marwan
The trilateral Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani agreement, signed in Mecca last Friday and already being referred to as the “Mecca Mutual Defense Agreement,” should not be seen as just another diplomatic event in the region’s long history of security arrangements. What took place at Al-Safa Palace—where Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif agreed that an armed attack against any one of their countries would be considered an attack against all three—may signal the beginning of a new phase in Middle Eastern politics: one that could reshape regional alliances and, more importantly, the region’s relationship with the major powers.
The immediate context is clear. The agreement comes amid renewed US-Iranian tensions and escalating Houthi threats. But interpreting it simply as an attempt to “protect Saudi Arabia from Iran” misses the larger strategic picture. What is emerging goes beyond the immediate Iranian question. It points toward an effort to construct a regional order that is less dependent on the binary that has dominated Middle Eastern geopolitics for years: the US-Israeli axis on one side and Iran and its network of allies on the other.
There is another important dimension. The agreement effectively redraws the geopolitical boundaries of the Middle East by bringing Pakistan more directly into its security architecture while consolidating Turkey’s role as a central regional actor. This represents a departure from the conventional understanding of the regional system as primarily comprising the Arab states, Iran, Israel and Turkey. It comes, moreover, at a moment of profound transformation following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the weakening of the old division between the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” and the traditional Arab “moderate camp.
In practical terms, the new arrangement offers a different model—one that could provide regional powers with greater strategic and security autonomy. In that sense, it differs fundamentally from the regional vision advanced by President Donald Trump through the Abraham Accords, in which Israel occupies a central position in a US-backed regional security architecture. After the Gaza war, that model increasingly raises another question: whether integration with Israel means accepting not only normalization, but also an Israeli claim to military primacy in the region.
Seen from this perspective, the trilateral alliance may be less about confronting Iran than about challenging the underlying logic of the Abraham Accords.This may also explain Benjamin Netanyahu’s warnings several months ago about the emergence of what he described as a “radical Sunni axis.” Israel, meanwhile, has been pursuing its own countervailing network of partnerships. India—Pakistan’s historic rival—has become increasingly important in this calculus, alongside Israel’s strategic relationships with Greece and Cyprus and, more recently, Argentina. These relationships serve strategic purposes of their own, but they also help Israel counter the growing perception of regional isolation in the aftermath of the Gaza war.
Nor should the Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani framework necessarily be viewed as a closed alliance. It has the potential to evolve into a broader regional umbrella centred on the Middle East’s increasingly influential middle powers. Other Arab states could eventually find a place within such a framework, including Jordan, Qatar and Egypt, and perhaps even Syria, which now faces Israeli military encroachment and the occupation of additional territory in its south following the collapse of the Assad regime.
Barry Buzan’s theory of regional security complexes provides a useful lens through which to understand the significance of this development. From this perspective, the emerging alignment represents change on three interconnected levels.
First, it expands the geopolitical boundaries of the Middle Eastern regional security complex, particularly by integrating Pakistan more directly into its strategic calculations. Second, it intensifies competition over the hierarchy of regional power: which states will emerge as the principal poles of influence within this enlarged security system? And third, it forces a reconsideration of the familiar categories of alliance, rivalry and cooperation that have shaped our understanding of Middle Eastern politics for decades.
The significance of the Mecca Agreement, therefore, lies not only in what the three countries have formally committed themselves to, but in what the agreement potentially represents: the search for a regional security architecture that is neither entirely dependent on Washington nor organized around Israel, while at the same time avoiding subordination to an Iranian-led regional order.
Yet this is precisely where the real questions begin. The agreement faces three major tests. The first is whether it can move beyond political declarations towards credible institutional and military mechanisms. The second is whether Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan can develop a sufficiently coherent strategic agenda despite their different interests, alliances and regional priorities. The third—and ultimately decisive—test will come when one of the three countries faces an actual security crisis and collective commitments collide with the national calculations of the other two.
The Mecca Agreement may indeed mark an important turning point in the architecture of Middle Eastern security. But regional orders are not created by communiqués alone. Between declaring an alliance and proving that it exists lies the most difficult test of all: what its members are prepared to do when their commitments carry a real political and strategic cost.
By Mohammad Abu Rumman is a columnist in The Jordan Times
Heba
Saleem Ayoub Quna
