Tehran, Iran – Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have expanded their mutual defence pact to add Turkiye, raising questions about the emergence of a new security architecture at a time when the United States and Iran have yet to reach a final deal to end their war.
Under the agreement signed in Mecca on Friday, any external armed attack on either of the three countries will now be considered an attack on all.
The trilateral pact was announced more than five months after the US and Israel launched a bombing campaign against Iran, triggering a conflict that quickly spread to the Gulf and disrupted maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye, however, have been careful not to antagonise any regional or international actors while finalising what they said was the result of years of hard work and negotiations. They have stressed the pact, which does not identify a specific threat, is not targeted against any country – particularly Iran – and does not abrogate or replace any existing agreements with others.
In Tehran, the reaction has largely been subdued, with officials mostly focusing on aspects of regional and Muslim cooperation and what they perceive as a declining role for the US.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Friday that when Muslims stand together, “we can face every challenge by malicious outsiders head-on”.
“Time to rely only on ourselves and embrace true brotherhood,” he wrote on X, without directly mentioning the trilateral agreement signed hours earlier.
But Iran certainly sees some reasons to be concerned in the long run, according to Hamidreza Azizi, a researcher and analyst on Iran and Middle Eastern geopolitical dynamics.
The associate at Clingendael Institute told Al Jazeera that the timing is important, since the agreement comes after months of a war in which Saudi Arabia has faced attacks from the Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen and armed groups in neighbouring Iraq.
“From Tehran’s perspective, the concern is therefore not only that the pact could strengthen Saudi deterrence, but that it could eventually facilitate coordinated pressure on Iran in Yemen, Iraq, and even economically through Turkiye and Pakistan,” he said.
On Sunday, the Houthis claimed another successful drone strike on the Saudi Aramco refinery in Jizan. Saudi Arabia confirmed a fire was extinguished without inflicting casualties, but did not mention the cause.
Separately in Yemen, Houthi missiles and drones struck the Saudi-backed and internationally recognised government’s Red Sea port of al-Makha, with officials reporting at least seven people killed, 15 wounded and severe infrastructure damage. The Yemeni group, which has also been hitting or turning back Saudi-linked ships in the Red Sea over recent weeks, said it targeted weapons depots.
‘A strong bloc’
Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not released a formal statement about the Pakistan-Saudi-Turkiye deal, but a senior official outlined Tehran’s diplomatic thinking in an interview with local media on Saturday.
Hossein Noushabadi, a director general for parliamentary and legal affairs, told the state-linked ISNA news service that the ministry predominantly regards the agreement within the context of a diminishing direct US presence in the region.
The pact “is being viewed as the beginning of the collapse of US security hegemony in West Asia and the Persian Gulf”, said Noushabadi.
“It appears that, in the not-too-distant future, a new regional security order based on cooperation among regional states will replace the power structures imposed by extra-regional actors, heralding the end of the prevailing security and geopolitical paradigm and West Asia’s departure from the sphere of vital US interests,” added the official, who is a former Iranian envoy to Oman.
Political scientist Vali Nasr said he does not believe the pact is currently a threat to Tehran.
“For now, these are all elements of a post-American security order in the Middle East,” the professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University told Al Jazeera.
“This is also as much a balance to the Abraham Accords as a direct challenge to Tehran,” he added, in reference to the US-pushed regional normalisation effort with Israel, which US President Donald Trump last month tied with a civil nuclear deal sought by Saudi Arabia.
Mehran Kamrava, a professor of government at Georgetown University of Qatar, also agreed that decision-makers in Iran do not immediately feel threatened by the pact, especially since they have maintained cordial relations with both Pakistan and Turkiye even under trying circumstances.
“Ultimately, this pact is not that new, nor is it something that, at present at least, has a great deal of substance beyond its symbolic significance. For example, neither Turkiye nor Pakistan would be willing to get involved in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen despite recent Houthi attacks on the kingdom,” Kamrava told Al Jazeera.
Not all inside Iran are content with the pact, however, with some hardline lawmakers and media arguing that it could ultimately be directed against the “resistance front” of Tehran-backed armed forces across the region, and degrade Pakistan’s credibility as a main mediator between Iran and the US and others.
“It’s clear that Arab states finally understand security cannot be imported; it must be built within the region. However, a roadmap is still missing,” Ebrahim Azizi, a member of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, said in a more hawkish viewing of the pact.
“Warning: Miscalculation is a historical mistake. Iran has proven that every error comes at a cost. Balance is the only way forward,” he wrote on X.
Ebrahim Rezaei, another member of the commission, also wrote on X that “a paper agreement with Turkiye and Pakistan” will not bring Saudi Arabia security, “just as years of one-sided dependence on the Americans did not bring them security”.
Is Iran missing out?
Clingendael Institute’s Azizi said Tehran’s priority will likely be to avoid turning the pact into an explicitly anti-Iranian coalition amid a war with regional repercussions, and that would mean preserving individual relations with each of the three countries.
He said Tehran can also continue to emphasise its long-standing argument that regional security should ultimately be organised by regional states rather than external powers.
“If those states come to see the pact as providing meaningful protection against Iran or Iran-aligned groups, that would make Iranian membership even more difficult,” said Azizi. “Over the longer term, however, if the arrangement evolves from a balancing coalition into a broader regional security architecture, the question of Iranian participation could look quite different.”
Experts also said it could be a possibility that Iran itself would be seeking potential membership in the pact in a distant future, but that would mean a sustainable end to attacks in the Strait of Hormuz and across the region, while expansion to other regional Arab states seems more plausible in the near term. Egypt has already been floated as a candidate, but that could be a complex decision for Cairo to make.
Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North African Programme at Chatham House, said the trilateral pact reflects both short- and long-term security concerns and opportunities for Riyadh, Islamabad and Ankara.
“They are driven together to forge greater diplomatic and defence cooperation in reaction to US unreliability, Israeli revisionism and Iranian retaliation,” she told Al Jazeera.
