Saudi Arabia brings substantial oil wealth to its defense agreement with Turkiye and Pakistan, but the pact’s publicly announced terms offer no formula for dividing the cost of military operations. The three states have committed to collective defense. Who would command their forces, what threats would trigger action and how members would pay all remain open questions.
Who Pays for Collective Defense
Turkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement on August 7, 2026. The pact builds on the Saudi-Pakistani Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement of September 2025. At an August 31 meeting in Istanbul, the countries announced a secretariat in Saudi Arabia, initially led by a Pakistani secretary general, along with cooperation in military technology and production.
The full agreement hasn’t been made public. A Pakistan Foreign Ministry statement said an armed attack against any of the three states would count as an attack against all three, but the public terms don’t say which forces would fight, who would command them or when they would act. They also leave common threats undefined and offer no plan for dividing costs.
Their resources differ sharply. Saudi Arabia has substantial oil wealth, Turkiye has industrial capacity but struggles with inflation, and Pakistan borrows from the IMF. The agreement promises industrial cooperation, yet offers nothing like NATO’s financial arrangement, which combines national force funding with contributions to common budgets based on national income. Malikzada asked whether Saudi Arabia would seek influence over deployments and procurement if it supplied most of the money—and whether Turkiye and Pakistan would accept that influence while providing troops and bearing casualties.
Arms suppliers will also affect what the governments can do together. SIPRI’s 2026 data showed China supplied 80 percent of Pakistan’s major arms imports in 2021–2025, while the United States supplied 77 percent of Saudi Arabia’s. Turkiye has a substantial domestic defense industry and decades of NATO experience. Bringing their forces together would require intelligence-sharing across different military systems. Washington could object to American equipment information reaching Chinese technicians, while Beijing could oppose Western access to Chinese technology.
State Power, Corporate Power
In an interview by Mercy A. Kuo, Dr. Matthew Botvinick warned that AI could intensify threats to constitutional democracy by amplifying social insecurity when trust in government institutions is low. He said the combination could create conditions for “the demagogue’s playbook,” in which political leaders exploit populist sentiment to undermine democracy.
Botvinick said AI could help authoritarian governments entrench power through surveillance and control of information. He pointed to China’s use of large volumes of data from inexpensive, ubiquitous sensors and online activity, including social networks, to monitor and control people. In the United States and other democracies, he said, the challenge is to meet law-enforcement and national-security needs without creating tools that are easy to abuse. He cited abuses in the United States, from FDR and J. Edgar Hoover to disclosures by Edward Snowden.
Democracy depends on balance. Botvinick said government power must be matched by society’s ability to act collectively through news media, civil society, a free marketplace of ideas and free and fair elections. AI could over-empower the executive branch if governments use it to automate obedience to central authority, he said, while surveillance or propaganda could weaken citizens’ ability to act together. He called constitutional democracy “absolutely mandatory for AI safety.”
Botvinick spoke in a purely personal capacity, not on behalf of Anthropic. He said companies that claim to care about AI safety, including all major AI labs, have a responsibility to use their power to protect and strengthen democracy. Corporate power can also be vulnerable to government power, he said, urging attention to relations between government and industry.
Taiwan’s Military Preparations
Taiwan has moved away from plans to defeat an enemy on the opposite shore or seek a decisive battle in the littoral area. It now focuses on an erosion strategy and sustained operations. More than one-third of Taiwan’s population lives in the north, where the political center, operational command organizations and transportation hubs sit. More than about half of the Republic of China Army and Marine Corps’ active-duty brigade-level forces are normally stationed north of Miaoli and Yilan; exercises can bring nearly two-thirds of active-duty ground forces there.
Taiwan’s 2026 schedule included a five-day Immediate Combat Readiness Exercise in June, a five-day Joint Defense Exercise in July, a 10-day Han Kuang Exercise in August and a 10-day Lu Sheng Exercise expected in October. Expanded training gives units more time for continuous exercises and prepares them to coordinate with civilian sectors in using manpower and material resources.
The Marine Corps has shifted away from offensive amphibious operations and power projection toward urban defense, giving up tanks and self-propelled artillery for drones and anti-tank equipment. Taiwan’s navy established a Coastal Operations Command this year, bringing together shore-based anti-ship missiles, radar, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and unmanned aerial systems. In late September, the Coast Guard appointed a Navy vice admiral as deputy director-general to support its transition from peacetime to wartime and connect military and Coast Guard communications.
The authors identified joint operations and command and control as major issues. Taiwan’s Joint Operations Training Base has limited capacity and usually offers only battalion-level training; restricted airspace also makes it difficult for the navy, Army Aviation and Air Force to train together as formed units. Media reports in January 2026 said U.S. personnel had been stationed at Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense Joint Firepower Coordination Center, which coordinates cross-service fires deployment.