The new security partnership between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—likely including a nuclear deterrent for Riyadh—illustrates the mercenary nature of Islamabad’s foreign policy.

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have always enjoyed a close political relationship. Since September 2025, that relationship has further deepened—most notably in military cooperation and security guarantees, following the two countries’ signing of a “Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement.”

The most obvious impact of the Saudi-Pakistani mutual defense pact is that it extends Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella over Saudi Arabia. In the days that followed the signing, Pakistani defense minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif publicly suggested that his country’s nuclear capability could be “made available” to Saudi Arabia if needed—a suggestion echoed by a Saudi official to Reuters, who said, “This is a comprehensive defensive agreement that encompasses all military means.”

The pact comes at a time when South Asia and the Middle East have both seen wars, missile threats, and proxy conflicts on their doorsteps. Most of these nations are historically US allies, but have viewed America’s chaotic domestic political situation with alarm and have begun to doubt that Washington can be relied upon to support them during a time of crisis. In that atmosphere, many have sought what think tanks have characterized as “NATO-like” agreements with their regional allies as an insurance policy. Indeed, although the full treaty text has not been publicly released, a Pakistani government spokesman described the pact as a guarantee that “any aggression against either country shall be considered as aggression against both.”

This language is roughly equivalent to NATO’s Article 5, under which “armed attack” is tied to a joint military response against the perpetrator of the attack. However, since the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949, NATO has established a durable system of procedures and safeguards preventing any country’s leader from abusing this system and dragging fellow members into an unwanted war. Every country within NATO is ultimately responsible for its own decisions, and all member countries have their own parliament, media, and courts that can question the government and impose political costs when the government acts in ways that do not align with the people’s interests.

Here emerges a potential problem. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—the former an absolute monarchy, the latter a military state with a thin veneer of democracy—have no such guardrails or institutions. The language contained within their pact is elastic, and “any aggression” could be stretched to cover any incident, with no clear definition of where the red line lies. Under those circumstances, far from increasing regional security, the Saudi-Pakistani pact could well lead to chaos.

Saudi Arabia Doesn’t Want to Rely on America for Deterrence

Saudi leaders began to fear that Washington might not be a reliable security partner after the 2019 Houthi attacks on Saudi oil facilities in Abqaiq, briefly halving Saudi oil output and costing the Saudi economy billions of dollars. The US response to the attack was widely regarded as mild and hesitant, owing to the perceived skepticism of President Donald Trump—then in his first non-consecutive term—to foreign entanglements.

Since then, the Gulf states have watched the US-backed regional order collapse around them. In June, amid the Israel-Iran war, Iran bombed the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, although it warned Washington and Doha beforehand. Later in the year, Israel attacked Qatar in September, violating a major US ally’s sovereignty. Before the Israeli and US strikes on Iranian sites, Riyadh benefited from tougher pressure on Tehran and from Israel’s hits on Iran-backed proxy groups. Now, however, it worries about a new order in the region that is shaped by Israel and backed by Washington. Under the new system, Saudi Arabia needs to present itself as stronger. The kingdom still has a close relationship with the United States and depends on US security, but it is widening its options, including partnering with China. The pact with Pakistan reflects that push, and it adds a layer of deterrence that Saudi Arabia can hint at without openly declaring.

That is where the nuclear question enters. From Riyadh’s side, the risk is that Saudi Arabia has long shown its ambitions for nuclear weapons, and it has repeatedly stated that if Iran ever acquired nuclear weapons, the kingdom would not stay behind. Now, this pact can be used to build deterrence, and it seems Saudi Arabia can try to borrow deterrence by wrapping itself in the ambiguity of a nuclear-armed partner and allowing that uncertainty to do the work. Although the treaty does not spell out a nuclear umbrella in the pact, the officials’ public hints are enough to create a nuclear shadow over every preventive strike against a Saudi nuclear pathway in the future, because any country now acting against it has to ask whether it risks dragging an atomic state like Pakistan into the conflict. This is similar to what happened in Western policy debates over North Korea, when hawkish proposals to “solve” the nuclear problem by destroying North Korea nuclear facilities ran up against the possibility of triggering a hostile response from China.

The Problem: Pakistan Will Sell Security to the Highest Bidder

As much as Saudi Arabia gains from the new alliance, Pakistan could potentially gain even more. Its nuclear deterrent was built for its rivalry with India, and that remains its primary strategic frame. But the country now has the potential to become much more influential across the region. With this move, the symbolism of a nuclear-armed Muslim state “protecting” the kingdom that hosts Islam’s holiest sites is a powerful political asset that buys Pakistan goodwill across the Muslim world, expanding its regional leverage, legitimacy, and strategic depth. It elevates Pakistan’s generals as guardians of a wider Islamic security order—and makes Saudi Arabia at least somewhat dependent on Pakistan’s military leadership.

But this raises another uncomfortable question: in the event of a future crisis, which country will hold the steering wheel? Saudi Arabia’s traditional government-by-consensus model has largely given way to the personalistic rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS)—a trend that will no doubt be further solidified after he formally accedes to the throne. In Pakistan, although nominal decision-making power is in the hands of the prime minister and his cabinet, it is well-known that the military plays an outsized role in the country’s politics and in practice can overthrow civilian leaders at any time. When fewer people have the power to plan and implement important security decisions, any crisis escalation becomes easier, and diplomacy becomes thinner. In that structure, even a minor incident can quickly turn into a reputation test, because unelected leaders often fear that restraint will be read as weakness both at home and by rivals abroad.

Moreover, if Pakistan turns its nuclear policy into a bargaining tool for regional influence, it leads to consequences that it cannot fully control. For a country to be a security guarantor, it typically requires stability and a well-functioning system of governance. Pakistan does not have these characteristics at present. Accordingly, its internal crisis has become a regional matter of concern. Pakistan has struggled for years with violence and insurgency, particularly by Islamist ideological movements it formerly supported for short-term political ends in neighboring Afghanistan and subsequently lost control over. Now that Pakistan, with such internal security fractures, sells itself as a regional security provider—particularly in the realm of nuclear capability—the risk is that it also exports uncertainty and crisis resulting from decisions shaped by internal power struggles.

Pakistan’s diplomatic moves go far beyond established governments in the Middle East and Central Asia. In December 2025, Reuters reported that Pakistan had struck a $4 billion weapons deal with Libya’s eastern Libyan National Army under the command of warlord Khalifa Haftar—a clear violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1970, which bans the sale of weapons to Libya. That agreement was reportedly finalized after Pakistan’s army chief met with Haftar in Benghazi, his unofficial capital. While Pakistan’s sale of arms clearly violated the UN arms embargo, Islamabad reasoned that it would not be held accountable for the breach, and signaled its willingness to treat arms exports as geopolitical positioning regardless of the customer.

Although Libya is formally at peace today, it is still ruled by rival groups in the east and west who refuse to recognize one another’s authority, and the LNA is clearly preparing for a potential future in which open warfare has resumed. If Pakistan is willing to sign one of its biggest export deals with what amounts to a non-state militia in a country on the brink of civil war, it also tells other fragile actors across the region that Islamabad is available to anyone as a supplier with equipment and political recognition if the price is right.

This pact will obviously have an impact across the region. India will now read this pact as Pakistan embedding itself deeper into the Middle East security architecture, potentially complicating New Delhi’s Gulf diplomacy and adding another external dimension to an already dangerous, decades-long rivalry. In that context, there is a real possibility of blocs forming around India and Pakistan in the region. Smaller Gulf states will weigh whether they are being pulled into competing camps, and whether security guarantees are becoming a substitute for regional diplomacy. Iran will wonder whether Saudi Arabia can now take tougher positions in the Gulf, given the backstop provided by Pakistan, and whether Pakistani military support would appear if anything happens in the future between Iran and Saudi. Israel, meanwhile, will watch the Gulf more carefully, especially in relation to Pakistan’s nuclear capability.

Saudi and Pakistani officials have repeatedly said that deterrence prevents war, that the two states have a right to cooperate, and that their agreement promotes peace and counterterrorism. The problem, however, is not cooperation. It is the architecture being built in a vague collective-defence language, nuclear signalling without clarity, and a growing role for a security establishment that already struggles to manage the consequences of past militant entanglements inside its country and in the region.

About the Author: Natiq Malikzada

Natiq Malikzada is a journalist and human rights advocate from Afghanistan. He holds an MA in International Relations and an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Essex, which he attended as a Chevening Scholar. Since 2013, he has focused on countering religious extremism and promoting democracy and pluralism. In 2020, he co-founded Better Afghanistan, an organization dedicated to fighting extremism, supporting education, documenting human rights violations, and empowering civil society. The organization also provides a platform for Afghan women’s rights activists to mobilize, engage in dialogue, and advocate for freedom and justice under increasingly repressive conditions.

Image: Shutterstock / FotoField.

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