Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on Wednesday signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA) during Pak Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s and Army Chief Asim Munir’s visit to Riyadh.Inked eight days after Israel’s unprecedented airstrikes in Qatar, the details of the deal are not public. However, according to a joint statement issued after the meeting, “the agreement states that any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both”.Responding to a question by Reuters on whether Pakistan would extend its nuclear umbrella to the Kingdom, a senior Saudi official asserted that the agreement “encompasses all military means”.India has said that it was aware of the arrangement which “formalises a long-standing arrangement between the two countries”. That is indeed true: Saudi Arabia and Pakistan share a security partnership that is both old and has sufficient depth. So what triggered the SMDA now? And more importantly, what does this mean for India?Differing motivationsSaudi Arabia and Pakistan have differing motivations for the SMDA. The Saudi interest, arguably also representing contemporary Gulf Arab interests, is driven by a strong desire to drive down conflicts in the Middle East.Historically, the Saudi-Pakistan defense equation, underpinned by religious commonality, has been defined by Saudi economic support and Pakistani military assistance. Even in the last decade, Pakistan has featured strongly in Saudi led military efforts. For instance, since 2015, former Pak Army Chief Gen Raheel Sharif has commanded the Islamic Military Counter-Terrorism Coalition. By 2018, Pakistan also broke its three-year long neutrality to station troops in Saudi Arabia to help with the Kingdom’s fight in Yemen.Story continues below this adOver the years, Islamabad has shown an ability to adapt to Riyadh’s needs depending on the dominant Arab security focus of the time — whether it be jihadist terrorism or Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.With this existing template of partnership, Pakistan serves as a convenient port of call when the current Arab effort is to prevent Israel from establishing itself as a state that can unilaterally reshape the region. This threat is arguably greater than older sources of conflict in the region. The terror threat in the Middle East (of the kind represented by ISIS) has dwindled, and Saudi Arabia is focused on extricating itself from the Yemen war.The fact that Israel’s strikes in Doha acted as a stronger catalyst for the Saudi-Pakistan SMDA, than even the Houthi strikes on Arab refineries in 2019, indicates the degree to which the good faith between Israel and the Arab world has been breached. The Pakistani interest is more straightforward. Islamabad seeks to leverage the Arab need for a better bargaining posture against Israel, to service its deterrence needs against India and reinforce Pakistan’s security capabilities that have long been in place in the Arab world.Story continues below this adAn estimated 1,200 to 2,000 Pakistani troops are already stationed in the Kingdom, and the existing template of cooperation means that Saudi economic support to Pakistan is set to continue, in return.In its motivations, the Saudi-Pakistan SMDA is centered around Middle Eastern security concerns. In effect, for Pakistan, the agreement theoretically and potentially allows Islamabad to draw diplomatic (if not material) support from Saudi Arabia in a future conflict with New Delhi in South Asia.The India factorIndia’s defence partnership with Saudi Arabia is nascent when compared to Pakistan’s. This relative nascence was evident most recently in the 7th meeting of the India-Saudi Arabia Joint Committee on Defence Cooperation in August 2025, in which “India offered to provide training to the Saudi Armed Forces”, something that Pakistan has been doing for decades.However, the India-Saudi partnership has grown steadily with sufficient mutual interest despite and alongside Pakistan’s older historic partnership. Indeed, a core characteristic of India’s strategic autonomy has been to develop its own relationships with a focus on leveraging India’s economic heft.Story continues below this adObjectively, the India-Saudi partnership has featured sufficient investment in recent months, with new defense exercises between Indian and Saudi forces and new institutional avenues of cooperation such as the Ministerial Committee on Defence Cooperation established in April, 2025.A crucial benefit of these ties has been effective Arab neutrality in India-Pakistan crises, and greater Arab involvement in India’s developmental projects in Kashmir. In the May 2025 India-Pakistan crisis, Saudi Arabia condemned the Pahalgam terror attack while also refraining from condemning Operation Sindoor (which Islamabad was lobbying for).Consequently, the main test for the SMDA is the degree to which it influences Saudi/Arab behaviour towards India-Pakistan crises. It is here that the lack of specific commitments in the agreement indicate a lack of credibility in the degree to which it can influence radical change and act as a deterring instrument for the regional adversaries of both states.On the basis of the joint statement alone, Pakistan striking Israel with either conventional or nuclear weapons is as unlikely as Saudi Arabia significantly assisting Pakistani attacks against India.Story continues below this adPakistan has invested years of diplomatic effort in convincing the United States that its nuclear deterrent is focused on India; Islamabad reiterated this as the former Joe Biden administration imposed new sanctions on Pakistan’s missile programme due to increases in range and capabilities.Moreover, Pakistani leaders have vociferously countered assertions of the Pakistani deterrent serving as an Islamic bomb. Pervez Musharraf spent much effort on countering the label as racist and illogical; “No one else’s bomb is called Hindu, Jewish, or Christian”. More recently in June, Pakistan struggled to find a neat way to reject an Iranian claim that Islamabad had offered Tehran its nuclear umbrella in case of an Israeli nuclear attack.Just as it is unlikely that Pakistan’s own appetite to risk upsetting Washington with such a commitment has changed, it is similarly unlikely that a joint statement alone indicates shifts in the Saudi posture. For Saudi Arabia, its partnership with India continues to offer greater economic and strategic value, with senior Saudi officials also reiterating this in statements following the Saudi-Pakistan SMDA.Saudi pragmatism during India-Pakistan crises has actively contributed to the growth of this strategic partnership. It is unlikely then that the Pakistan-Saudi SMDA as it presently stands, significantly affects the South Asian conflict landscape.Story continues below this adBashir Ali Abbas is a Senior Research Associate at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi