by Muhammad ARSHAD
For two decades, Türkiye’s strategic horizon was defined by the Levant: Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean and the unstable arc along its southern border. That horizon is widening. On 21 October, Türkiye, Qatar, Pakistan and Indonesia signed the Badr memorandum in Doha, committing to cooperate on military production, training, and research and development. It arrived a day after Ankara sent the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement to parliament for ratification. Read together, the two agreements reveal a deliberate design. Makkah supplies a security commitment; Badr builds industrial interdependence. Türkiye is combining both to extend its influence across Asia without needing a permanent military presence in every country it courts.
Consider Makkah first. Signed in August by Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, it provides that an attack on one party is an attack on all. Turkish lawmakers received the text for ratification this week, and a ruling-party legislator told Reuters that a mandate for deploying personnel to Saudi Arabia would follow, with no participation in offensive operations and an initial focus on air defence and electronic warfare. Two officials separately described Ankara’s contribution as largely equipment, intelligence sharing and weapons systems. The calibration is revealing. Türkiye is offering Riyadh technical enablement rather than a garrison, while Saudi capital and Pakistan’s nuclear-armed status give the arrangement weight. Ankara has also agreed to join a Saudi-led Red Sea maritime coalition, tying its credibility to a live security problem rather than a paper pledge.
Badr is a different instrument. It contains no mutual-defence clause; it is an industrial framework, which Qatar’s news agency says aims to foster defence manufacturing, technical training and research. Turkish defence-industry chief Haluk Görgün framed its purpose as turning the partners’ complementary capabilities into concrete projects. The complementarities are plausible. Qatar hosts a Turkish base and, according to Middle East Eye, has a priority need for cost-effective air defence. Indonesia already has defence-industrial ties with Ankara, and Pakistan brings a large military establishment and long-standing Gulf links. The significance lies less in any single project than in the architecture: previously separate bilateral relationships are being stitched into one network spanning the Gulf, South Asia and Southeast Asia.
Badr also builds on foundations that already exist. Pakistan and Türkiye have a naval partnership around the MILGEM corvette programme, and Ankara and Jakarta have worked together on the KAPLAN MT medium tank, evidence that Türkiye’s offer in Southeast Asia includes local manufacturing rather than just finished hardware. Each relationship gives the others something. Pakistan can act as a bridge between Gulf capital and South Asian manufacturing; Indonesia opens a large Southeast Asian market; Qatar supplies investment capacity and a Gulf platform. This is how a middle power multiplies its reach: by making itself the connecting node among partners who each need what the others hold, instead of relying on its own resources alone.
Industry is the engine of this strategy because Türkiye now has something to sell. Defence and aerospace exports reached $10.05 billion in 2025, up 48 per cent from $7.1 billion a year earlier, and the first half of 2026 brought a further 29.5 per cent rise. The sector spans some 3,500 companies and 100,000 jobs. Arms contracts are not merely revenue. Spare parts, maintenance, training and upgrades keep a buyer tied to its supplier for decades, and joint production deepens that tie further. Analysts describe the pattern in Central Asia, where Turkish drone sales diversify militaries away from Russian equipment. Yet the numbers also warn against overstatement: 57.3 per cent of recent exports went to NATO allies. The Asian arc is a strategic ambition built on a still largely Euro-Atlantic customer base.
Why does this matter? First, it widens procurement choices for Gulf and Asian states uneasy about technology restrictions or the reliability of external guarantees. Second, it sharpens competition with established suppliers. Third, it gives Ankara a voice in calculations well beyond its neighbourhood. India is the most obvious observer: Indian commentators argue that Türkiye’s backing for Pakistan reflects a prioritisation of security over trade in its South Asia policy, and that Ankara is also courting Bangladesh. That framing is contested, and it would be wrong to call Badr an anti-Indian or anti-Western bloc. It is a production framework among four governments with differing priorities, and Türkiye remains a NATO member.
The limits are substantial. Memoranda are cheap; funded production lines are not. Central Asian governments have hedged against over-reliance on any single patron, and Türkiye’s own economy constrains how much capital it can deploy compared with China. Saudi–Turkish relations carry a history of rivalry, Pakistan’s priorities are shaped by India, and Syria and Israel remain volatile fronts that could pull Ankara’s attention back to the Levant.
Looking ahead, my judgment is that Türkiye will pursue four things. It will ratify Makkah and deploy small technical contingents focused on air defence and electronic warfare, avoiding anything resembling combat commitments. It will try to convert Badr into named, financed projects, most plausibly in air defence, drones, naval systems and armour. It will keep adding partners, with Southeast Asia and Bangladesh the likeliest additions, and favour minilateral formats over formal alliances. And it will keep balancing: remaining in NATO, trading with Moscow and Beijing, and presenting itself as a bridge rather than a bloc leader. The indicators to watch are ratification votes, the first joint-production contracts, and whether Qatari and Saudi money follows the signatures.
Türkiye’s ambition is not simply to project power beyond the Levant, but to become an indispensable node in the defence relationships linking the Middle East with South and Southeast Asia. Whether it succeeds depends on a mundane test: turning political declarations into funded factories, shared technology and durable trust.
