Manish Tewari | Will Saudi-Pak Pact Add Fuel To West Asia Fire?

The unveiling of a strategic mutual defence agreement between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on September 17, 2025, sent a geopolitical tremor through world capitals, a shockwave whose aftershocks promise to redefine the contours of Middle Eastern security.

However, for analysts who watch Pakistan and the Middle East closely it was not surprising. It only turned the de-facto into de-jure. Pakistan has been providing regime security to many of the Gulf Arab and Middle Eastern states for decades now.

At its core, this pact seems to be a reaction to Israel’s audacious strike on Doha targeting Hamas leadership. It is ostensibly designed to extend a Pakistani nuclear umbrella over the Kingdom, a historic first by a non-signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

While catalyzed by Israel’s audacious attack on Doha targeting Hamas leadership, this agreement is not a spontaneous reaction but the culmination of decades-deep ties, a relationship whose roots predate Pakistan’s own creation, evident as early as 1946 when Saudi rulers advocated for the Muslim League at the United Nations.

This is not Pakistan’s inaugural foray into grand security alliances. To comprehend the profound implications of this defence pact, one must first situate it within the graveyard of Pakistan’s previous strategic alliances.

The ghosts of the South East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) and Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO), the Cold War constructs forged under the aegis of General Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Dulles, loom large.

Fortified by the 1954 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement with the United States, Pakistan’s armory and treasury were bolstered for the primary objective of containing the Soviet Union. Yet, these alliances foundered on the rocks of two fatal flaws: internal discord among members and, more significantly, Pakistan’s own diversion of these resources and alliances towards its confrontation with India, thereby negating their very raison d'être.

The 1970s delivered a stark reality check with the birth of Bangladesh and regional conflagrations. The pattern repeated with grim familiarity during the Soviet-Afghan war, where the joint Saudi-American project of nurturing the Mujahideen through Pakistan’s deep state ISI-military combine spawned a blowback that culminated in the 9/11 attacks and the ultimate ignominy for the US having to neutralise its architect, Osama bin Laden, in the backyard of its strategic ally Pakistan’s National Military Academy in Abbottabad.

The United States is actively bolstering Pakistan as a net security provider, a staggering misreading of history and strategic reality. Washington seems incapable of admitting its past misadventures, from the Soviet invasion era to the War on Terror, and is now concocting a perfect recipe for a fire in the Middle Eastern powder keg.

This is a catastrophic error in judgment, for Pakistan remains, as the adage goes, not a country with a military, but a military with a country. The imagery of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif receiving a red-carpet welcome at Andrews Airforce Base is a potent symbol of this dangerous American miscalculation. The historical ledger, stained by the dissonance between stated alliance objectives and Pakistan’s parochial national security doctrine, should serve as a stark warning.

The immediate consequence of the pact has been to harden positions rather than deter aggression. Tel Aviv, far from being cowed, has doubled down on its rhetoric and actions against Islamabad, viewing the agreement not as a deterrent but as a provocation. The true seismic impact, however, lies in its repudiation of longstanding American foreign policy architecture. The much-vaunted “Pivot to Asia” and the Indo-Pacific strategy are suddenly relegated to the background as Washington is dragged back into the Middle Eastern maelstrom.

The Abraham Accords lie in tatters, unable to prevent a wider regional war, and the ambitious India-Middle East Economic Corridor (IMEC) is now in a deep freeze, a casualty of irreconcilable strategic rivalries that no economic corridor can bridge.

The potential crystallisation of a Middle Eastern mutual defence alliance, an “Islamic Nato”, would leave a host of global powers including India, Iran, Israel, Europe, China, and Russia, navigating a dramatically altered and more dangerous strategic landscape.

Incidentally, Gen. Raheel Sharief, former Army chief of the Pakistan Army since 2017, has been heading the 42-nation Riyadh based Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition (IMCTC) the real germination of the ubiquitous Islamic Nato.

For India, the fence on which it has perched is becoming untenably narrow. The diplomatic chill with the United States, exacerbated by the Trump administration’s bogus mediation claim qua the May 2025 kinetic actions and India’s categorical repudiation of it, has been swiftly followed by a conspicuous warming up towards Islamabad.

High-level meetings between Trump officials and Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership, coupled with the conferment of Pakistan’s highest military honour upon US CENTCOM chief Gen. Kurilla, illustrate a stark realignment.

The revocation of the Chabahar waiver, the imposition of crushing tariffs and looming levies on its film industry have jeopardised the twin pillars of the Indo-US relationship: strategic and economic interests. The third pillar, people-to-people ties, is strained by restrictions on H1B visas. In response, New Delhi and Moscow, reaffirming their special relationship, are likely to accelerate alternatives like the International North-South Transport Corridor and the Chennai-Vladivostok naval corridor, seeking markets in Europe and Central Asia

The US and its Gulf partners could not have chosen a more dangerously paradoxical security guarantor. Pakistan’s record is one of a serial proliferator, its nuclear program itself a product of clandestine theft. The supreme irony is palpable: a pact implicitly directed at containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions is spearheaded by the very nation that, through the A.Q. Khan network, provided the foundational technology for Tehran’s program in 1987, and which continues to rhetorically support Iran’s right to nuclear power.

Ultimately, the designation of Pakistan as a net security provider is a catastrophic misnomer. It is, in fact, a net insecurity provider. The snakes in Pakistan’s backyard, once bred for proxy wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir, have a documented history of turning on their masters and biting regional and international patrons. A state that brandishes nuclear blackmail against its neighbours, exports cross-border terrorism and celebrates UN-designated terrorists as national heroes is not a source of stability; it is pure fuel for the Middle Eastern fire.

This new alliance system, therefore, does not extinguish the flames of conflict. It merely pours a volatile, Pakistani-sourced accelerant onto them, ensuring a more unpredictable, more dangerous and wider conflagration for which the world remains dangerously unprepared.