When Alliances Stop Working
Saudi Arabia and the limits of regional strategy
In a recent report, Turkiye Today, citing sources close to Saudi military leadership, stated that Ankara has no intention of joining any Saudi–Pakistani defense pact and that cooperation between Riyadh and Islamabad is expected to remain strictly bilateral. The report did not announce a policy shift, but it did serve to delimit expectations surrounding Saudi-led security configurations. Riyadh has shown growing reluctance to anchor its regional posture in formalized, multilateral structures, preferring arrangements that remain narrow, reversible, and politically insulated.
This pattern helps explain why several high-profile frameworks associated with Saudi Arabia — including IMEC and the normalization track with Israel — have stalled without being formally abandoned. Their ambiguity is not accidental. It allows Riyadh to keep these projects visible as diplomatic currency while shifting the actual burden of security, deterrence, and regional balancing onto channels that are less public, less ideological, and harder to sanction.
What often appears, from the outside, as a series of disconnected regional stories — Pakistan, Turkey, Israel, Iran, or the Palestinian question — increasingly functions in Saudi strategy as secondary terrain. The more consequential layer lies elsewhere: in the reconfiguration of South and West Asia, in the balance between India and China, and in the emerging architectures of connectivity, deterrence, and influence that cut across the Middle East rather than stop within it. It is in this wider frame that Mohammed bin Salman’s approach becomes intelligible — not as a search for a new camp or patron, but as an effort to reposition Saudi Arabia as a node in a much larger geopolitical system, one where regional crises are managed, leveraged, or deferred, but rarely allowed to define the strategy itself.
The Limits of Formal Commitments
By the mid-2020s, formal alliances increasingly ceased to perform their core function of absorbing uncertainty and instead began to translate volatility into fixed commitments and visible exposure, reducing room for maneuver at precisely the moments when adaptability mattered most. Saudi Arabia internalized this shift through practice: coalition frameworks expanded responsibility across military, maritime, and logistical spaces without preserving escalation control, as instability propagated from conflict zones into trade routes, chokepoints, and peripheral theaters. Diverging Saudi and Emirati approaches to maritime security, alongside Qatar’s reintegration outside formal security architectures, underscored a recurring imbalance between visibility and leverage — one already familiar from earlier Arab and Islamic security formats that prioritized symbolic leadership while constraining flexibility once commitments were declared.
External alignments reinforced the same logic. Under the second Trump administration, U.S.–Saudi relations regained transactional clarity yet remained highly personalized and interest-contingent, while after October 7 normalization with Israel shifted from a bounded diplomatic instrument into a politically loaded exposure tied to the Palestinian question and to the absence of a consolidated domestic consensus in Israel over authority, governance, and external decision-making. Iran further sharpened this calculus: neither regime collapse nor reintegration offers Riyadh a stable outcome, forcing Saudi strategy toward containment rather than resolution. The cumulative result is a shift in strategic grammar — away from blocs and toward functional, reversible arrangements — a logic that pushes Saudi positioning beyond a Middle Eastern frame and into the wider competitive space shaped by U.S.–China rivalry and China–India friction.
Pakistan as Interface: South Asia, China, and Saudi Arabia’s Post-Bloc Strategy
Long-standing military, financial, and security ties between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have recently been reactivated in a context where Riyadh increasingly treats partnerships as mechanisms that extend reach across systems Saudi Arabia neither controls nor seeks to dominate directly. Pakistan’s relevance lies in its position within South Asia’s structural fault lines. As India consolidates its role as a U.S.-aligned Indo-Pacific actor and positions itself as the western anchor of American connectivity strategies, Pakistan remains embedded in China’s continental logic — through CPEC, defense-industrial integration, and strategic coordination shaped by the India–China rivalry. This makes Islamabad indispensable as an interface between Chinese-led infrastructure space and non-Chinese regional actors.
That interface comes at a cost. Pakistan is structurally burdened by the Kashmir conflict, chronic political fragility, and the primacy of its military–intelligence apparatus, which operates according to logics of endurance. Kashmir, in this sense, is a controlled escalation zone that anchors Pakistan’s relevance while permanently constraining its sovereignty. For external partners, this makes Pakistan unreliable as a growth platform or diplomatic ally, but usable as a carrier of functions that depend on deniability, compartmentalization, and the normalization of risk. Saudi Arabia works through these liabilities, precisely because they prevent Pakistan from stabilizing into any single camp.
South Asia, in this configuration, operates as a contested logistics space where continental and maritime systems intersect under permanent stress. Pakistan sits astride their most vulnerable junctions: from Gwadar as a pressure valve on the Arabian Sea, to inland corridors linking China’s western provinces with energy routes bypassing the Malacca chokepoint. Unlike India’s port-centered, visibility-heavy connectivity model, Pakistan’s infrastructure is inseparable from intelligence management and military oversight, allowing trade, security, and deniability to move together. This is precisely what makes the system functional — and unattractive to actors dependent on transparency, predictability, and legal finality.
Operating through Pakistan places Saudi Arabia inside this contested Asian geometry without forcing declarative choices. The second-order effect is exposure to a system where escalation is managed through intelligence channels, logistics redundancy, and controlled ambiguity rather than alliance guarantees. China is not a partner in this configuration, but a condition of it. As Beijing narrows its tolerance for external political exposure — a trend reinforced by Taiwan’s elevation from distant contingency to planning horizon — architectures that separate presence from responsibility become more durable. Pakistan carries exposure; Saudi Arabia gains access; China remains embedded without being addressed. Against this backdrop, IMEC and normalization with Israel are repositioned: not as foundations of Saudi strategy, but as selective overlays on a much deeper Asian engagement shaped by routes, pressure points, and deterrence logics that lie east of the Middle East.
Turkey, IMEC, and the Limits of Completion
Speculation around Turkey’s possible inclusion in Saudi-led security or connectivity frameworks should be read less as a negotiating track than as a signaling exercise. Ankara’s interest reflects a bid for authorship — a desire to inscribe itself into emerging structures as a visible regional pillar. Riyadh’s response, by contrast, has been to cap expectations without foreclosing optionality. It is a way of keeping Turkey in play without allowing its participation to harden unfinished arrangements into politicized commitments. The ambiguity itself is functional, especially at a moment when U.S. and Israeli preferences favor manageability over expansion rather than the opening of new fault lines with Ankara.
IMEC, in this context, has been redefined. The corridor continues to advance where it already works: in Emirati logistics, Indian westward connectivity, and Israeli technological integration. What has dropped away is its earlier ambition to serve as a strategic spine for a new regional order. IMEC no longer competes with continental systems running through Pakistan and Central Asia, nor does it replace them. It operates alongside them, as a maritime, high-visibility layer in a much denser connectivity environment. Its strength lies precisely in its partiality: it moves goods and capital, not security guarantees or political outcomes.
What ultimately distinguishes Saudi Arabia’s emerging posture from Israel’s is not ambition or threat perception, but time. Israeli strategic culture remains oriented toward closure: wars are meant to end, agreements to bind, uncertainty to be resolved. Saudi strategy under Mohammed bin Salman increasingly operates on the opposite premise — that in a system defined by cascading risks, premature resolution can be more destabilizing than managed suspension. Conflicts are not solved but stabilized; partnerships are not concluded but kept reversible; political outcomes are deferred until they acquire shape without demanding sponsorship.
This divergence explains why normalization with Israel, like IMEC, never fully converts into an endpoint. It also clarifies Riyadh’s posture toward Iran: neither regime collapse nor rapid reintegration is attractive unless it produces a controllable, suspended order rather than open-ended chaos. For Israel, the challenge is not exclusion from Saudi strategy, but misreading it. Treating ambiguity as hesitation invites pressure; recognizing it as equilibrium demands adaptation. In a regional system increasingly governed by unfinished wars and incomplete architectures, strategic relevance will depend less on securing closure than on operating coherently without it.
