The Mecca pact is a paper fortress

TURKEY'S foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, says Egypt will join the new defence pact between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey. The qualification is telling: Cairo is a "natural partner" that will sign once a few "technical issues" are resolved. He spoke on August 8th, the day after the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement was signed by the three founding members. It is the kind of offhand assurance that sounds reassuring until one examines what those technical issues might be.

The Mecca pact is an Article 5-style mutual-defence arrangement. An armed attack against any signatory is to be treated as an attack against all. It commits the three countries to closer coordination on intelligence, capacity building, defence expenditure and arms manufacturing. The general secretariat is based in Riyadh. In many ways it is a logical response to a logical problem. The United States and Israel's war on Iran, which ran from February to mid-June 2026, showed Gulf states what happens when they host American bases: they get hit by Iranian missiles and drones in return. During the conflict, Iran and its allies struck targets in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and Jordan. The United States struggled to supply adequate air-defence munitions to its Arab partners, diverting many resources to Israel instead. Gulf states, already anxious about American reliability, decided they needed options.

Yet the Mecca pact reveals more about the ambition of its authors than the security it can actually provide. The trouble is not merely that it is new. It is that its three members have spent the better part of a decade at each other's throats.

Saudi Arabia and Turkey were effectively hostile until a rapprochement that followed the 2018 Khashoggi affair. Until then, Riyadh had frozen Turkish investments worth billions of dollars; Mr Erdogan's Turkey had sheltered members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group Saudi Arabia considers a threat. Turkey and Egypt's relationship was even worse. After the 2013 removal of Egypt's Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, Ankara condemned what it called a coup and hosted Brotherhood activists broadcasting from Istanbul. Egypt viewed Turkey's interventions in Libya and Qatar — where it supported governments backed by the Muslim Brotherhood or Qatar itself — as direct challenges. Turkey's deployment of troops to Doha during the 2017 Gulf blockade further antagonised Cairo. The Turkish-Egyptian thaw has been real: Mr Erdogan visited Cairo in February 2024 for the first time in more than a decade, and bilateral trade has recovered. But the two countries still support opposing sides in Libya, and have not even demarcated their maritime borders.

These are not matters that a few technical issues resolve. They are the sort of historical grievances that surface when an alliance is tested, not when it is announced in a holy city.

Then there is Egypt itself. Cairo participated in four-way consultations with the founding members — meetings in Riyadh, Islamabad, Antalya and Cairo between March and June. Yet it was not invited to the signing. Egypt Left Out of Mecca Defense Pact Despite Role in Four-Nation Talks. Analysts suggest several reasons. Egypt's constitution restricts the president from deploying troops abroad without a two-thirds parliamentary majority, making collective-defence commitments politically difficult. Egypt also maintains its own substantial military, keeps diplomatic channels with Iran, and has shown little appetite for entanglement in regional conflicts. In short, Egypt lacks the strategic motivation of Saudi Arabia, which is exposed to Iranian missiles and whose Vision 2030 transformation depends on stability.

Mr Fidan's insistence that Iran is not the target of the pact rings hollow. Turkish officials may prefer a defensive framing. But Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif called Israel a "common threat" and urged Muslim-world unity against it. The timing of the pact — just weeks after Iran warned it would strike Gulf energy infrastructure if America launched new attacks, and as the Strait of Hormuz dispute between Iran and the United States remains unresolved — places it squarely in the shadow of the Iran question. Iran threatens to hit Gulf states if US launches new strikes. Iran's response was predictably dismissive: a paper alliance, it argued, does not guarantee security.

The deeper significance of the Mecca pact lies not in what it does but in what it signals about American power. The arrangement is not a rejection of the United States; it is an insurance policy against its limitations. Since January 2026, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have stated they would not allow the use of their airspace to attack Iran. Public opinion across the Gulf now views the United States as a greater threat than Iran: a survey in 2025 found 77% of respondents held this view, up from 21% in 2022. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman all lobbied President Trump against renewed strikes on Iran. The Gulf states' calculation is no longer whether the United States will protect them. It is whether American interests will drag them into conflicts they did not choose.

The Mecca pact is one symptom of that shift. It is also an illustration of its limits. A collective-defence framework among states with unresolved rivalries, different threat perceptions, and no shared command structure is less a security guarantee than a statement of intent. The founding members have complementary strengths on paper: Turkey brings NATO's second-largest military and a thriving defence industry; Saudi Arabia brings financial heft; Pakistan brings nuclear weapons and battlefield experience. But Pakistan's nuclear deterrent remains oriented toward India, not the Gulf. Turkey's NATO membership creates its own complications. And none of the three has shown it can resolve the Strait of Hormuz, the conflict that brought all this about.

To be sure, not every alliance needs to replicate NATO's integrated command or decades of institutional habit. The pact's emphasis on defence-industrial cooperation, intelligence sharing and capacity building may be more practical than a mutual-war clause. If Riyadh's ambition to manufacture half its defence equipment by 2030 is taken seriously, Turkish and Pakistani partners could fill gaps that American arms-export politics have left open. The collapsed Raytheon-Scopa deal, shelved partly because of American concerns about Chinese technology, is one example of where domestic defence production matters.

Yet the promise of Egypt's membership highlights the gap between aspiration and reality. If Cairo cannot be brought in — not because of technicalities but because its strategic interests differ, its constitution constrains it, and its own grievances with Turkey remain unresolved — then the Mecca pact will remain a three-state arrangement. That is not nothing. But it is far from the Muslim collective-defence mechanism Mr Fidan appears to envision.

The broader lesson for regional security is less flattering. The Gulf states are right to diversify their security partnerships. Reliance on a single patron whose interests are volatile is a recipe for vulnerability. But replacing one fragile dependency with another — one built on recent rivalries and symbolic solidarity — is no substitute for a genuine regional order. The Mecca pact is a start. Whether it becomes something more depends on whether its members can solve the technical issues Mr Fidan alludes to. They may find those issues are less technical than they think.