Ideally, Iran would be part of such an alliance. But alliances are not freebies; they are transactional arrangements built around converging strategic interests. The obvious question, therefore, is: what exactly would Iran bring to the table, and what would Iran expect in return?
More importantly, why would the IRGC agree to enter an unfamiliar security architecture with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan when there is limited strategic and ideological alignment with some of these countries? Iran has spent decades building an independent security doctrine based on strategic autonomy, asymmetric warfare, missile and drone capabilities, and, most importantly, a network of regional partners and proxies that gives Tehran strategic depth. Joining a formal multilateral alliance could constrain precisely those instruments that have allowed Iran to survive decades of isolation.
So the Iranian question cannot simply be reduced to "Why doesn't Iran join?" The more important question is whether the proposed alliance offers Tehran something sufficiently valuable to compensate for the strategic autonomy it would potentially have to sacrifice.
Then there is the question of deterrence against the United States and Israel.
Has Iran established deterrence? Partially, yes—but the nature of that deterrence is often misunderstood.
Iran has certainly demonstrated that it can impose significant costs on an adversary and that attacking Iran is not comparable to conducting a conventional strike against a small, geographically compact state. Iran's enormous territory, population, strategic depth, dispersed military infrastructure and extensive missile and drone capabilities make a prolonged campaign extraordinarily difficult.
But this is not the same thing as Iran possessing the ability to consistently impose a symmetrical military response on the United States or Israel. Iran's deterrence is therefore based less on the ability to defeat either country conventionally and more on the ability to make the costs of a prolonged conflict sufficiently high and unpredictable.
In other words, Iran's geography and strategic depth are themselves deterrent assets.
The US-Israel-Iran confrontation is therefore unlikely to be resolved through a single decisive war. It may increasingly resemble a long-term strategic contest, somewhat analogous to the Syrian experience in the sense that military confrontation, covert action, proxy warfare, sanctions, intelligence operations and periodic strikes can continue for years without producing a definitive strategic settlement.
The United States and Israel may periodically attempt to degrade Iranian missile, nuclear, drone and military infrastructure whenever they believe Iran's capabilities are becoming unacceptable. Iran, meanwhile, will attempt to regenerate those capabilities, improve survivability and develop new means of imposing costs on its adversaries.
That creates a perpetual cycle of degradation, adaptation and regeneration.
And this is precisely where the proposed alliance becomes complicated.
If Iran is brought into a formal security pact, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan could potentially become indirectly exposed to this confrontation. The alliance could create expectations that these countries support Iran diplomatically, economically, technologically or even militarily whenever Tehran comes under sustained pressure. None of the three is likely to accept an arrangement that automatically obliges them to fight the United States or Israel every time Iran is attacked.
But this is also why we need to stop thinking of alliances exclusively in terms of the traditional "attack one, attack all" model.
A modern strategic partnership does not necessarily require automatic military intervention. The real value can lie in operational expansion, intelligence sharing, logistics, interoperability, defence-industrial cooperation, joint production, technology transfer, supply-chain redundancy and increased survivability of military capabilities.
For example, Iran's experience in developing missiles, drones, asymmetric warfare and military systems under severe sanctions could complement Turkey's increasingly sophisticated defence industry and Pakistan's experience in conventional warfare and strategic deterrence. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, brings enormous financial resources, energy leverage and access to capital and international markets.
The resulting ecosystem could be considerably more valuable than simply promising to send troops to defend one another.
Iran's experience with Russia should also be a lesson here. Tehran invested considerable strategic value in its relationship with Moscow, including cooperation in drones and other military technologies, presumably expecting reciprocal military, technological and diplomatic support. Yet the relationship demonstrated an uncomfortable reality: great powers rarely enter alliances purely on the basis of friendship or ideological affinity; they act according to their own strategic interests.
Iran therefore has every reason to be cautious about entering another alliance in which it could potentially provide more strategic value than it receives in return.
And then there is the biggest institutional obstacle: the IRGC.
For the IRGC, Iran's regional network is not merely a collection of "proxies" that can be switched on and off. It has become an important component of Iran's national-security doctrine and strategic depth. Hezbollah, Iraqi armed groups, the Houthis and other regional relationships give Tehran mechanisms for projecting influence, deterring adversaries and keeping potential battlefields away from Iran's borders.
A formal alliance with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan could therefore create uncomfortable contradictions. What happens when Saudi interests conflict with an Iranian partner in the region? What happens when Turkey's Syria policy conflicts with Tehran's? What happens when Pakistan wants to maintain relations with Washington while Iran is engaged in a confrontation with the United States?
These are not theoretical problems. They go directly to the question of whether the alliance could survive its first serious strategic crisis.
The IRGC would therefore have to ask itself a fundamental question: would the alliance enhance Iran's strategic depth or undermine it?
If joining the pact requires Tehran to abandon or substantially restructure its existing regional networks, Iran may see little reason to join. But if the alliance is designed to complement rather than replace Iran's existing strategy, giving Tehran additional economic, technological, diplomatic and military options, then the calculation changes considerably.
This is why I think the most realistic model is not an immediate NATO-style Muslim military alliance. It would probably have to begin as a strategic cooperation framework: intelligence sharing, joint defence production, military exercises, drone and missile technology cooperation, secure supply chains, energy cooperation, financial mechanisms, coordinated diplomacy and perhaps eventually some form of collective-security guarantee.
Over time, successful cooperation could create enough mutual dependence to evolve into something much deeper.
The irony is that Iran may actually be one of the most valuable members of such an arrangement precisely because it is the country that has spent decades developing capabilities outside the Western security architecture. But that same history also makes Iran one of the most difficult countries to integrate into a conventional alliance.
So the challenge isn't simply convincing Iran to join.
The challenge is designing an alliance that Iran has a strategic reason to join without requiring it to abandon the very security architecture that allowed it to survive in the first place.
And unless that equation is solved, a Turkey-Saudi-Pakistan-Iran alliance will remain an attractive idea on paper but an extremely difficult institution to operationalise in reality.