Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia plan defence pact as US-Iran row threatens Middle East

As tensions between the United States and Iran threaten to plunge the Middle East into chaos again, regional military powers Turkey and Pakistan have revealed they are planning a tripartite defence partnership with Saudi Arabia.\nThursday’s disclosure comes as Iran’s neighbours await clarity on US President Donald Trump’s announcement of a 25 per cent tariff on the Islamic Republic’s trading partners earlier in the week – a measure which threatens to disrupt supply chains across the region.\nThe proposed trilateral agreement “is something that is already in the pipeline”, Pakistan’s defence production minister Raza Hayat Harraj told Reuters news agency on Thursday.\nIt was separate to nuclear-armed Pakistan and Saudi Arabia’s mutual defence agreement, signed in September, soon after Israeli warplanes attacked Hamas negotiators in Qatar, he said, indicating that the proposed deal was not likely to include Nato-like commitments to come to each other’s aid in the event of conflict.\nTurkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan, addressing a press conference in Ankara on Thursday, confirmed that negotiations with regional states – which he declined to name – have been under way since early last year.\n\nAlthough an agreement had yet to be reached, Fidan said the proposed security mechanism would act as a shared platform for “all regional nations”, whose issues could be resolved if they could be “be sure of each other”.\nExperts say the pact reflects concerns about Washington’s increasingly erratic behaviour, which threatens to disrupt both the region’s fragile power balance and trades in energy, petrochemicals and food.\nStrategically, it would signal a “more self-reliant security geometry linking the Gulf, Anatolia and South Asia”, said Andreas Krieg, an associate professor of defence studies at King’s College London.\nA three-way deal would also “strengthen deterrence narratives aimed at Iran and help Riyadh diversify partners beyond the West”, the risk analyst told This Week In Asia.\nKrieg predicted that it was more likely to “resemble a cooperation and capability-building package than a mutual-defence clause” – as any such clause would face legal and parliamentary scrutiny, and “invite external pressure from Washington and, indirectly, Israel”.\nDifferent priorities\nHowever, translating shared political intent into an operationally meaningful framework, would be a challenge because all three nations “have overlapping interests, but different threat prioritisation and risk tolerances”, Krieg said.\nRiyadh is focused on air and missile defence, maritime security and Iran, while Ankara’s priorities are shaped by Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean and its Nato relationship. On the other hand, Islamabad must constantly calibrate around India, Iran and domestic counterterrorism demands.\nAnother friction point is intelligence sharing and command-and-control. “Partners will be cautious about sensitive data, rules of engagement and who has access to what systems,” Krieg said.\n“Defence industrial politics [also] matter,” he added, because co-production, offsets, pricing and technology transfer “are where deals often stall”.\n\n\nLike all of Iran’s neighbours, the three countries are worried about the potential impact of Trump’s tariffs, unveiled on Monday.\nAt a conference in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, the UAE’s minister of foreign trade Thani al-Zeyoudi said the levy could affect supplies of Iranian produce and other goods to the Emirates.\nIran is the UAE’s second largest trading partner. It imports large quantities of Iranian produce as feedstock for its flourishing processed food industry.\nDubai was looking into how the tariffs could “affect the prices on the consumer and how much they’re paying to have the alternative”, Zeyoudi said.\nIn Pakistan, imports of staples like tomatoes from Iran soften the inflationary impact of seasonal supply shortfalls. Alongside India, Pakistan is a major producer of basmati rice, the backbone of Iranian cuisine.\nIn turn, all three countries act as an import lifeline for Iran’s sanctions-bound economy and the country’s 90 million consumers whose plight – exacerbated by Tehran’s gross mismanagement and widespread corruption – has sparked the most widespread, violent protests since the 1979 revolution.\nIf Iran’s ability to trade is affected, its currency, the rial, may crash “even further than the record lows” that triggered the recent protests, according to Farzan Sabet, a managing researcher of the Global Governance Centre in Geneva.\nThis could create a “massive surge in inflation”, he said in social media posts on Tuesday.\n‘A bit vague’\nIn the face of such pressure, analysts expect Iran’s major trading partners to push back against the tariff, both for economic reasons and a discomfort at the prospect of Iran being destabilised by sustained US air strikes.\n“Keeping the Iranian economy afloat has been a strategic priority for the UAE since 2021,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, CEO of the Bourse and Bazaar Foundation, a think tank based in London.\n“The tariffs won’t change that calculus” as they seemed “neither enforceable nor consequential, and everyone is going to forget about it in a week,” Batmanghelidj said on social media on Tuesday.\nTurkish policy expert Bill Park also doubted that the new US tariff would “actually be imposed, or last for long”.\n\n“Quite when and how they would be imposed is a bit vague,” the defence studies lecturer at King’s College London told This Week In Asia. “It’s Trump mouthing off again.”\nTurkey and Iran last month announced their desire to boost bilateral trade and revive their 2015 preferential trade agreement. They also signed a long-term deal to extend Iranian gas exports to Turkey.\n“Both are committed to expanding trade but in reality trade between the two has fluctuated, partly through the impact of sanctions, partly through Iran’s economic dysfunctionality,” Park said.\nTurkey and Iran would “probably find workarounds”, he said – as would Tehran’s other neighbours.\n