Is Pakistan now Saudi Arabia’s nuclear shield?

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This is the script for my video posted on May 25, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

For almost as long as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has existed, Pakistan has been one of its closest allies. In fact, many consider this relationship to be one of the closest friendships between any two countries in the world. But in 2025, the two countries signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement to codify this relationship for the first time. This is an important geopolitical shift. Let’s talk about why.

Saudi ties with Pakistan predate Pakistan itself. In 1940, Crown Prince Saud bin Abdulaziz led a delegation to Karachi to meet with the All-India Muslim League, which was led by Pakistan’s eventual founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah. When Pakistan partitioned from India and gained its independence from Britain, Saudi Arabia was among the first states to recognize its statehood, and in 1951 the two countries signed a friendship treaty. In 1966, Saudi King Faisal and the government of Pakistan issued a joint communique declaring solidarity on the basis of mutual respect and common interests, crystallizing the relationship from an informal friendship to a formal collaboration.

Pakistan has been deploying troops to Saudi Arabia since the 1960s, including near the country’s borders with Israel. In 1969, the Pakistani Air Force deployed pilots to Saudi Arabia to repel a Yemeni incursion into Saudi territory, and in 1979, the Saudis called on Pakistani commandos to help take back the Grand Mosque after insurgents seized it. During the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991, Pakistani troops defended the Two Holy Mosques, the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, and supported coalition forces fighting Iraq in the north. In 2015, Pakistan’s parliament voted to stay neutral in Saudi Arabia’s war against the Houthis in Yemen, but in 2017 a recently retired Pakistani general became commander of the Saudi-led Islamic MIlitary Counter Terrorism Coalition in Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia funds thousands of Sunni madrasas, or Islamic educational institutions, in Pakistan as well, largely with the aim to counteract the small but assertive Shia minority in Pakistan backed by Iran, which is effectively wedged between the two countries. There’s been a narrative for decades that Saudi funding created the Sunni militant networks that eventually took over Afghanistan, but in reality less than a quarter of slain Pakistani militants in the mid 2000s were found to have a madrasa background, so that story is a little more complex than its seems at first glance.

Meanwhile, about 2.6m Pakistanis live and work in Saudi Arabia. In 2025, Saudi Arabia hosted between half and two-thirds of Pakistan’s organized labor migrants, with remittances of over 9b USD sent back to Pakistan every year. To put this into perspective, this is more money than any single Pakistani export category other than textiles, and larger than any of the country’s export markets.

The Saudis have repeatedly kept Pakistan solvent in periods of economic crisis. After Pakistan’s nuclear tests in the late 1990s, sanctions hit the country hard, but Saudi Arabia had already promised 50000 barrels per day of free oil to cushion the economic impact. Without the promise of Saudi support it’s possible that Pakistan would have stopped testing nuclear weapons, and this was precisely the point. In fact, Saudi Arabia has repeatedly sent billions of dollars to Pakistan when the country experiences hardship and insolvency.

It’s well documented that Pakistan sought out Saudi financing for its nuclear program in the early 1970s, and they reportedly received about a billion dollars per year for that purpose. The Saudi defense minister toured Pakistan’s nuclear facilities in 1999, and a 2003 visit to Pakistan from Crown Prince Abdullah allegedly produced an unwritten agreement that Pakistan would serve as a nuclear backstop if Saudi Arabia felt threatened by a third party nuclear program. This is where the 2025 Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement, or SMDA, comes in, because it encompasses all military means. The Pakistani defense minister hinted that nuclear capabilities would be shared with Saudi Arabia, and even though he walked it back, the reality is that this is the first written mutual defense agreement between an Arab Gulf state and a nuclear-armed power, going beyond the de facto security guarantees provided by countries like the US and the UK.

The SMDA considers any aggression against either country to be an aggression against both. It reportedly provides for up to 80000 Pakistani troops to be deployed to Saudi Arabia, and these pieces are an explicit geopolitical signal that the Saudis are hedging against the security guarantees that the US has provided for decades. In the context of the recent conflict with Iran and the US’s volatile decision-making, this gives Saudi Arabia assurance that it will not be hung out to dry. The timing is interesting as well, because the agreement was signed just days after Israeli airstrikes killed Hamas negotiators in Doha and the US declined to publicly condemn it.

Unfortunately for Pakistan, Saudi Arabia has also been pursuing closer ties with India. In 2019, the countries formed a joint Strategic Partnership Council, or SPC, and by 2025 Saudi Arabia had pledged a hundred billion dollars in Indian investment, half of which is for energy infrastructure specifically. Just months before signing the SMDA with Pakistan, the SPC expanded to four ministerial committees, including one on defense cooperation, and signed over 50 memorandums of understanding. Saudi Arabia has explicitly told news outlets that the SMDA is not directed at any specific country, but this messaging reads as reassurance to India, and the full text of the treaty has never actually been published. Regardless, Saudi Arabia is clearly trying to play both sides.

What’s interesting here is that Saudi Arabia and Iran are on opposite ends of a geopolitical spectrum just as Pakistan and India are, but while Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are close, they’re each forced to navigate their own relationship with the other’s rival. The SMDA only makes these dynamics sharper and more dangerous, because the underlying geopolitical dynamics haven’t really changed. Both countries are forced to play both sides of the other’s conflict, which means that the friendship just isn’t as simple as it appears on the surface.

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