The Unraveling of US Regional Primacy

The announcement that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan have signed a mutual defense pact marks a watershed moment in Middle Eastern security politics. For the first time, the three largest Muslim-majority powers—each with distinct geopolitical weight, military capacity, and ideological orientation—have placed themselves under a single collective defense umbrella. The agreement, signed in Mecca by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, stipulates that an armed attack on any one of the three states will be treated as an attack on all. This is Article V language in everything but name.

A year ago, such an outcome seemed improbable. When trilateral talks first surfaced, the most plausible trajectory pointed toward military industrial cooperation, not collective defense. Turkey’s longstanding caution about binding security guarantees outside NATO, Pakistan’s desire to avoid entanglement in Middle Eastern conflicts, and Saudi Arabia’s preference for bilateral arrangements—especially with Washington—made a full trilateral mutual defense pact unlikely. The emerging framework appeared to be a pragmatic alignment: joint production, technology transfer, and defense industrial integration among three rising arms manufacturers.

But the region changed. The United States and Israel launched a preemptive attack against Iran, setting off a regional war. The Gaza peace track collapsed. US–Saudi negotiations over civilian nuclear cooperation were thrown into disarray within a day of signing, after President Trump declared on social media that the deal was “totally subject” to Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel—a condition absent from the agreement Washington and Riyadh had just announced. And Saudi Arabia, facing intensifying attacks on its critical infrastructure, found itself exposed at a moment when the United States was visibly struggling to maintain its security posture in the Middle East. These pressures transformed a modest trilateral initiative into a structural security architecture.

The pact is not a replacement for Turkey’s NATO commitments or Saudi Arabia’s bilateral security ties with the United States. It is a parallel architecture—a hedge against strategic uncertainty, a diversification of security dependencies, and a signal that the US track is becoming less central to Gulf security planning than it once was. But it is also something more: a declaration that Riyadh will not trade normalization with Israel for closer defense ties with Washington at a time when the United States cannot credibly guarantee regional stability.

The Strategic Shock: Iran War and US Retrenchment

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