PAKISTAN-SAUDI DEFENCE DIPLOMACY: A NEOCLASSICAL REALIST ANALYSIS OF OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

Abstract

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have sustained one of the more durable security partnerships in the Muslim world for almost six decades, yet the relationship has also survived a direct Saudi request refused by Pakistan's own parliament in 2015 and a persistent asymmetry in wealth and military capacity. A Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed in September 2025 has sharpened rather than resolved this puzzle: officials describe it as historic, independent analysts as a modest reaffirmation of existing practice, and at least one international body as an unstated extension of Pakistani nuclear protection to Saudi Arabia. Existing scholarship, largely descriptive and reliant on documentary sources alone, has not adjudicated these competing readings. This article addresses that gap by examining, through Neoclassical Realism applied as a single, consistently specified framework, the historical and strategic factors that have shaped Pakistan-Saudi defence cooperation, the challenges currently confronting it, and the opportunities available for strengthening it. Drawing on process-traced documentary evidence and twelve semi-structured interviews with military, diplomatic, academic, and policy practitioners, thematically analysed and triangulated throughout, the article finds that the relationship is best understood not as a single alliance but as several parallel tracks. Constraint tied to domestic politics and sectarian sensitivity toward Iran binds tightly around politically visible cooperation such as troop deployment, and only loosely around technical cooperation such as training, naval exercises, and defence-industrial exchange, a pattern that explains both the relationship's historical survival and the 2025 pact's deliberate ambiguity. The article extends Neoclassical Realism to an asymmetric, Muslim-majority security relationship underrepresented in the wider literature and recommends that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia institutionalise their cooperation separately by track rather than through a single undifferentiated mechanism.