Pakistan
Updated
What it is
Pakistan is a South Asian nuclear-armed state with one of the world's largest standing militaries, and it has deep, decades-old informal security ties to Gulf Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia. In 2025-2026 those ties were formalized into explicit mutual-defense commitments across the Gulf.
Why it matters lately
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed a Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement on September 17, 2025, and Pakistan had begun sending fighter jets to Saudi Arabia under the pact by April 2026. The arrangement expanded further in 2026: on August 7, 2026, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed a trilateral Joint Defence Agreement treating an attack on any one signatory as an attack on all, and on August 27, 2026, Pakistan signed a separate defense protocol with Kuwait to help train its military and build border-security capacity.
Asymmetric Analytics view
Inference (AA): Pakistan's expanding web of Gulf defense pacts is a channel through which a Pakistan-related conflict could draw in Gulf states, a scenario the ELSI graph monitors for regional spillover risk.