Pakistan’s Strategic Leap |
In the shifting sands of 21st-century geopolitics, alliances are no longer static treaties etched in Cold War stone. They are evolving contracts of strategic necessity and existential anxiety. For Pakistan, last year’s Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Saudi Arabia and Turkey’s reported interest in joining cannot be reduced to a simple pact among Muslim nations. It reflects a deeper, more searching impulse: How does Pakistan, a nation forged in the fires of perpetual insecurity, construct agency in a world where old alliances no longer guarantee safety?
This is not an abstract question of policy wonks. It is a question rooted in our societal aspirations and political anxieties, where the state’s choices are inextricably tied to narratives of survival and identity. Pakistan’s strategic culture has long oscillated between realist imperatives and moral narratives–between the imperatives of deterrence and the rhetoric of Muslim solidarity. The emerging Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey security configuration is both a continuation and a transformation of that long journey.
Our foreign policy has often been described in simplified binaries: East vs West, Islam vs secular nationalism, alliance vs non-alignment. But lived experience tells a more layered story. Its civil and military institutions have repeatedly grappled with the contradictions of being a Muslim homeland and a strategic actor in a fractious region. These tensions have shaped not only policy choices but the psychological architecture of the state itself.
This pact between Islamabad and Riyadh, as well as its potential to become a force of reckoning in the wider region, represents a strategic maturation, an attempt to reclaim agency not by clinging to external umbrellas, but by building tangible security linkages that count in the calculus of deterrence. Pakistan’s offer of mutual defence is not a chest-thumping rhetorical flourish. It is a reflection of hard bargaining rooted in its unique strategic assets: nuclear capabilities, a large and battle-tested army, and a growing defence industrial base.
Pakistan is less interested in being a client state and more determined to be a credible partner and producer.
“It is premature to say anything, but many countries desire, after this development, to have a similar arrangement,” Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar had remarked in September.
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