the reliability of the supposed Pakistani nuclear umbrella.

Similarly, would Saudi Arabia put at risk its growing economic ties with India — a major trading partner — in the event of the next border skirmish between Pakistan and India? Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman has shifted Saudi foreign policy from his muscular (and largely failed) assertion of Riyadh’s power in the late 2010s (military campaign in Yemen, boycott of Qatar, harsh rhetoric toward Iran) to a “no problems with neighbors” approach in the 2000s (cease-fire with the Houthis, end of the Qatar boycott, restoration of diplomatic relations with Iran). The switch is in service of realizing the ambitious goals of his national economic transformation program, Vision 2030. That plan relies on Saudi Arabia increasing its non-oil trade, attracting substantial amounts of foreign direct investment and tourism, and becoming an ever more important node in the global economy. Regional tensions and wars are not conducive to the realization of those goals.

India is an important element of those Saudi economic transformation plans. Saudi-India trade in fiscal year 2024-25 was $41.88 billion. That is approximately eight times the amount of Saudi-Pakistani trade in that same period. India is a growing economy with the largest population in the world. Saudi Arabia is a hub in the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC) plan midwifed by President Joe Biden’s administration as a rival to China’s Belt and Road Initiative and agreed to in principle by the participating states at the G-20 summit in September 2023. The Saudis even conducted joint military exercises with Indian forces as recently as August 2025. Saudi Arabia has few military assets to contribute to Pakistan in a conflict with India. Its strength is its economy, but whether the Saudis would cut off India economically to support their Pakistani allies, at considerable cost to themselves, is a very open question.

The value of the Saudi-Pakistani mutual defense agreement to Riyadh is more diplomatic than military. It reaffirms what has been an important security link for decades. Pakistan could probably contribute to Saudi air defense planning and training in some ways, given its creditable performance in its recent skirmish with India. Increased Saudi economic support to Pakistan is always welcome in Islamabad, which continues to face serious economic challenges. But neither country is likely to commit itself wholeheartedly to the defense of the other, particularly in the most likely scenarios in which each country would find itself under attack.

The message to the US

Given the uncertain strategic benefits to Saudi Arabia of the recently signed agreement with Pakistan, and the apparent fast track it was put on after the Israeli attack on Qatar, it is reasonable to see the Saudi intention here as sending a message to Washington. Pakistan is not a substitute for the United States in the Saudi security calculus. It is also not an indirect bridge to China, as some commentators have speculated when writing about the security agreement. Saudi Arabia can deal with China directly. However, Pakistan can be a hedge against the uncertainty about the extent and nature of the American security commitment to Riyadh. The Saudi leadership recalls that in response to the Iranian attacks on Saudi oil facilities in September 2019, while President Donald Trump was in the White House serving his first term, the United States took no action. Likewise it is on Trump’s current watch that Israel attacked an American Gulf ally. This track record understandably raises questions in Riyadh about just how the Trump administration sees its security role in the Gulf region.

There is no doubt that President Trump values his relationship with the Gulf states. His May 2025 visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, his first planned foreign tour of his second administration (the visit to Rome for the papal funeral being a response to an unexpected event), makes that clear. However, the unmistakable impression the president has left is that he sees the Gulf states as business and financial partners, for the US and for his family, more than as security partners. In the past, American arms sales in the Gulf were viewed as part of a larger strategic commitment to the region. Now, they seem to be just another element of the economic portfolio. Trump publicly criticized Israel’s strike on Qatar after the fact, but it is unclear whether he was informed far enough in advance to tell the Israelis not to carry it out in the first place. Few in the Gulf believe that Trump was caught by surprise by the attack, and all note that Washington has taken no practical steps to punish the Israelis.

Reassuring the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, about the firmness of the American security commitment is not something that can be done once and then forgotten. As small states without the military capability to stand up to their regional neighbors (and that includes Saudi Arabia), they are constantly pulled between fears that the United States is going to abandon them and fears that the United States is going to drag them into a conflict (with Iran, for example) that they do not want to join. This “entrapment-abandonment” syndrome is a structural part of the relationship. With the attack on Qatar, home to the largest American military base in the Middle East and a major non-NATO ally, by America’s closest Middle East ally, the main worry now is that the Gulf states are being abandoned by Washington, or at least Washington is unwilling to prevent Israel from directly attacking its Gulf partners and disrupting the regional order more generally.

The Trump administration has said the right things in the wake of the Israeli attack on Qatar.  The White House’s September 29 Executive Order committing the United States to the defense of Qatar strikes the right note, though it has the feel of locking the barn door after the horse has bolted. (Other Gulf states will likely clamor for a similar commitment, as well.) The administration now needs to do the right things. Israel needs to be told in no uncertain terms, and publicly, that there will be serious consequences in the bilateral relationship if it attacks American allies in the Gulf again. Those consequences should be communicated not only to Jerusalem but to Riyadh and the other Gulf capitals as well. The United States should assist the Gulf states in improving their air-defense systems to cover attacks from all directions. Finally, the Trump administration needs to include Saudi Arabia and its other Gulf partners in serious discussions about what its longer-term plans for regional security are. If the administration has not come up with those plans yet, it is high time to do so.

Uncertainty is the key concept in the Middle East now. There is profound uncertainty about what Iran will do in the region, following the setbacks it has experienced in 2024 and 2025 — the decimation of Hamas, the weakening of Hizballah, the fall of the Assad regime, and the June 2025 Israeli-American air campaign. There is even greater uncertainty about Israel’s role in this new power dynamic in the region, given its maximalist behavior in Gaza and the West Bank, its disruptive military actions in Lebanon and Syria, its 12-day war with Iran, and now its attack on Qatar. But the greatest source of unpredictability is the United States, still the most important outside power player in the region. The Trump administration can lessen some of that doubt by making it clear that Israel has been told directly to keep its hands off America’s Gulf partners.

F. Gregory Gause III is a Visiting Scholar at the Middle East Institute. He is also a professor emeritus of international affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.

Image created by Oleksii Liskonih via Getty Images