The post-American order starts in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan

Without the US, others will make whatever makeshift security arrangements they can.

- Mihir Sharma

Given the long history of cooperation between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, it’s tempting to dismiss their announcement last week of a mutual security pact as mere paperwork, formalising a relationship that already exists.

But it’s much more than that. This is the first concrete indication of what a post-American world might look like — one that is far more insecure, unstable and unhappy.

The two nations were indeed close for decades. In 1967 - two months after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War - they signed a security agreement in which Pakistan’s battle-hardened military promised training and support to the kingdom. Two years later, their pilots flew for Saudi Arabia in its war against communist South Yemen.

By the 1980s, the generals in Rawalpindi had sent their ally 15,000 soldiers to help protect a regime unnerved by the siege of Mecca in 1979. There were even Pakistani tanks stationed in Tabuk near the kingdom’s northwest border, a short drive from Israel’s Red Sea port of Eilat.

But such closeness seemed consigned to the history books in 2015 after Pakistan’s National Assembly unexpectedly defied Riyadh — and perhaps its own military — by refusing to send soldiers to fight the Houthis.