Six months of war have taught the Gulf something it spent four decades arranging not to fathom: that the presence of the world’s pre-eminent security provider is not the same thing as protection by it. Iranian missiles and drones have reached the soil of every Gulf state hosting American forces. Nearly 50,000 US troops across 19 sites did not stop them. Energy infrastructure has burned, Hormuz has been throttled, and the Red Sea has been turned into a second chokepoint. Against that record, the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement is not an act of pique or drift. It is a correction, and an overdue one.
Signed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and building on the Saudi-Pakistani accord of September 2025, the pact commits three states to treating an armed attack on one as an attack on all.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar has anchored it to Article 51 of the UN Charter, the cleanest available legal footing, and both Islamabad and Ankara have stressed that it abrogates nothing and targets no-one. Those are not evasions. They are the conditions under which an arrangement of this kind can actually be built in a region where almost every previous attempt collapsed under the weight of its own rhetoric.
Why these three?
Alliances usually fail because their members want the same things. This security framework is a decent bet because they do not. Saudi Arabia has capital, convening authority and, in Makkah, a setting no rival forum can match, but limited indigenous military-industrial depth. Turkiye has Nato’s second-largest army, a defence industry now among the world’s most inventive, and a need for markets and investment. Pakistan has manpower, seven decades of institutional military experience and the Muslim world’s only nuclear deterrent, and needs financing and industrial partners. The three are complementary: each party’s deficit is another’s surplus, which is the most durable foundation an alliance can have.
Note also what the pact quietly settles. Riyadh appears to have put away the file on Abraham Accords membership without ever having to announce it. When the Trump Administration made civil nuclear co-operation contingent on normalisation with Israel, the Gulf read the message precisely, and Makkah is the response. Saudi Arabia’s position — no normalisation without a credible path to Palestinian statehood — now has structure behind it rather than only sentiment.
The first probe
Two days after the signing, Houthi drones struck Aramco’s Jazan refinery, and the same day missiles hit Mocha, the Red Sea port beside Bab el-Mandeb. Follow that trail carefully. Jazan is a 400,000-barrel-a-day facility, but Mocha is the strategic move: close Bab el-Mandeb and the alternative to Hormuz is lost, which Tehran is already constricting. This was a co-ordinated attempt to make Saudi exports hostage at both ends, timed to the announcement and designed to test what the ink was worth.
That the response was national rather than trilateral says less than the sceptics claim. Alliances are not born with machinery; Nato’s own guarantee was a piece of paper for years before shape gave it teeth. The relevant question is what the probe accelerates. The expectation to watch is a deepened Pakistani air defence and advisory presence inside the kingdom, and faster Turkish defence-industrial transfers. Integrated air and missile defence is precisely the capability the past six months have shown the region cannot outsource, and it is precisely what these three can build together faster than any of them could alone.
For now, the pact operates through ambiguity: an adversary cannot know what a fresh attack would trigger, and must assume the worst. That is a genuine deterrent, and at this stage the sensible one. It will need to be converted into planning, exercises and command arrangements before it hardens, but conversion is a matter of political will, and the will has rarely been more evident.
Beyond one umbrella
None of this is a rupture with Washington. All three are close American partners; all three are major non-Nato allies; the arrangement most likely proceeded with tacit acquiescence, and it sits comfortably inside an American preference for allied burden-sharing. But the honest description is that the American relationship is important while ceasing to be exclusive — and for the Gulf, that is progress, not betrayal. It is perhaps, in Riyadh’s interest to hold several layers of security rather than one. Any state that has watched interceptors draw a damp squib over its own refineries would conclude the same.
The wider reading is that this belongs to a broader movement of middle powers insuring themselves — the same instinct visible in BRICS enlargement, in Gulf hedging towards Beijing, and in the fact that the mediation of this war has been conducted largely by Islamabad and Doha rather than by Washington. Whether that amounts to a new world order is a larger claim than the evidence yet carries: these are allies buying supplementary cover, not defectors.
But something real is shifting. For the first time, a serious collective defence commitment in West Asia has been drafted, signed and legitimised by regional powers on their own authority, in their own holy city, without an external guarantor holding the pen. That is a first, and its significance will grow rather than fade.
Room to grow
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said the three should not remain three. Egypt is possibly the next candidate — already a partner of all three, already consulting with them, and, as Fidan puts it, a “natural partner” — although the jury is out on this given Cairo’s binding arrangements in the region that may be seen as clashing with its interests. Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan and Azerbaijan have also been named as plausible.
The discipline required is calibration: a framework broad enough to give members political cover and flexibility about the form of any response will attract signatories, whereas a rigid automatic trigger would repel them. Fidan’s formula — consultation determining degree, form and format — is exactly the elasticity that permits growth without fracture.
The empty chair/s
This brings us to the argument that deserves the last word. Iran has absorbed six months of combined American and Israeli force and has not been subdued. It is highly improbable that a security architecture premised on its permanent exclusion can produce lasting stability. But this particular architecture need not be premised on that at all.
Two of its three members are Iran’s functioning interlocutors. Pakistan shares a long border with Iran and a deep relationship intertwined with a huge Shia population on both sides. Turkiye has kept commercial and diplomatic channels to Tehran open through every round of sanctions. Iran has itself proposed a regional security arrangement convened without external powers — conceptually not far from what Makkah has begun. Yesterday Tehran officially said it did not fear the trilateral agreement which it sees as a regional response to taking security ownership. The difference has always been who holds the pen, and now the pen is regional.
The nuclear arithmetic is sharper still. A structure containing both a nuclear-armed Pakistan and Iran gives Riyadh a reason not to seek its own deterrent and Tehran a reason not to sprint for one. Two guarantors with warm ties to Tehran do not encircle it; they lower the temperature around it. An excluded Iran negotiates with an American-brokered containment structure. An included Iran negotiates with its neighbours.
This cannot be said in Riyadh while Houthi drones are still falling on Jazan, and Tehran must first stop treating its proxies as negotiating currency. The sequence runs through a Hormuz settlement, not around it.
- The writer is Deputy Managing Editor, Gulf Times.