The Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey defense pact is the August 2026 mutual-defence arrangement, a Saudi-Pakistan military treaty extended to Turkey and offered onward to Iran and Egypt, that John Kiriakou treats as a break-point in the post-1945 security order.
Kiriakou’s framing
Asked by Victor Bout to react on air, Kiriakou called the announcement “as as important as you just said it is. This is a tectonic shift in geopolitics and it spells major change in several different ways.” He read the timing as reactive rather than incidental, a Gulf response to the collapse of the U.S. security umbrella.[1][2]
The proximate cause: Israel threatens Turkey
The immediate trigger, in Kiriakou’s account, was an Israeli defence minister’s public statement that “Israel’s next war would be against Turkey.” Turkey is a NATO member and “one of the largest militaries in NATO.”[2]
Kiriakou’s implication is that this ends Article 5: “if Israel were to attack Turkey, the United States would have to go to war against Israel. And that will never ever happen under any circumstances. And so what it means is the end of NATO, right? Because Article 5 says the US is compelled to defend Turkey. And if the US refuses, that’s the end of NATO.”[3]
The deeper cause: U.S. failure in the Gulf
Kiriakou places the pact against a Gulf-wide re-assessment. “The US can’t even defend itself in the Persian Gulf, let alone to defend Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.” Those royal families, and Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, are, in his rendering, “concluding: why do we have the United States in our country if they can’t defend us and they can’t even defend ourselves. It’s better for us to strike out on our own.”[3][4]
The nuclear balance
The pact is nuclear. “Pakistan is a nuclear power. And so if Israel is going to threaten Saudi Arabia or threaten Turkey and Israel has 220 nuclear weapons, well Pakistan has 40, 50, 60 nuclear weapons of its own. So all of a sudden the playing field changes.”[5]
Reception
Kiriakou was in Egypt the week the announcement broke. “People were literally dancing in the streets when the announcement was was made. People in Islamabad, Riyadh and Ankara were literally dancing in the streets.”[6]
He compares the trajectory to BRICS: “more and more countries are being added and now they’re beginning in the preliminary discussions about a unified currency. I think we’re seeing the same thing happen in the military, that countries have to protect themselves and to protect each other without the United States. This is the very beginning of that.”[6][7]