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How the World’s Mutual Defense Alliances Look in 2026

Mutual defense treaties are built around a simple principle: an attack on one member is treated as an attack on the wider group.

NATO is one prominent example, but similar arrangements stretch across the Americas, Eurasia, and the Gulf. This visualization maps five major multilateral defense alliances currently in force and shows where their memberships overlap.

Five Major Mutual Defense Alliances

The map draws on data from NATO, the Organization of American States, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the CSTO, and reporting from Al Jazeera and the Atlantic Council.

The visualization focuses specifically on formal multilateral agreements containing mutual defense commitments. Broader military partnerships without an equivalent collective-defense provision are not included.

NATO is by far the largest alliance shown, with 32 members across Europe and North America. The Rio Pact covers much of the Americas, while the GCC links the six Gulf monarchies. The CSTO spans Russia and several former Soviet states, while the three-member Mecca Defence Alliance is the newest pact on the map.

The Rio Pact Is Older Than NATO

The oldest alliance shown is the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, commonly known as the Rio Pact. It was signed in 1947, two years before NATO was established in 1949.

The treaty established a collective-defense framework across the Americas, although its membership has changed substantially over the decades. The United States remains a party to the Rio Pact while also belonging to NATO, making it one of three countries on the map covered by two of the alliances shown.

NATO has expanded from 12 founding members to 32, with Finland joining in 2023 and Sweden in 2024. The alliance has also seen a sharp rise in military spending in recent years, though the United States still accounts for an outsized share of NATO defense spending.

The New Mecca Defence Alliance Connects Three Security Blocs

The biggest recent change to the map came in August 2026, when Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement. The pact states that an armed attack against one of the three countries will be considered an attack against them all.

Its three members bring different existing security relationships. Türkiye has belonged to NATO since 1952, while Saudi Arabia is part of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council. Pakistan belongs to neither alliance and is a nuclear-armed state.

The agreement creates a new point of overlap between security arrangements that previously occupied largely separate regions.

The CSTO Has Seen Its Membership Shrink

While the newest alliance on the map is expanding the network of mutual-defense commitments, the CSTO has moved in the opposite direction.

The Russia-led alliance currently has five active members: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. Armenia, which joined the organization at its founding, suspended its participation in 2024 but has not formally withdrawn.

That leaves the CSTO with a smaller active footprint than it had for much of its history and makes Armenia an unusual case on the map: still formally tied to the alliance, but no longer participating in its activities.

Why Other Major Security Partnerships Aren’t Shown

Several well-known security groupings are absent because they do not meet the definition used for this visualization.

AUKUS, for example, is a defense and technology partnership rather than a treaty containing an Article 5-style collective-defense commitment. Other arrangements may require members to consult following an attack without explicitly committing them to mutual defense.

The map therefore focuses on a narrower category: formal multilateral agreements with mutual defense language currently in force, where a majority of the original signatories remain bound.

Learn More on the Voronoi App

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out 75 Years of NATO on Voronoi, the app from Visual Capitalist.

Who Imports the Most Military Drones?

Drones have become one of the defining weapons of modern warfare, and international trade in them now revolves around a single conflict.

This graphic ranks countries by the number of military drones they received from foreign suppliers from 2022 to 2025, using data from the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database. The figures include drones sent as aid and those built in the recipient country under a foreign license.

SIPRI tracks major weapons only: drone aircraft with a loaded weight of at least 150 kg, plus one-way attack drones and loitering munitions, which it classifies as missiles. Small first-person-view (FPV) and commercial drones fall largely outside its scope.

Ukraine and Russia Dominate Military Drone Imports

The ranking drops off sharply after the top two countries. No other country received even 300 military drones during the period.

Ukraine’s supply was heavily concentrated among U.S. systems, which accounted for 83% of its recorded total. Russia’s recorded imports, meanwhile, were attributed to Iran.

The table below shows the number of military drones each country received in 2022–2025 and its share of the global total.

Most of Russia’s drone imports were Shahed-136s, which Russia first imported from Iran and now produces in its own versions as the Geran-2. SIPRI says there is little indication that continued Iranian input is still needed.

Small Military Drone Trade Is Far Bigger

Outside Russia and Ukraine, Taiwan is the largest importer of military drones, with 291 U.S.-made loitering munitions delivered in 2025.

Its drone push has been influenced by Ukraine, and government plans call for up to 200,000 drones over the coming decade, more than 10 times the entire global total recorded from 2022 to 2025.

This gap exists because SIPRI’s database, the same one behind our ranking of the biggest arms importers, tracks major weapons: large drones plus long-range one-way attack drones, with the latter making up 97% of the transfers shown here. The small, inexpensive first-person-view (FPV) drones that now do much of the fighting at the front mostly fall outside its scope.

Those drones move in far larger numbers. The UK alone delivered more than 85,000 smaller military drones to Ukraine in six months of 2025, about five times SIPRI’s recorded global total for the entire four-year period.

Drones built domestically are also excluded, since SIPRI only counts weapons that cross borders or are produced under a foreign license. Ukraine’s defense industry can now produce more than 8 million FPV drones a year, while Ukrainian intelligence estimates that Russia builds about 2,800 Geran-2 drones per month, far above the 2,000 a year SIPRI records under the Iranian license.

Learn More on the Voronoi App

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out this post on how important people in different countries consider defense on Voronoi.