Two Shields Over One Country
Late on Wednesday, Turkey’s parliament began ratifying a treaty that commits NATO’s second-largest army to the defence of Saudi Arabia. By midnight it had approved only the first of 16 articles, and the debate resumed on Thursday afternoon. Eight months earlier, four Iranian ballistic missiles that crossed into Turkish airspace were shot down by NATO air defences, the first reportedly by an American destroyer.
Put those two facts side by side and the paradox is complete. Ankara sleeps under NATO’s missile shield while pledging, in a pact signed in Mecca on 7 August, to treat an attack on Riyadh or Islamabad as an attack on itself. Most commentary reads this as Turkey drifting away from the West. It is closer to the opposite: Turkey has found a way to profit from the West’s retreat without leaving it.
From a Bilateral Pact to a Trilateral One
The pact Turkey is ratifying began as a bilateral deal. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a mutual defence agreement on 17 September 2025, days after Israel struck Hamas officials in Doha. Turkey sought to join in January, but the talks stalled. Then the US-Israeli war on Iran began in late February, and Saudi Arabia came under repeated attack from Iran, Iraqi militias and the Houthis. When Riyadh asked Washington to strike the Houthis, President Trump reportedly pulled back rather than open a new front.
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