Saudi Arabia Builds Its Own NATO — And the World May Be Changing With It

For most of the modern Middle East, when the region became dangerous, there was one question that mattered more than almost any other:

What will the United States do?

Saudi Arabia may be asking a different question now.

What can we do for ourselves?

That change is easy to miss amid the missiles, shipping disruptions, Iranian threats, Houthi attacks and the almost daily rearrangement of alliances across the Middle East.

It should not be missed.

Because in the space of little more than a year, Saudi Arabia has begun assembling something that would have seemed improbable not long ago: a network of regional defense relationships increasingly capable of operating without the United States at its center.

It Started Quietly Enough.

On September 17, 2025, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement in Riyadh. The relationship itself was hardly new. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan had enjoyed close strategic and military ties for decades.

But this was different.

The agreement formalized the principle of mutual defense between the two countries.

And Pakistan is not simply another Middle Eastern security partner. Pakistan has one thing Saudi Arabia does not.

Nuclear weapons.

Then came Turkey.

On August 7, 2026, Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Sharif met at Al-Safa Palace in Mecca and signed the Makkah Joint Defense Agreement.

The language matters.

An armed attack against any one of the three states, the agreement says, will be regarded as an attack against them all.

That sounds familiar because it is.

It is the central idea behind Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty—the principle that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, went so far as to describe the new commitment as “technically the same” as NATO’s Article 5, although the three countries retain discretion over precisely how they would respond.

Saudi Arabia.

Turkey.

Pakistan.

Put those three countries on a map. Then consider what each brings to the table.

Saudi Arabia brings money, oil, enormous strategic geography and custody of Islam’s two holiest cities.

Turkey brings NATO’s second-largest military, an increasingly sophisticated domestic defense industry, drones, missiles and a geographic position connecting Europe, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Middle East.

Pakistan brings one of the world’s largest militaries. And nuclear weapons.

This is not NATO.

Not yet, and perhaps never. But neither is it simply another diplomatic photograph.

Something has changed.

THEN THE STORY GOT BIGGER

Three weeks before the Mecca agreement, Saudi Arabia had already convened representatives from 43 countries and the European Union in Riyadh.

The purpose was maritime defense.

On July 30, Saudi Arabia announced the establishment of a Multinational Maritime Defense Alliance designed to protect three of the most strategically important waterways on Earth: The Red Sea, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden.

Saudi Arabia would lead it. Saudi Arabia would host its headquarters.

And Saudi Arabia would sit at the center of the command structure.

Thirteen other founding countries joined it: Bahrain, Bangladesh, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, Turkey and Yemen.

Fourteen countries in all, counting Saudi Arabia.

The alliance is intended to share intelligence, coordinate planning, conduct exercises and ultimately conduct maritime operations to protect navigation, trade and energy routes. Saudi Arabia has already appointed a commander, Rear Admiral Abdullah bin Salem Alshehri.

Suddenly the three-country story had become something much larger.

And much more interesting. Because these countries are not natural political clones.

They don’t have identical interests. They don’t have identical relationships with Washington. They don’t have identical relationships with Iran, Israel, China, Russia or one another.

Some are wealthy. Some are poor. Some are Arab. Turkey and Pakistan are not.

Some are monarchies. Some are republics.

Turkey is a NATO member. Pakistan is a nuclear power. Egypt controls one end of the Suez Canal.

Djibouti sits beside the Bab el-Mandeb and hosts foreign military bases from competing world powers. Qatar has pursued its own famously independent foreign policy.

And yet they have found one thing on which they increasingly agree:

The waterways around them have become too important—and too dangerous—to leave entirely to somebody else.

That may be the real story.

Not the creation of an Islamic NATO.

The emergence of regional ownership.

THE GEOGRAPHY DOESN’T CARE ABOUT POLITICS

Look at the map again.

At the northern end of the Red Sea is the Suez Canal. At the southern end is the Bab el-Mandeb. Beyond that lies the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. To the northeast is the Persian Gulf and another narrow passage: the Strait of Hormuz.

These are not obscure geographical features.

They are valves in the circulatory system of the world economy.

For decades, the United States Navy and its allies have played an enormous role in keeping those sea lanes open.

That was not charity. It was part of the post-World War II international system the United States helped build.

Open oceans. Protected commerce. Reliable energy supplies. American naval supremacy.

And, in return, extraordinary American influence.

But geography has begun imposing a new reality. The Iran conflict has threatened passage through Hormuz.

Houthi forces in Yemen have attacked shipping in and around the Red Sea and declared blockades against Saudi-linked maritime traffic.

Ships can avoid the Red Sea. But avoiding the Red Sea means sailing around Africa.

That takes time. Time means fuel. Fuel means money.

Money means higher freight rates, higher insurance premiums, delayed goods and eventually higher prices for somebody who has never heard of the Bab el-Mandeb.

That somebody may be standing in a grocery store in Ohio. Or waiting for a component in Germany. Or buying fuel in Florida.

There is nothing local about a maritime chokepoint.

And Saudi Arabia has an especially acute problem.

The kingdom spent decades building its prosperity around oil exports from the Persian Gulf.

When Hormuz became dangerous, Saudi Arabia had an alternative: its East-West pipeline can carry oil across the kingdom to Yanbu on the Red Sea. An escape route.

Except an escape route is only useful if the other end is open.

Once Saudi oil reaches the Red Sea, ships still face the Bab el-Mandeb on their way toward the Indian Ocean.

The Houthis understand this. So do the Saudis.

One blocked strait is a crisis. Two vulnerable straits can become a strategy.

THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE

The temptation is to see all of this as a completely new Middle East.

It isn’t.

The names change. The geography does not.

The British understood this better than almost anyone.

For the British Empire, the Mediterranean, Suez, the Red Sea and Aden formed the route to India. Control the route and you protect the empire. Lose the route and the map begins working against you.

When the Suez Canal opened in 1869, it transformed global commerce. Britain eventually made control of the canal a strategic obsession.

Then came 1956.

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.

Britain and France, working secretly with Israel, tried to reverse him militarily. They failed—not simply because of Egypt, but because the United States refused to support the old European imperial powers.

The Suez Crisis became one of the great markers of the twentieth century.

Britain still possessed warships. It still possessed soldiers. It still possessed nuclear weapons. What it no longer possessed was the freedom to act as though it alone determined the regional order.

Empires do not always end when they lose a war.

Sometimes they end when everyone realizes the old rules no longer apply.

THE MIDDLE EAST HAS TRIED THIS BEFORE

The idea of building a security system around the Middle East is not new.

In fact, the history of the last eighty years is littered with attempts to answer essentially the same question Saudi Arabia is asking today:

Who protects the region when the region becomes dangerous?

For Saudi Arabia, the modern answer began in February 1945.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was returning from the Yalta Conference when he met Saudi King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal. The meeting has acquired almost mythical status as the beginning of the modern American-Saudi relationship.

The bargain was never as simple as “oil for security,” although that phrase eventually became convenient shorthand for it. But the interests were unmistakable. Saudi Arabia possessed enormous petroleum reserves. The United States possessed something the young kingdom could not create for itself: global military power.

Over the decades that followed, those interests hardened into one of the strangest and most durable strategic relationships in American foreign policy.

A conservative Islamic monarchy and an American republic did not need to share political values. They needed one another.

But Saudi Arabia was hardly the only country searching for a security architecture.

In 1955, Britain, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan created what became known as the Baghdad Pact.

Look at two of those names again.

Turkey and Pakistan.

Seventy years later, they are back at the center of another attempt to construct a regional defense structure.

The original Baghdad Pact was designed largely as a barrier against Soviet expansion. It was part of the Cold War strategy of building alliances around the Soviet Union: NATO in Europe, SEATO in Southeast Asia and a defensive belt across the Middle East.

The United States supported the arrangement but never became a full member. And almost immediately, the regional realities proved more complicated than the alliance map.

Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser opposed the pact. Nasser represented another powerful idea sweeping the region: pan-Arabism.

Why should Arab countries attach themselves to security arrangements designed in London or Washington? Why not build Arab power instead?

Nasser attempted precisely that.

Egypt and Syria joined together in 1958 to form the United Arab Republic, an extraordinary experiment intended to demonstrate that Arab political unity could be more than a slogan. It lasted three years.

Syria withdrew in 1961.

The lesson would recur again and again: countries may share language, religion, geography and enemies and still have profoundly different national interests.

The Baghdad Pact didn’t fare much better.

A revolution overthrew the Iraqi monarchy in 1958. Iraq withdrew from the alliance the following year. The organization continued under a new name, the Central Treaty Organization—CENTO—with Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Britain.

Then came 1979.

The Iranian Revolution overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, one of Washington’s most important regional partners, and replaced his government with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic.

CENTO collapsed.

But 1979 did much more than destroy an alliance.

The Egypt-Israel peace treaty fundamentally rearranged Arab politics. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan at the end of the year. Revolutionary Iran now openly challenged both American influence and the conservative monarchies of the Gulf.

The strategic map had changed again.

Saudi Arabia and its neighbors responded.

In 1981, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman created the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Once again, regional countries were trying to build collective strength. And once again, history would reveal its limits.

In August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Iraqi army swallowed the country with astonishing speed and suddenly stood close to Saudi Arabia.

This was precisely the kind of existential crisis a regional security system was supposed to address.

But when Saudi Arabia looked at the Iraqi army across its northern frontier, the decisive military answer did not come from an Arab alliance or the Gulf Cooperation Council.

It came from the United States.

President George H. W. Bush ordered Operation Desert Shield. American forces poured into Saudi Arabia. An enormous international coalition assembled. In January 1991, Operation Desert Storm began.

Kuwait was liberated.

And the old arrangement had demonstrated its value with remarkable clarity.

When catastrophe came, America came too.

As Dr. Gary Kellner puts it, “For most of the postwar era, the Middle East could argue about America, resent America, even work against America. But when the roof came down, everybody knew where the fire department was.”

For the next generation, that assumption sat beneath much of the Gulf’s security structure.

American bases. American aircraft. American intelligence. American weapons. American naval power.

Then the relationship became more complicated.

The September 11 attacks transformed America’s relationship with the region. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq followed. Americans spent lives, money and political capital in conflicts that seemed increasingly difficult to end.

The Arab Spring began in 2010 and toppled governments Americans had known for decades. Syria descended into civil war. ISIS created a self-declared caliphate across large parts of Syria and Iraq. Iran expanded relationships with armed groups across the region. Russia intervened militarily in Syria. Saudi Arabia became trapped in a costly war in Yemen.

And China arrived not with an aircraft carrier but with money, trade and diplomacy.

By the 2020s, the question facing the Gulf states had changed. It was no longer simply:

Can America protect us?

America plainly could.

The question was:

Can we safely assume that America always will?

That distinction helps explain what is happening now.

The Baghdad Pact was built in the shadow of the Cold War. CENTO depended heavily on outside powers. The Gulf Cooperation Council never developed into a NATO-style military alliance.

For decades, whenever regional arrangements proved insufficient, the United States remained the ultimate backstop.

Saudi Arabia’s emerging strategy appears to be testing a different proposition.

Keep the American relationship. But build other relationships too.

Turkey. Pakistan. Egypt. The Gulf states. The Red Sea countries.

Perhaps eventually others.

Not one protector. A network.

And that may be what makes this moment different from the failed alliances that came before it.

The Middle East has tried collective security before.

What it has rarely tried is building it with a regional power sitting at the center of the table and the United States no longer automatically sitting at the head.

That is why the Saudi story deserves more attention than it has received.  

We may be watching another adjustment in who believes he has the authority—and the responsibility—to keep the region functioning.

WHY NOW?

Saudi Arabia has not suddenly become anti-American.

That interpretation is too easy. And probably wrong. The kingdom still has deep military, economic and strategic ties to the United States.

Turkey remains in NATO. Pakistan has had an extraordinarily complicated but longstanding relationship with Washington. The three-country Makkah agreement itself has been presented as complementary to existing international security structures rather than a replacement for them.

So this is not necessarily Saudi Arabia telling America to leave.

It may be Saudi Arabia saying something considerably more consequential:

We cannot assume America will always arrive.

That is a different proposition.

For generations, much of the Middle East’s security architecture ultimately rested on American power.

The United States protected shipping. The United States sold weapons. The United States maintained bases. The United States deterred adversaries. The United States negotiated between governments that frequently refused to speak directly to one another.

And whenever the region approached catastrophe, presidents from both parties discovered that however much Americans wanted to be finished with the Middle East, the Middle East was rarely finished with America.

But American politics has changed.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan changed it.

Donald Trump’s transactional approach to alliances changed it.

The rise of China changed it. Russia’s return changed it. And regional governments themselves changed.

Saudi Arabia today is not the Saudi Arabia of 1973.

Mohammed bin Salman has been determined to make the kingdom not merely rich but powerful.

Those are different things.

Money buys weapons. Power creates choices.

And the ability to choose among Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Ankara, Islamabad and regional partners is itself a form of power.

THE PAKISTAN QUESTION

Pakistan makes this story impossible to treat casually.

It tested nuclear weapons in 1998, shortly after India conducted its own tests.

Since then, South Asia has lived with the reality of two nuclear-armed rivals facing one another across one of the world’s most dangerous borders.

Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was developed for Pakistan.

Nothing in the Saudi-Pakistani or Makkah agreements automatically transfers nuclear weapons or a nuclear guarantee to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi officials have specifically rejected suggestions that the Makkah agreement is connected to nuclear ambitions or an arms race.

That distinction matters.

But so does perception. Deterrence is partly about capability.

It is also about what an adversary believes might happen.

When Saudi Arabia enters a mutual-defense relationship with a nuclear-armed state, every strategic planner in the region has to include that fact somewhere in the calculation.

Iran notices. Israel notices. India certainly notices. Washington notices. So does China.

The agreement does not have to contain a secret nuclear clause to change strategic psychology.

Sometimes ambiguity itself is useful.

AND THEN THERE IS TURKEY

Turkey may be the most fascinating member of the three-country pact.

It has been a NATO member since 1952. It possesses the second-largest military in the alliance. It controls access between the Black Sea and Mediterranean through the Turkish Straits. It sits beside Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

For decades, Turkey was described primarily as NATO’s southeastern flank.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has spent years making clear that Turkey sees itself as considerably more than somebody else’s flank.

Turkey buys weapons where it believes its interests require them. It bargains with Russia. It bargains with Europe. It competes and cooperates across the Middle East. It has built a defense industry with growing international reach.

And now it has entered a collective-defense arrangement with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Turkey insists this does not compete with NATO.

Perhaps it doesn’t.

But it does reveal something about the emerging international system.

Countries increasingly refuse to belong to only one room.

Turkey can be in NATO and in Mecca.

Saudi Arabia can maintain an American security relationship while building its own regional architecture.

Pakistan can maintain ties with China while deepening defense relationships with Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

This is not the Cold War.

There may no longer be only two doors.

WHO IS THE ALLIANCE AGAINST?

Everyone involved is careful with this question.

The official answer is: nobody.

The Makkah pact is described as defensive and not directed against any particular country. The maritime coalition says essentially the same thing.

That is diplomatically sensible.

But nations do not spend billions of dollars on defense because everyone is getting along.

Iran is impossible to ignore. The Houthis are impossible to ignore. Israel is impossible to ignore. The instability created by war is impossible to ignore.

The real answer may be that these alliances are directed less against a single enemy than against uncertainty itself.

Saudi Arabia has watched Iranian power expand and contract. It has fought a disastrous war against the Houthis in Yemen. It has watched Israel demonstrate extraordinary military reach. It has watched America enter the region, leave the region, return to the region and debate leaving again. It has watched Russia intervene in Syria. It has watched China broker diplomacy.

It has watched global shipping become vulnerable to relatively inexpensive drones and missiles.

From Riyadh, the lesson may be obvious.

Never depend upon a single protector.

That is not ideology.

It is insurance.

WHERE IS ISRAEL?

This is where the story becomes even more delicate.

For years, one of Washington’s great strategic ambitions was to move Saudi Arabia and Israel toward normalization.

The Abraham Accords had already changed Israel’s relationships with several Arab states.

Saudi recognition of Israel would have been the grand prize. But the regional wars changed the political landscape.

And now Saudi Arabia is building security relationships that include countries with very different views of Israel.

Turkey’s relationship with Israel has deteriorated sharply. Pakistan does not recognize Israel. Saudi Arabia has never formally recognized Israel.

Yet all three have important relationships with the United States.

This does not automatically create an anti-Israel alliance. But Israel cannot ignore a defense arrangement connecting Saudi wealth, Turkish military capacity and Pakistani nuclear capability.

Especially if that arrangement expands. And expansion is no longer hypothetical.

The agreement has been explicitly left open to additional countries.

Egypt has been discussed as a possible participant. And as of this week, Bangladesh is considering whether to join the Makkah pact.

That decision would be consequential well beyond the Middle East.

Bangladesh has historically tried to balance relationships with India, China, the United States and the Muslim world.  Joining a defense structure containing Pakistan could complicate its relationship with India immediately.

Which demonstrates the problem with alliances.

They solve one security dilemma by creating another.

THE ALLIANCE THAT DIDN’T COME FROM WASHINGTON

There is another irony here.

The United States has tried before to encourage something resembling an “Arab NATO.”

The idea was straightforward. Build a regional security architecture capable of containing Iran and reducing the burden on the United States.

It never truly materialized. The interests of the countries involved were too different. Their rivalries were too deep. Some did not want to antagonize Iran. Some did not trust one another.

And some wanted American protection without surrendering their own freedom of action.

Now something resembling the idea is beginning to emerge.

Except Washington did not build it.

Riyadh did.

And it isn’t exclusively Arab.

Pakistan matters precisely because it is not Arab. Turkey matters precisely because it is not Arab. Perhaps the old idea failed because Washington was trying to construct an alliance according to America’s map of the region.

Saudi Arabia is now constructing one according to its own.

That difference may prove enormous.

THE COUNTRIES THAT AREN’T THERE

Sometimes the most interesting names on an alliance roster are the missing ones.

The United Arab Emirates is not among the founding members of the maritime coalition. Neither is Oman. Both are Gulf states. Both care intensely about maritime security. Both have reasons to avoid allowing the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden or surrounding waters to descend into chaos.

Their absence reminds us that this is not yet a unified Middle East.

Far from it.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have cooperated closely, but they have also developed competing interests.

Oman has traditionally pursued an independent foreign policy and frequently acts as a diplomatic bridge to Iran. Egypt joined the maritime coalition but has not yet joined the three-country mutual-defense pact.

Every additional commitment creates another calculation.

If Egypt joins an alliance with Pakistan, what does India think? If Turkey’s new obligations collide with NATO obligations, which takes precedence? If Saudi Arabia is attacked by an Iranian proxy, what precisely constitutes an “attack” under the Mecca agreement?

Does Turkey respond militarily? Does Pakistan? What if Pakistan clashes with India? Does Saudi Arabia now have an obligation? What if Turkey becomes involved in another confrontation connected to Syria?

These are not reasons the alliance will fail.

They are the questions every alliance eventually has to answer.

NATO discovered that Article 5 was beautifully simple on paper and enormously complicated in the real world.

Collective defense works when potential adversaries believe the commitment. But the stronger the commitment becomes, the more dangerous the obligations become as well.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR AMERICA?

Probably not what either side of the American political argument wants it to mean.

It does not prove that America has lost the Middle East.

The United States remains an extraordinary military power in the region. Its relationships, bases, intelligence capabilities, weapons systems and diplomatic influence cannot simply be replaced.

But influence is not binary. America does not have to disappear for American primacy to diminish.

The important change comes when other countries begin planning for a world in which Washington is one essential partner rather than the indispensable partner.

That is what may be happening.

And there is a paradox.

For years, American presidents have told allies to do more for their own defense. Pay more. Build more. Take responsibility. Stop assuming the American taxpayer will underwrite every security problem forever.

Now some of them are doing exactly that.

And Washington may discover that allied independence is considerably more complicated than allied dependence.

For decades, the United States asked its partners to carry more of the burden. But carrying the burden also means having a greater say in where it is carried, against whom, and for what purpose.

That is the bargain.

Saudi Arabia is not leaving the American orbit. Turkey is not leaving NATO. Pakistan is not abandoning its relationships with China or the West.

Something subtler may be happening.

They are building a world in which none of those relationships has to be exclusive.

As Dr. Kellner puts it, “Saudi Arabia isn’t necessarily walking away from the United States. It may simply be preparing for a world in which it no longer has to wait for the United States to walk in.”

That may ultimately be more important than whether anyone ever calls this an “Islamic NATO.”

NATO was born in 1949 from a particular moment: a devastated Europe, an expanding Soviet Union and an America willing to place its military power permanently behind the defense of other countries.

The emerging Saudi architecture comes from a very different moment.

America is still powerful. China is more powerful. Russia remains dangerous. Iran remains unpredictable. Israel has demonstrated extraordinary military reach.

And the countries between them have learned that depending upon any single great power carries risks of its own.

So they are hedging. Building. Talking to governments they once kept at a distance. Creating overlapping alliances rather than choosing a single camp.  The map is being redrawn—not necessarily by moving borders, but by moving relationships.

That is what makes the thirteen nations surrounding Saudi Arabia worth watching.

The question is not whether Mohammed bin Salman has created another NATO.

He hasn’t.

The question is whether Saudi Arabia and its neighbors have begun constructing something that, for perhaps the first time in the modern era, they believe they can own themselves.

For most of the last eighty years, when the Middle East became dangerous, the question was:

What will America do?

The next era may begin with another question.

What will the Middle East do without waiting to ask?