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In Sept. 2025, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defense pact, formalizing what decades of quiet cooperation had already made real. The defense pact signed in Riyadh was presented in official communiqués as a natural deepening of bilateral ties. It was that, but it was also something larger: The latest installment in a pattern that has persisted for half a century and that continues to confound the logic of power politics. Pakistan, a state dependent on International Monetary Fund bailouts and outmatched conventionally by its larger neighbor, has once again positioned itself at the center of a consequential security arrangement. India, a $3.5 trillion economy with a presence at every major multilateral table, was not in the room. This is not an accident of diplomacy. It is a structural pattern — produced by nuclear security, chronic economic fragility, and geographic pivotality — and converted into leverage by Pakistani actors who have translated these conditions into diplomatic capital with remarkable consistency across every configuration of leadership and regional power. The most important of those actors is the Pakistan Army, whose military capacity has functioned as an exportable service to multiple competing powers at once. Six months later, that same pattern would put Pakistan at the center of the effort to secure a ceasefire between the United States and Iran.
The standard explanation leans on a contingency: The right leader at the right moment, an opportunistic military, and American Cold War patronage that created habits of collaboration. These explanations are not wrong so far as they go, but they do not go far enough. Pakistan’s diplomatic reach has held across civilian governments and military dictatorships, across American patronage and American sanctions, across periods of relative stability and acute internal crisis. Contingency explains episodes, but it does not explain half a century of deep diplomatic and military ties.
The empirical record is striking. Beginning in 1969, Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Agha Hilaly carried Washington’s initial feelers to Beijing. Pakistani President Yahya Khan personally delivered President Richard Nixon’s messages to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai during his 1970 visit, laying the groundwork for National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s secret July 1971 flight to Beijing — the back channel maneuver that cracked open the most consequential diplomatic realignment of the twentieth century. In the same year, Pakistan lost half its territory in the war over East Pakistan and brokered a geopolitical revolution. Through the 1980s, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence served as the indispensable conduit for American and Saudi support to the Afghan mujahideen — managing a covert operation that reshaped Central Asia and cemented Islamabad’s reputation as a state that great powers need. Since 2001, it has oscillated between partner and adversary to Washington in ways that have infuriated American officials and yet kept Islamabad relevant to every serious conversation about the region’s future. And now it is deepening security ties with the Gulf at a moment when the architecture of Middle Eastern security is being redrawn.
India’s record over the same period is one of conspicuous abstention. In the Persian Gulf, where millions of Indian nationals generate remittance flows exceeding $40 billion annually, India has deepened its economic ties and cultivated warm bilateral relationships, but has never converted that weight into a security role. There is no defense pact, no troops stationed on Gulf soil, no joint command structure. Pakistan, with a fraction of India’s economic footprint in the region, has all three. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has cultivated personal relationships with Gulf leaders assiduously — the visits, the investment pledges, the carefully staged bilaterals. What he has not built is the architecture that would make India indispensable rather than merely welcome. India has built relationships everywhere and obligations nowhere.
The standard response to this comparison is to invoke India’s democratic complexity, its federal constraints, its tradition of Nehruvian non-alignment. These explanations have merit, but they do not account for the consistency of the gap. India has had governments of radically different ideological orientations — socialist, market-liberal, Hindu nationalist — and all of them have produced roughly the same foreign policy footprint relative to the country’s capabilities. This is not a failure of leadership or ideology, India has never been constrained enough to be entrepreneurial.
Pakistan occupies a position that is, even among nuclear-armed states, almost without parallel. It is nuclear-armed, economically fragile, and geographically pivotal, and the combination matters more than any single element.
The nuclear deterrent is the foundation. Since 1998, Pakistan has possessed the one capability that neutralizes India’s conventional dominance — an arsenal that makes full-scale war catastrophically costly for both sides. In May 2025, that logic was tested in ways it never had been before. As I argued at the time, the conflict represented a dangerous departure from past patterns — direct missile exchanges between nuclear rivals for the first time, across multiple domains simultaneously. Pakistan responded to Indian strikes, held its ground, and accepted a ceasefire after demonstrating it could absorb and respond to Indian military action. The deterrent was no longer merely a ceiling on Indian escalation. It had become the floor of Pakistani confidence and India’s conventional dominance was strategically capped.
Here is what most analyses of Pakistan get wrong: Pakistan is not a dependent state seeking patrons because it cannot defend itself. It seeks patrons because its deterrent secures its borders but does not pay its bills, train its officer corps in foreign academies, fund its infrastructure, or service its debt to the International Monetary Fund. A state that needs patrons to survive is a supplicant. Pakistan needs patrons for everything except survival — that makes it a broker. Pakistan has operated as the latter more consistently than its reputation suggests and more consequentially than its capabilities would predict.
Pakistan cannot afford geopolitical passivity. It received a record $38.3 billion in workers’ remittances in FY25 — more than the entire International Monetary Fund loan package that Islamabad negotiated that same year — and the Gulf states account for the dominant share of that flow. Keeping those labor corridors open is economic survival, not diplomacy. The military’s institutional interests — promotions, equipment, prestige, external validation — require the training exchanges, equipment pipelines, and advisory relationships that come from being a valued security partner to wealthy states.
Geography completes the picture. Pakistan sits at the intersection of South Asia, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and western China — a position that has made it useful to every external power that has ever had ambitions in the region. For the United States during the Cold War, it was the southern anchor of containment. For China, it is the endpoint of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and the land bridge to the Arabian Sea. For Saudi Arabia, it is the source of military manpower and, increasingly, the custodian of Sunni military credibility that the Kingdom needs as it navigates an environment increasingly shaped by Iranian power. No external power with ambitions in the region has ever been able to ignore Pakistan — and none has.
Signed in Riyadh on Sept. 17, 2025, the Saudi-Pakistani mutual defense pact stipulates that “any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both.” Most analysis has treated it through the lens of conventional military cooperation, Pakistani troops in Saudi Arabia, joint exercises, training programs, equipment transfers. That misses what lies beneath. For decades, analysts in Washington, Riyadh, and Islamabad have returned to a question that no official in any of those capitals will answer directly: Does Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal extend any form of deterrent guarantee to Saudi Arabia?
The answer came closer to the surface than usual within days of the signing. Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif publicly suggested the pact included a nuclear umbrella, then retracted the comment within hours. The retraction was more revealing than the statement. When a senior official volunteers the nuclear dimension and then walks it back, he has confirmed what strategic ambiguity is designed to communicate: The possibility, hovering just below the threshold of official commitment, is the point.
This ambiguity has deep roots. Saudi Arabia provided substantial financial support to Pakistan’s nuclear program in its earliest stages — the investment that gave rise to the notion of an “Islamic bomb” with obligations running in both directions. Extended deterrence has historically been the exclusive instrument of superpowers: The United States extending its nuclear umbrella over NATO allies, Japan, and South Korea through formal treaty commitments and forward deployments or the Soviet Union offering analogous guarantees to the Warsaw Pact. What the Saudi-Pakistani relationship suggests is something categorically different — extended deterrence offered not by a superpower through a formal alliance, but by a nuclear middle power through deliberate ambiguity and outside any treaty framework, across a relationship built on religious solidarity and transactional military services. If that reading is correct, the nonproliferation architecture built around superpower guarantees requires fundamental rethinking.
The significance of this arrangement cannot be separated from the moment that produced it. Israel’s strikes in Qatar targeting Hamas political leaders on Sept. 9, 2025 rattled Gulf monarchies that had long considered themselves shielded from regional turbulence. Iran’s retaliatory strike on the Al Udeid Air Base, a major American installation, demonstrated that Tehran would not hesitate to drag neighboring states into the conflict. Two Houthi ballistic missiles aimed at Israel broke apart mid-flight over Saudi territory. The message to Riyadh was unmistakable: The Kingdom’s airspace was no longer inviolable, and Washington’s protective umbrella was fraying at precisely the moment the region needed it most. Against that backdrop, Pakistan offers something no other partner can — nuclear capability held by a Muslim state with decades of demonstrated reliability as a security partner. The 2025 security pact is not the beginning of this relationship, but its latest formal expression, signed, notably, without Washington. Washington was only informed after the fact.
India’s foreign policy underperformance relative to its capabilities is, at its root, a product of the same logic that explains Pakistan’s overperformance. India is secure enough not to need patrons, wealthy enough not to need remittance corridors, and large enough to set the terms of most bilateral relationships rather than adapting to the terms of others. These are, in the ordinary sense of the word, advantages. In the specific sense of generating diplomatic entrepreneurialism, they are constraints.
The ideological framework that governs Indian foreign policy, strategic autonomy, or in its current variant, vishwabandhu, a phrase that roughly translates as “India is a friend to all,” is not without internal coherence. It reflects a genuine reading of India’s interest in preserving optionality in a world dividing between American and Chinese orbits. But optionality is not strategy. A state that refuses to impose costs on Russia over Ukraine, maintains arms exports to Israel while abstaining on Gaza, and declines to take a position on any contested question of regional order is not exercising strategic autonomy. It is performing it, and performance without commitment generates no alliance relationships, no dependent states, no clients who owe their security to Indian support.
The civil-military dimension deepens the same pattern. Indian foreign policy is produced through complex coordination among competing institutions — thoroughness at the cost of speed. Pakistan’s foreign policy is made, for better and for worse, by the army. This produces pathologies that are well-documented, the tolerance for militant networks, the double game that has frustrated every American administration since 2001. It also produces speed and coherence at precisely the moments that matter, which is why it was Pakistani Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir, not any Indian counterpart, on the phone with Trump and Tehran in the same week.
American strategic discourse has, since the 2005 civil nuclear deal, operated on a template for the region. India as the natural democratic partner, reliable and rising. Pakistan as the duplicitous spoiler, useful but untrustworthy. That template has never accurately described either state. In the spring of 2026, it was exposed as insufficient.
As American and Iranian forces exchanged strikes across the Middle East, it was Pakistan — not India, not any European ally, not any state in the Gulf — that Washington turned to as its back-channel to Tehran. Islamabad relayed a fifteen-point American peace plan to Iranian officials. Iran allowed Pakistan-flagged tankers to transit the Strait of Hormuz — a gesture Trump publicly described as evidence of Tehran’s commitment to talks. A ceasefire followed. Two powers that cannot talk directly need a state both will trust as a conduit. Pakistan is, again, that state, and this time, it helped secure a ceasefire.
Pakistan’s indispensability coexists with genuine liabilities. This is the state that spent two decades as the Taliban’s chief patron and ran the A.Q. Khan proliferation network. It did not change, the configuration of necessity changed around it. The Saudi defense pact illustrates the tension precisely. “It was supposed to be cash for deterrence,” one person familiar with Pakistan’s senior military thinking told the Financial Times — a rare acknowledgment, even anonymously, that the arrangement has not delivered. “But we’ve not gotten any new Saudi investments and deterrence failed.” Pakistan is now caught between its Saudi commitment, its Iranian back-channel, its warming relationship with Washington, and a domestic population that includes forty million Shia Muslims whose sympathies run toward Tehran. The indispensable broker is also a state that could be consumed by the very contradictions its indispensability creates.
There is a more transactional dimension to the current alignment. Pakistan’s courtship of the Trump administration included a Jan. 2026 agreement with World Liberty Financial — the Trump family’s crypto venture — signed in Islamabad with Munir personally present alongside the prime ministers. Bloomberg has raised questions about whether Pakistan’s mediation role was facilitated in part by its willingness to provide commercial benefits to entities connected to the president. These concerns are legitimate and unresolved. Nonetheless, Pakistan has always identified what its patrons need beyond the purely diplomatic — Gulf states needed military manpower, Washington needed Afghan logistics, Riyadh needed Islamic legitimacy. That the currency exchange in 2026 includes crypto agreements rather than troop deployments is new in form, but it is not new in logic.
The more useful question for American strategists is not how to make Pakistan more reliable or India more assertive, but how to build policy on what these states actually are rather than what Washington wishes they were. India will continue to hedge, abstain, and call it principle. Pakistan will continue to be in the room. Policy that starts from that fact is more durable than policy that starts from hope.
The most common objection to Pakistan’s structural indispensability is that Pakistan’s current centrality is a product of personal chemistry between Munir and Trump and will evaporate when either man leaves the stage. The historical record does not support this. The broker role has outlasted every army chief and every American president who has engaged in it. It will outlast these two as well.
Washington’s challenge is not to change that pattern but to stop being surprised by it. A state that can call Trump, Witkoff, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the same week and be taken seriously by all three is not a problem to be managed. It is a resource to be understood. The only variable is whether Washington will have developed, by then, a strategic framework capable of working with that reality rather than against it.
Farah N. Jan is a senior lecturer in the International Relations Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in nuclear security, alliance politics, and threshold wars in the Middle East and South Asia. She is completing a book on the Saudi-Pakistani alliance.
Image: The White House via Wikimedia Commons
