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Analysis/0063/August/2026/London-Dialogue. 09 August 2026
Author: Dr Tahir Mahmood Azad
On 7 August 2026, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a trilateral defence agreement in Mecca. Islamabad's foreign ministry announced that an armed attack on any one of the three states would be treated as an attack on them all. Some commentators reached at once for the label “Islamic NATO”. The choice of Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, lent the ceremony a solemnity that no ordinary capital could supply.
On paper, the arrangement is formidable. In practice, it is encumbered by questions of credibility and legality, by three incompatible systems of government, by divergent interests, and by the awkward fact that it has been signed in the middle of a live regional war. No agreed text has been published; what exists is a set of national press releases and social-media statements. The central argument of this analysis is that the pact is better understood as defence-industrial policy than as a security alliance, and that even that more modest logic is bounded on every side, above all by the fact that little of it can proceed without the approval of the United States.
Why These Three, and Why Now
The timing is not accidental. Gulf confidence in the United States as sole guarantor had already been shaken by the muted American response to the 2019 Aramco strikes and by Israel’s September 2025 strike in Doha. The US-Israeli war on Iran, which began on 28 February 2026 and is now in its sixth month, turned that anxiety into urgency, drawing Gulf states into the line of fire and disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. The trilateral, negotiated quietly for nearly a year, was accelerated by these shocks.
The logic of pairing is intuitive: Riyadh brings capital, Ankara brings drones, warships and a mature defence industry, and Islamabad brings manpower, air defence and nuclear stature. Pakistan has already stationed a substantial contingent in the Kingdom, reported at around eight thousand personnel with aircraft, drones and an air defence system, while Türkiye secured its largest-ever defence export when Riyadh agreed to buy Turkish drones in 2023. Yet the framing invites a harder question: why only these three, and why a mutual-defence architecture rather than a broader, inclusive forum? A grouping of three Sunni-majority states, sealed in Mecca and excluding Iran, Iraq and others, risks being read as a sectarian bloc, and it excludes the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council, including the UAE and Qatar, at a moment when the GCC is itself divided.
Map-1 : Strategic geometry of the Mecca trilateral
The collective-defence clause meets a region already at war, with Iran striking Gulf and US targets, including on Saudi soil.
More Industrial Policy Than Alliance: The Defence-Industrialisation Logic
The most persuasive reading of the pact is not collective defence but defence industrialisation. Saudi Arabia spends more than $80 billion a year on defence yet remains heavily import-dependent: in 2020-24, some 74 per cent of its major arms came from the United States, followed by Spain and France. Vision 2030 aims to reverse that, localising more than half of military procurement by 2030, up from roughly 2 per cent at inception, through the General Authority for Military Industries (GAMI) and Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI). Seen this way, the pact is a vehicle for that industrial ambition, and the mutual-defence language is the wrapping, not the substance.
The Iran war has sharpened the logic. It has exposed the structural cost of Western-style defence: cheap Iranian drones, costing perhaps $20,000 to $50,000, are being shot down by Patriot interceptors at about $4 million each and THAAD interceptors many times dearer, and Gulf states have burnt through large shares of their interceptor stocks. Analysts increasingly judge purely defensive interception to be economically and mathematically unsustainable against mass-produced strike systems. That lesson rewards precisely the niche that Pakistan and Türkiye occupy low-cost, combat-proven, rapidly producible weapons.
Figure 1: The cost-exchange problem.
Cheap drones deplete very costly interceptors, an equation that favours mass-produced strike and counter-drone systems. Illustrative unit costs; sources: Bruegel, CSM/CSIS.
What Pakistan and Türkiye offer is exactly this. Türkiye’s defence spending, $30 billion in 2025 and up 94 per cent since 2016, is driven mainly by a domestic industry that now exports combat-proven drones, loitering munitions, naval platforms and electronic warfare systems. Pakistan brings ballistic and cruise missiles, a large combat-experienced air force, small arms and systems integration. Neither is a substitute for the high-end platforms Riyadh still buys from the West, but both can supply the cheap, attritable mass that the war has shown to be decisive and at a fraction of Western prices.
Figure 2: Military expenditure, 2025.
Saudi capital dwarfs its partners’ budgets, the asymmetry at the heart of the capital-for-capability bargain. Source: SIPRI, April 2026.
Table 1: Comparative snapshot of the three signatories:
The bargain is therefore real and, for all three, rational: technology, personnel and know-how flow toward Riyadh; financing, offsets and co-production flow back to Ankara and Islamabad. The sums are large enough to matter. If the Kingdom localises even half of an $80 billion budget, that is on the order of $40 billion of annual industrial activity; capturing even a tenth of it apiece, as some in both capitals envisage, would be transformative, a sum comparable to a third of Pakistan’s entire defence budget. This is the pact’s most durable dimension, because it aligns with each party’s material interest rather than resting on a war none of them wishes to fight.
Figure 3. Saudi Vision 2030 localisation ambition
The target is steep, and progress from a low base is slow. Source: GAMI / Vision 2030.
Table 2: The capability-for-capital exchange.
The target is steep, and progress from a low base is slow. Source: GAMI / Vision 2030.
Table 2: The capability-for-capital exchange.
The Decisive Limit is Washington
None of this happens without the approval of the US administration, and that is the single most important thing to understand about the pact. The United States is not a bystander: it supplies about three quarters of Saudi Arabia’s major arms and treats weapons exports as an instrument of foreign policy. It will not passively watch Pakistani and Turkish firms displace American primes in its most lucrative market. More concretely, Turkish and Pakistani defence industries are themselves hostage to Western licensing. Washington sanctioned Türkiye’s defence-procurement agency under CAATSA in 2020 over the Russian S-400, cutting off US export licences, and Türkiye’s flagship Bayraktar drones have long depended on Western subsystems subject to export freezes.
The precedent is not hypothetical. Pakistan was forced to cancel a $1.5 billion order for thirty Turkish T-129 attack helicopters because the United States would not license the American-made engine, and it turned to China instead. Any serious Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani project that touches Western-origin components will hit the same wall, which pushes the partners toward Chinese content and its own complications. This is why the industrial logic will advance fastest in genuinely indigenous drones and co-production and stall wherever it touches technology Washington controls.
Pakistan’s own dependence compounds the point. Some 81 per cent of its major-arms imports come from China, and its flagship JF-17 fighter is a Chinese co-production. In several domains Pakistan is less a donor of technology than an assembler of Chinese systems, which limits how much sovereign capability it can actually transfer to Riyadh.
And Israel is watching: By US law the executive must certify to Congress that any arms sale to a Middle Eastern state other than Israel will not erode Israel’s qualitative military edge. When President Trump approved a future F-35 sale to Saudi Arabia in November 2025, the Israeli defence establishment reacted with alarm and submitted a formal position paper warning of the threat to its air superiority. Any Saudi missile or strike build-up assembled with Pakistani and Turkish help, especially anything with ballistic reach, would draw Israeli objection and congressional friction, giving Washington yet another reason to hold the throttle. Israel will read the whole trilateral as it read the September 2025 bilateral pact through the lens of its own deterrence.
Finally, the economics are palliative, not curative. Saudi oil money and defence offsets can ease Pakistan’s and Türkiye’s crises, but there is no guarantee they will, and localisation spending is meant to build capacity inside the Kingdom, in competition with Western primes, South Korea, China and the UAE’s own defence-industrial drive. Even in the best case, the returns would not fix the underlying economies. Pakistan’s fundamental problems, a narrow tax base, chronic external deficits, IMF dependence and political instability, would remain, as would Türkiye’s recession and inflation. A patron that funds your defence industry also acquires influence over it. The defence-industrialisation reading is the truest account of the pact, but it is industrial policy conducted under American licence.
Three States, Three Systems
Beyond the industrial logic, the pact faces a basic constitutional problem: the three signatories are governed in fundamentally different ways, and each faces distinct domestic pressures.
Türkiye operates an executive presidential system. Erdoğan is elected and commands a parliamentary majority, so the pact carries democratic cover that Saudi Arabia’s cannot, but his position is strained: the arrest of his chief rival, Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, triggered the largest protests in a decade even as the economy slid into recession. As a NATO member with Article 5 obligations, Türkiye also risks being drawn into a war against Iran or in Yemen that its allies neither sanction nor support.
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy in which decision-making is concentrated in the Crown Prince. Its strategic map spans Yemen, Iran, the Red Sea, North Africa, including Sudan, and open rivalry with the UAE, and it is hedging its nuclear future toward Washington, not Islamabad, via the November 2025 civil-nuclear declaration and a 2026 123 agreement. A monarchy’s commitments are swift but personal, opaque and oriented to regime security.
Pakistan has a parliamentary system whose legitimacy is contested. The February 2024 election produced serious allegations of manipulation centred on discrepancies between Form 45 and Form 47, and the government is widely called a “Form 47” administration. The government rejects this, and most petitions have been dismissed, but the deficit is a strategic fact; it was underscored when Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said in July 2026 that the country’s governance had “collapsed”, a remark he later qualified.
Credibility, Legality and a Clause Meeting a Live War
Because the text is unpublished, the pact’s obligations are known only through official summaries. The pattern is familiar: the bilateral Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement of 17 September 2025 was likewise never published in full or placed before Pakistan’s parliament, and even within the Pakistani military the commitment was reportedly contested for running one way and blurring conventional and nuclear forces. The trilateral repeats this with no legal framework, no parliamentary approval and no ratification, giving it the character of an executive undertaking rather than a national one.
The gravest problem is that the clause at its heart, ‘an attack on one is an attack on all’, has been signed while the region is ablaze. Since February 2026, Iran has struck US and allied targets across the Gulf, including Saudi soil. Read literally, that obliges Pakistan and Türkiye to respond, which neither can: Pakistan shares a long border with Iran, carries sectarian sensitivities and has been mediating the ceasefire, while Türkiye has its own equities with Tehran and NATO to weigh. The same holds for Yemen, where Pakistan’s parliament chose neutrality in 2015, and the Gulf is not even united, with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi at odds over Yemen, Sudan and energy. The clause is therefore more symbolic than operational, and if invoked, it would either drag the partners into wars they cannot sustain or be exposed as unenforceable.
Overlapping Pacts, and The Nuclear Question
The trilateral is the third overlapping arrangement in under a year. The 2025 SMDA remains notionally in force and was reportedly invoked during the war; before it, the Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition, commanded since 2017 by General Raheel Sharif and reaffirmed as recently as February 2026, is a counter-terrorism body long criticised as an anti-Shia front. The proliferation of unpublished, overlapping pacts suggests signalling and reassurance more than institution-building. On the nuclear question, no reported agreement has Pakistan backstopping Riyadh, and the treaty text does not mention nuclear weapons. The war has in any case shown the limits of nuclear deterrence against cheap, dispersed drones and missiles: the threats here are conventional, and so are the answers.
Pakistan’s Structural Constraints
Pakistan enters from weakness. Overseas Pakistanis across the GCC are a pillar of national remittances, which reached a record $41.6 billion in FY2025-26, with Saudi Arabia the single largest source at about $9.8 billion, an argument for broad-based engagement with all the Gulf rather than entanglement in one bloc’s quarrels.
Figure 4. Pakistan’s workers’ remittances by source, FY2025-26.
Gulf labour markets, led by Saudi Arabia, underwrite the external account. Source: State Bank of Pakistan.
On the eastern front, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty in April 2025 and reaffirmed the suspension in July 2026, feeding an intensifying water crisis. To the west, Pakistan is fighting along the Afghan border, a Baloch insurgency and instability in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, while Kashmir festers. These are where Pakistan’s security is genuinely at stake, and none is addressed by a Gulf-facing pact. A commitment concluded without parliamentary sanction is also legally exposed: a future government with a settled mandate, in a landscape still shaped by the enduring popularity of Imran Khan, could reasonably revisit it. Islamabad’s mediation between the United States and Iran showed what principled, capable statecraft looks like; the same spirit should govern its own security choices.
Global Concerns and Conclusion
The pact will be read anxiously abroad. New Delhi sees a Türkiye-Pakistan-Saudi axis consolidating two antagonists alongside a courted partner. Washington faces two quasi-allied partners, one a NATO member, forming a bloc that hedges against American reliability even as both deepen ties with it, and it retains, through arms sales, licensing and the Israeli commitment, the means to shape what the bloc can actually build. Russia and China are material too: Beijing backs Islamabad on water, arms and the economic corridor, and both will weigh whether a Sunni bloc helps or hinders them. The “Islamic NATO” label is overstated: NATO has a published treaty, integrated command and shared doctrine, none of which this pact possesses.
The safety of the two Holy Mosques and the security of Saudi Arabia command deep and legitimate solidarity, and Pakistan’s readiness to stand with Riyadh reflects that bond. But solidarity must be married to rational judgement, moral seriousness and legal propriety, not used as cover for regime security. Understood honestly, the Mecca pact is less an alliance than an industrial bargain: Saudi capital in exchange for Pakistani and Turkish capability, a bargain that could, over time, build a Saudi defence-industrial base while channelling finance to Ankara and Islamabad. Its potential is real, but it is capped by Washington’s veto, by Israel’s watchfulness, by Pakistan’s China-dependence and unresolved legitimacy, and by economies that oil money can soothe but not cure. A collective, inclusive forum engaging all the GCC and other Muslim states, aimed at genuine de-escalation, would serve the region better than a narrow, opaque bloc. The pact is a statement of intent. It is not yet, and may never become, an alliance.
Tahir Azad
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