THE SAUDI–PAKISTAN STRATEGIC MUTUAL DEFENCE AGREEMENT (2025): IMPLICATIONS FOR REGIONAL SECURITY AND EMERGING MULTIPOLARITY

Abstract

The signing of the Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement in 2025 is a historic event in the Gulf-South Asia architecture of security and has far-reaching consequences to the stability in the region, the balance of deterrence, and the multipolar international system of the 2021s. A qualitative, exploratory research design in an interpretivist epistemological context was used in this work to investigate these implications using the insights of elite practitioners and scholars with a direct interest in regional security affairs. The purposive and elite sampling methods helped to recruit and engage 18 key informants, who are defense analysts, foreign policy specialists, military scholars, retired diplomats, and international relations academics, using semi-structured and in-depth interviews. To triangulate primary interview data, qualitative document analysis of official agreement texts, policy papers, think tank reports, and diplomatic communiqués was carried out. Data collected were then analyzed through the themes framework of thematic analysis developed by Braun and Clarke and formed four main themes; strategic alignment and deterrence, regional security dynamics, emerging multipolarity, and the economic-security nexus. Results indicate that this deal is a multidimensional strategic tool that serves the interests of Saudi Arabia in deterrence depth and Pakistan in stabilizing its economy, and at the same time, rebalances regional power politics in a manner that destabilizes Iranian threat perceptions, challenges Indian strategic placements, and helps to fuel progressive destabilization of U.S.-centric security constructs along the Gulf-South Asia axis. The paper concludes that the treaty constitutes a commodity as well as a catalyst of world multipolar changes with immense implications to international security regulating, nuclear risk control, and domestic diplomatic order.

Keywords: Saudi-Pakistan defence agreement, regional security, multipolarity, Gulf security architecture, deterrence, nuclear ambiguity, geopolitics, South Asia, qualitative research, international relations.