The Arab Gulf states have for decades looked externally for their security, particularly to the West.

The United States, United Kingdom and France have bases throughout the region, underscoring the Gulf’s importance to the West. But the sense of security these bases provide is not as solid as it once was.

In the US, a growing segment of the foreign policy sphere views East Asia as more important to Washington, largely because of the rise of China as a threat to American hegemony.

Analysts who argue that the West is no longer a reliable protector for the Gulf point to evidence such as the September attack on Doha by Israel, which continues to receive US support despite Washington’s attempt to distance itself from the strike.

The uncertainty seems to have prompted Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states to consider other options for their security with perhaps the most notable recent example being the defence pact signed by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan last month.

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have continued to strengthen ties, including a visit to the latter by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on October 27, in which a wide-ranging economic framework was signed.

The GCC and collective security

Collective security in the GCC can be achieved through two separate but related concepts: “collective management” and “endogenous security”.

Collective management in the context of GCC security would include large regional powers, such as Egypt, Pakistan and Turkiye, forming an alliance that would have a shared interest in providing security to countries in the wider Islamic world.

Egypt has the strongest and largest Arab army, and after the attack on Qatar, its president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, proposed a force that could intervene if any Arab country is attacked, offering 20,000 military personnel.

Pakistan is the only Muslim country with nuclear deterrence, and Defence Minister Khawaja Asif has not ruled out the possibility of other Arab countries joining the agreement between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Turkiye is a NATO member with Western military standards and modern weaponry and does not shy away from taking positions that are supportive of other Muslim-majority countries.

Previous iterations of these alliances have historically fallen short of their goals, such as the Middle East Strategic Alliance, proposed during the first administration of US President Donald Trump to stand against Iran and its allied forces but which proved ineffective.

That was partly a result of its focus on Iran, even as many regional countries were moving away from viewing Iran as an immediate threat, unlike the US view of Tehran.

The second form of security is endogenous security, based on shared defence structures among GCC members, who have signed numerous regional security and defence pacts.

These include the formation of a unified army named the Peninsula Shield Force (PSF) in 1984, the Joint Defence Agreement (JDA) in 2000 – modelled on NATO’s Article 5 and committing to collective defence – and finally the Unified Military Command in 2013, which aimed for a more integrated and centralised command structure.

Although these unions somewhat strengthened the sense of collective security among members, they did not change the fact that individual countries had longstanding reliance on external guarantors, sovereignty concerns and divergent responses to regional conflicts.

The PSF was virtually useless during the 1990 invasion of Kuwait because it had only a brigade-sized force (roughly 5,000 soldiers) at the time and was caught off guard by the scale and speed of the Iraqi invasion. The JDA only convened an emergency meeting during the Israeli attack on Doha, reiterating the indivisibility of member states’ security. The goal of the JDA is collective action against an aggressor force like NATO. It should have achieved this aim through more comprehensive mechanisms or coalitions with other military alliances, but it lacked this capability.

These incidents underline that what exists is a joint military command structure with little cohesion, based on mutual defence agreements that are hard to enforce.

The presence of US forces and reliance on US arms supplies limit the GCC’s ability for independent action. Furthermore, the militaries of these countries lack extensive combat experience compared with other regional armies like those of Egypt and Turkiye.

There remain, however, five key areas the GCC could cooperate in: logistics and supply chains, technological innovation, defence industrial management and production, intelligence sharing, and air and missile defence.

It remains to be seen how the GCC will manage such coalitions alongside the presence of external powers and what path it will take towards achieving collective security.

Saudi Arabia’s diversification

On September 17, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA), stipulating that aggression against one would be considered aggression against both, a clause reminiscent of Article 5 of NATO’s North Atlantic Treaty.

The deal diversified Saudi Arabia’s security guarantees, reduced its dependence on the US and underlined its autonomy on defence arrangements outside the Western mandate, giving it a balance between the power poles of the US, China and the region.

Although China avoids formal military alliances in the Middle East, it would be happy to see its rival Washington constrained. China has close ties with Pakistan, and a more formal Saudi presence in Pakistan would be welcomed by Beijing.

China has invested billions of dollars in infrastructure and energy projects under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and is Pakistan’s largest trading partner with bilateral trade of more than $25bn annually. China also accounts for 81 percent of Pakistan’s arms imports.

However, the US presence in the Middle East is massive and longstanding. It has 19 bases in the region, led an international coalition to liberate Kuwait in 1991 and protects commercial shipping in the Gulf – as well as leading the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq and decades-long support for Israel.

On the other hand, Pakistan has its own conflicts with India and Afghanistan, giving it limited capacity for effective involvement in Middle Eastern crises, despite the mutual defence clause.

Therefore, while this pact diversifies Riyadh’s security options, it is not yet capable of redefining its traditional security dependencies.

Tangible achievements

But the agreement still represents a novel, non-Western approach to regional security, entrusting the resolution of security complexities to the regional countries themselves.

It also allows these countries to benefit from each other’s assets and resources. Through cooperation with Pakistan’s defence industries, Saudi Arabia seeks to realise its ambitious Vision 2030 goals, which include localising 50 percent of its defence needs within the next five years and joining the ranks of the world’s top 25 arms-exporting countries.

Pakistan has made huge progress in its missile industry with its Shaheen-3 missile reaching a range of 2,750km (1,709 miles), even raising concerns about the possible production of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting targets as far as the US.

Saudi Arabia has previously cooperated with China in this field and can now invest in drone and missile industries with Pakistan, giving it a deterrent against Iranian missile threats.

Pakistani engineers and institutions, such as the Heavy Industries Taxila and the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, have the expertise to build, maintain and repair drones, aircraft and aviation equipment.

Saudi Arabia could benefit from cooperation with them by providing generous funding that could eventually benefit civilian sectors such as aerospace, artificial intelligence, robotics, cybersecurity and electronics.

Despite such collaborations appearing straightforward at first glance, they face operational challenges.

Defence cooperation and the establishment of joint military industries require the coordination and integration of defence standards. Saudi Arabia’s defence system is Western in nature and deeply dependent on American hardware, intelligence and support networks whereas Pakistani technologies – though cost-effective – are generally at a lower level of technical complexity compared with their Western counterparts, which could complicate mutual cooperation.

Moreover, bureaucracies in the two countries operate at different speeds. Riyadh’s reform agenda is centralised and capital-intensive while Pakistan’s defence sector remains heavily state-controlled and faces budget shortages.

Therefore, cooperation in joint military production, in addition to standardising protocols, requires overcoming administrative and cultural challenges.

The new Saudi-Pakistan defence pact and broader discussions around collective management and endogenous security in the Gulf illustrate that the region is at an inflexion point.

The longstanding dependence on Western protection is being reassessed, not through abrupt abandonment but through diversifying security guarantees. The shift does not yet signal a wholesale decoupling from the US but instead a recalibration with Gulf capitals testing the viability of parallel security arrangements.

The Saudi-Pakistan agreement reflects a willingness to engage new partners and reimagine security as something not just provided by Western powers but jointly constructed by regional actors.

Whether that happens will depend on many factors, including political will and whether these new partnerships are strong enough to eventually replace the old way of doing things. For now, the region is witnessing the early stages of a potential strategic rebalancing – one that could, over time, redefine Gulf and regional security and how it fits within the wider world.