Pakistan, Turkiye and Saudi Arabia Sign Historic Defense Pact, PM Shehbaz Calls It a Win for All Three

Pakistan, Turkiye, and Saudi Arabia have signed a trilateral defense agreement in Mecca, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif calling it an honor to sign and crediting Field Marshal Asim Munir’s role in translating the shared vision into reality. Sharif said the pact serves the interests of all three nations and enhances regional security and stability, expressing hope it would bring prosperity to all three countries and benefit the broader Muslim world.

The agreement, called the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, was signed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, and Sharif, following nearly a year of negotiations. Under its terms, any armed attack against one of the three states will be regarded as an attack against all three — establishing a formal collective deterrence framework among the three Muslim-majority nations.

Saudi deputy minister for public diplomacy Rayed Krimly described the pact as enabling the three partners to develop joint defense capabilities, while stressing it does not represent an effort to establish a military axis or sectarian bloc. Turkish media reports indicated the agreement is likely to allow joint military exercises and training, technology transfers, and intelligence sharing, with a Turkish official describing it as purely defensive in nature, involving mutual support limited to defense.

The signing came a day after Sharif, accompanied by Munir, arrived in Saudi Arabia and performed Umrah in Mecca, with Erdogan traveling separately to meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on the same day. The timing places the agreement directly against the backdrop of the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, which has repeatedly struck Saudi Arabia and drawn attacks from Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen and Shia armed groups in Iraq — a pattern that has threatened Saudi oil exports and raised serious questions about the reliability of the kingdom’s longstanding US security guarantee.

This trilateral pact builds directly on the earlier Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed bilaterally in September 2025 in Riyadh, which similarly established that any aggression against either country would be treated as aggression against both. Saudi analysts had previously suggested Riyadh could activate that bilateral pact should it become directly drawn into the Iran conflict — a scenario that appears to have accelerated momentum toward this broader trilateral framework now including Turkiye.

While Saudi Arabia has faced repeated direct attacks throughout the conflict, Turkiye and Pakistan have largely avoided significant direct strikes, though both nations share strong interest in calming a regional conflict that threatens their own security and economic interests — Pakistan through its extensive diplomatic mediation efforts between Washington and Tehran, and Turkiye through its broader regional economic and strategic stakes.

Iranian lawmaker Ebrahim Rezaei warned that the pact alone wouldn’t be sufficient to guarantee Saudi security, according to Al Jazeera reporting — a response suggesting Tehran views the agreement as a notable strategic development worth publicly addressing rather than dismissing outright.

Experts describing the pact’s significance say it could reshape the region’s broader security architecture, bringing together a major Gulf oil power, a NATO member with significant regional military capability, and a nuclear-armed South Asian state under a formal collective defense commitment for the first time. Whether this framework translates into concrete joint military action if any of the three nations face direct attack, or remains primarily a deterrent and diplomatic signal, will likely be tested by how the broader regional conflict continues evolving in the months ahead.