Saudi-Pakistan Defence Pact and India’s Evolving Engagement in West Asia

The Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA), signed on September 17,2025, is a dramatic development amidst a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape in West and South Asia. Pakistan’s strategic elite has once again shown itself adept at geopolitical rent-seeking by leveraging the country’s nuclear status, religious identity, and geographical proximity to the Arab World to cultivate partnerships that can bail out its crisis-ridden economy. However, Pakistan’s primary objective is to counter India’s new assertive deterrence posture in ‘Operation Sindoor’, which established new rules of engagement, challenging Pakistan’s policy of using terrorist groups to secure its geopolitical goals under its nuclear umbrella. Saudi Arabia, for its part, seeks to shore up flailing deterrence against Iran and Israel. By asserting an outsized security role in the Gulf region, Pakistan is also holding out the promise of burden-sharing to the United States, increasingly viewed as an unreliable security guarantor despite its longstanding military preponderance in the region.