Security Pact or Capital Realignment?

The defense agreement between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan should not be read simply as a military arrangement among three regional states. Much commentary places it within the familiar frame of geopolitical rivalry — Iran versus Israel versus Saudi Arabia versus Turkey. That frame captures part of the picture, but it cannot explain why this alignment has taken shape at this particular historical moment. Placed instead within the broader transformation of the global capitalist system, a different picture emerges: security, arms manufacturing, and investment appear here as facets of a single process.

Wallerstein understood the world-system not as a collection of independent states but as a network of unequal economic and political relations linking core, semi-periphery, and periphery. In this framework, a state’s position must be measured against the global process of capital accumulation, technology, and power — not read off its foreign policy alone. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan occupy three distinct but complementary positions within this hierarchy. Saudi Arabia commands enormous financial capital yet remains dependent on imported defense technology. Turkey has spent two decades building a domestic arms industry — drones, armored vehicles, electronics — as part of a broader effort to loosen its historical dependence on the West, a trajectory I examined at greater length in my earlier analysis of Turkey’s semi-peripheral position. Pakistan, despite chronic economic crisis, has secured an outsized role in regional security calculations through its nuclear capability and its long record of joint arms production with China.

What distinguishes this cooperation from earlier regional alliances is its entanglement with the political economy of the defense industry itself. Saudi capital has flowed into Turkish and Pakistani defense manufacturing, generating export revenue and employment for Ankara and Islamabad while expanding their technological and productive capacity. The pact is best understood as an alliance of finance capital, arms industry, and geopolitics — not simply a union of three armies. Yet this should not be mistaken for Riyadh finally solving its security crisis. Decades of Saudi reliance on Washington’s guarantees and on massive purchases of Western weaponry have not produced durable security, and cooperation with Turkey and Pakistan is unlikely to fill that gap on its own.

Why This Pact Cannot Manufacture Security

Recent Middle Eastern history shows that accumulating weapons and expanding military alliances does not automatically translate into security; in many cases, the same process has instead intensified arms races and instability. Saudi Arabia illustrates this contradiction clearly. Over four decades it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the world’s most advanced fighter jets and air-defense systems from the United States and Europe. Yet none of this prevented the war in Yemen from reaching Riyadh’s stated objectives, nor did it stop the 2019 strike on Aramco’s facilities despite the presence of sophisticated air defenses.

The clearest and most recent confirmation of this failure came from the US-Israeli war against Iran. Iran responded by striking countries that hosted American bases — and, more tellingly, the United States, despite its unrivaled military superiority, could not fully secure its own installations in the region. If a superpower with that degree of technological dominance cannot protect its own military assets, it follows that it cannot guarantee the security of the states that host them, Saudi Arabia among them. The episode demonstrates plainly that security, unlike weapons, is not a commodity that can simply be bought or outsourced to a foreign patron.

One might object that this reading is unduly pessimistic: even without a full guarantee, a mutual-commitment clause — an attack on one is an attack on all three — could still raise the cost of aggression and function as a partial deterrent. The objection has some merit, but it runs into two structural limits. First, effective deterrence requires clear political will for direct intervention, and neither Ankara nor Islamabad has shown that will in previous Gulf crises. Second, the three states’ security interests are not always aligned — Turkey is preoccupied with the Eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus, Pakistan with its rivalry with India, Saudi Arabia with the Gulf and Yemen — and in an actual crisis these priorities could pull in different directions. The agreement is better understood as a framework for military cooperation and technology transfer than as a classical collective-defense treaty; this is precisely where Wallerstein is instructive. When the primary driver of a partnership is economic and industrial interest, one should not expect it to produce full security convergence as a byproduct.

Fragmented Realignment: Parallel Blocs, Not a New Order

It is tempting to read this pact as the emergence of a new Islamic bloc, or as an early sign of the end of American hegemony. The region’s actual map suggests something else. What is taking shape in the Middle East is not a simple two-camp polarization but several parallel, at points overlapping, blocs: the UAE-Bahrain-Israel-US axis on one side; the newly formed Turkey-Saudi-Pakistan axis; and, opposing both, Iran and its allies. None of these axes is internally uniform or stable — Saudi Arabia and the UAE, despite strategic proximity, have been rivals in Yemen; Turkey belongs simultaneously to NATO and to this new pact with Saudi Arabia. This fragmentation itself confirms a Wallersteinian reading: semi-peripheral and peripheral states are maneuvering for position within the existing hierarchy, not dividing the region into two opposing camps.

Wallerstein’s point remains that the capitalist world-system does not collapse suddenly even in periods of hegemonic decline; what occurs instead is a realignment of power relations within the same general logic of the system. Saudi Arabia is pursuing relative autonomy in defense; Turkey is consolidating its status as an industrial-military power; Pakistan hopes to offset chronic economic crisis by attracting investment. These are less a shared ideological project than separate national interests, which is precisely why the pact could unravel quickly if the regional balance shifts.

From a left perspective, two errors deserve equal caution: inflating this pact into the beginning of an anti-imperialist front, when none of the three states intends to exit the capitalist world economy or confront it structurally; and dismissing it as merely symbolic, when it could genuinely strengthen the three countries’ defense industries and economic ties without transforming the region’s security order. The pact’s real significance lies less in the number of fighter jets involved than in what it tells us about the current stage of the world-system: a Middle East in which regional states, as Washington’s appetite for direct intervention wanes and its inability to secure even its own bases becomes evident, are attempting to play a more active role in securing their own interests — an attempt that remains bound by the structure of global capitalism and its limits, not a rupture from it. The path toward something better lies not in swapping one hegemon for another, but in strengthening independent social movements, labor organizing, and new forms of transnational solidarity — the only horizon from which a genuinely different order, built on social justice rather than the competition of powers, could emerge.

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