As Dhaka signals openness to the new Saudi-Turkey-Pakistan defence pact, this article argues Bangladesh should resist the pull to formalise its interest; its mutual-defense clause risks entangling Bangladesh in disputes it did not choose while flattening a web of separate Gulf, Iranian and Indian relationships it can’t afford to subordinate.
On 20 August, State Minister for Foreign Affairs Humayun Kabir told the Bangladesh’s state news agency (BSS) that Dhaka “maintains a positive approach towards the possibility of joining an economic or defence framework involving Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey, taking into account its own interests and the changing dynamics of the global economy and trade.” It was a carefully hedged sentence, and notably, not a commitment. Days later Kabir went further, saying Bangladesh had “expressed our interest in the Makkah Defence pact”, and on 27 August Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman told parliament that Dhaka would consider joining “positively” if the founding members invited it. Bangladesh is reportedly the second state, after Egypt, to signal interest in the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement since Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed it at Al-Safa Palace on 7 August. For a pact barely two weeks old at the time Kabir spoke, that is a quick pull, and it is worth asking what is drawing Dhaka toward the door before asking whether it should walk through it.
The agreement itself is a genuine departure from the way defence commitments in the region have usually been written – often relying on security guarantees from foreign hegemons like the United States. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan have committed to treat an armed attack on any one of them as an attack on all three, language lifted almost directly from Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, and Turkish officials have floated a ministerial committee and a permanent secretariat in Saudi Arabia to administer it. The three countries together field close to 1.4 million active personnel and roughly 340 naval assets, backed by combined defence budgets above 124 billion dollars. Pakistan’s foreign minister has said the arrangement is “purely defensive” and open to others who are willing to uphold its commitments, which is the same open door that Kabir was answering when he spoke to BSS.
What should give Bangladeshi policymakers pause is not that Washington or Beijing will object loudly if Dhaka joins. Neither is likely to. Trump publicly welcomed the pact on Truth Social, framing it as evidence that regional states were finally able to defend themselves. Turkey remains a NATO member and a US arms customer even as it signs new defence pacts; Saudi Arabia has spent 2026 courting Washington on trade while diversifying its security partnerships; Pakistan has quietly rebuilt its standing with the Trump White House, most visibly when Trump hosted Pakistan’s army chief for lunch at the White House in June 2025. Beijing, for its part, has said nothing official about the agreement, even as Chinese state media and scholars picked it apart in unusual detail. Chinese analysts have largely read the pact as a symbolic step toward regional strategic autonomy amid declining US influence rather than a threat to its own position. But the absence of pushback from either capital only means neither power sees the pact as touching its own core interests yet. It says nothing about what happens to a small state’s freedom of manoeuvre once it signs on.
That freedom of manoeuvre is the real stake. Bangladesh’s relationship with the Gulf is not one relationship with Saudi Arabia; it is a web of separate dependencies that a Makkah-anchored identity would flatten into one. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar together sent more than 8.6 billion dollars in remittances to Bangladesh in the first half of the current fiscal year, out of roughly six million Bangladeshi workers across Gulf labour markets. Qatar is also one of Bangladesh’s three long-term LNG suppliers, and when Iranian strikes hit Gulf energy infrastructure earlier this year, Doha invoked force majeure and suspended cargoes, pushing Dhaka into fuel rationing and shutting four of five state-run urea plants for two weeks during the Boro irrigation season. Iran matters here too, not through trade, which is thin, but through the Strait of Hormuz, the route for roughly 6.2 million tonnes of Bangladeshi crude and refined-product imports a year. In March, Dhaka’s energy ministry formally asked Tehran to guarantee safe passage for its tankers. None of these relationships has an obvious place inside a security identity built around Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad, and none is one that Bangladesh can afford to subordinate to the other three.
The mutual-defence clause raises a sharper problem. An article 5-style commitment binds a country to disputes it did not choose. Pakistan’s most volatile external relationship is with India, and the two nuclear-armed neighbours fought a four-day conflict last year serious enough that Washington, through Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, intervened to help broker a ceasefire after strikes and drone exchanges across the border. Since then New Delhi and Islamabad each described that de-escalation differently, but the fact that outside mediation was needed at all says enough about how quickly the rivalry can escalate. Pakistan has also drawn closer to Gulf tensions with Iran through its expanding security ties with Riyadh, even as it keeps a working relationship with Tehran. A Bangladesh formally bound to Pakistan’s defence commitments would be exposed to both fault lines, neither of which has anything to do with Dhaka’s own interests, purely by virtue of treaty language rather than any calculation Bangladesh made for itself.
India’s reaction compounds the risk closer to home. Dhaka has no active conflict with New Delhi today, but recent rhetoric out of India, alongside more frequent visits by Indian security officials, already reflects discomfort with Bangladesh’s post-2024 political direction. Formal Bangladeshi association with a pact that Pakistan’s own defence establishment has floated as a template for a wider Islamic security architecture would sharpen that discomfort rather than ease it. The likelier consequence is not confrontation but pressure through channels India already controls: tighter land-border management, friction over transit, and a freer hand for Delhi in Myanmar, where it has its own stakes. It would also give India more reason, not less, to leave the Chittagong Hill Tracts unsettled as leverage, a region already carrying a live insurgency problem involving the Kuki-Chin National Front, periodic weapons seizures, and disputed claims about recovered ammunition that Delhi denies but that continue to strain the relationship.
There is also a basic asymmetry in what each Makkah signatory brings to the table, where Bangladesh offers virtually nothing in comparison. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state that maintains independent relationships with both China and the United States regardless of what it signs in Riyadh. Turkey fields NATO’s second-largest military and a domestic defence-industrial base that lets it act largely on its own terms. Saudi Arabia is the world’s top oil exporter, with a balance sheet that can absorb collective-defence costs most countries cannot. Bangladesh depends on Gulf remittances for a large share of its foreign-exchange earnings, imports LNG through contracts that can be suspended by force majeure within days, and moves nearly all of its trade through two ports, Chittagong and Mongla, that sit far from the Gulf and Red Sea contingencies the pact was built around. A country this exposed to global trade and energy shocks has less room than Pakistan, Turkey or Saudi Arabia to absorb a mutual-defence obligation gone wrong, and far less capacity to walk away from one if it does.
None of this means Bangladesh has no interest in the Gulf’s evolving security order or that Kabir’s comments were a mistake to make. Keeping the door open costs Dhaka little for now, and the pact’s founders have made clear they want more members. But an open door is not an invitation to walk through it immediately, and the case for waiting has only strengthened since the pact was signed. Bangladesh’s position between Doha’s gas contracts, Tehran’s strait, Delhi’s border and Beijing’s port investments is precisely the kind of multidimensional alignment that a single Gulf-anchored security bloc would compress into one relationship at the expense of the rest. Until the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement produces a public treaty text defining what actually triggers its collective-defence clause, and until Dhaka has a clearer read on how India intends to respond, the wiser course is to keep every one of those relationships intact rather than fold them into an alliance that was never built with Bangladesh’s geography, or its neighbourhood, in mind.
Arman Ahmed is an independent researcher and a research analyst at the Nicholas Spykman International Center for Geopolitical Analysis in Paris, focusing on South Asian geopolitics and international security. His work has been widely published in platforms such as The Geopolitical Monitor, The Geopolitics, Modern Diplomacy, The Madras Gazette, Eurasia Review, The NewAgeBD, The Daily Star, The Business Standard, Prothom Alo-English, the Australian Institute of International Affairs, and many more national and international outlets. He specializes in strategic affairs, South Asia, defense policy, and foreign policy analysis.
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