Will Pakistan-Saudi-Turkiye defence pact change US strategy?

Washington, DC – The administration of United States President Donald Trump has offered no official response in the hours since Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan signed a landmark mutual defence agreement in Mecca.

The muted reaction, which persisted into Saturday, likely underscores the multilayered — and still emerging — implications of the new deal for US strategy, according to analysts.

Considered by many to lay the groundwork for what could be one of the most significant power shifts in the region in decades, the deal comes within the context of the US-Israeli war against Iran and Israel’s increasingly aggressive military actions in the region.

One provision is said to call on signatories to treat an attack on one as an attack on all, reminiscent of NATO’s Article 5.

Some analysts see the agreement as a reflection of growing wariness towards an unpredictable US government, potentially presaging a wider security realignment that could transform the Middle East.

Others have argued that, while US actions have indeed fostered the conditions that accelerated the deal, the pact fits neatly within US strategic aims of greater burden-sharing among allies.

In the near term, many experts agree the pact will likely have the greatest impact in the diplomatic sphere, posing a potentially insurmountable challenge to Arab-Israeli normalisation under the Abraham Accords.

The push for greater regional cooperation with Israel has been the linchpin of the Trump administration’s designs for the Middle East, dating back to his first term. But Sina Toosi, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Policy, explained that the mutual defence pact is likely a setback.