Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia sealed a historic defense pact on Friday, signing an agreement “intended to strengthen collective deterrence against any act of aggression.”
The so-called “Mecca Joint Defense Agreement” between the three Sunni Muslim-majority states is meant to increase cooperation during regional uncertainty and threats from the Iran war.
The agreement was signed in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
The alliance has been likened to a NATO-style alliance and on Friday, the Pakistani foreign ministry said that an attack on any member would be regarded as an attack on all.
But experts and analysts have been quick to point out that the deal is unlikely to work that way — at least at first.
For example, on the weekend the Houthi rebel group in Yemen fired at Saudi Arabian oil facilities again. The Houthis consider Saudi Arabia their enemy and are also aligned with Iran. The latter has also targeted Saudi Arabia after the US and Israel attacked it, starting a war in late February, because it sees the Saudis as a US ally.
But following the Houthi attack on the weekend, neither Turkey nor Pakistan sprang to the Saudis’ defense. Nor are they likely to attack Iran, analysts say. In fact, Pakistan is acting as a mediator between Iran and the US currently.
Mecca agreement an ‘elastic defense pact’
This arrangement is meant as more of a deterrent and as an “elastic defense pact,” Dania Thafer, executive director of the Washington-based think tank the Gulf International Forum, or GIF, told DW late last week.
“If you look at the parties in this agreement, you have Saudi Arabia, which is in the middle of this conflict. But you also have Turkey and Pakistan, who both have relations with Iran and both have relations with the US. So I think it’s an extra layer of deterrence, if you will, for Saudi Arabia,” Thafer explained. “I think Saudi Arabia is looking at a layered deterrence approach to regional threats as they emerge.”
This new alliance is likely to work out in various stages with the short-term goal being a “stabilized region,” Kamran Bokhari, a senior fellow at the Middle East Policy Council in Washington, told DW.
Technology transfer and investment
Longer term goals will involve defense cooperation rather than fighting, other experts have said.
“The three countries complement each other unusually well,” Andreas Krieg, a lecturer in security at King’s College London, told news agency Agence France-Presse last week.
Saudi Arabia has oil wealth but limited defense technology and has been reliant on the US up until now. Meanwhile Turkey and Pakistan need investment and have strong armed forces, and in Turkey’s case an advanced defense-industrial sector, Krieg explained. Pakistan is the only one with nuclear weapons of the three.
“Turkey has technology and production capacity but needs markets and investment. Pakistan has a workforce, military institutions and nuclear deterrent, but needs financing and industrial capabilities,” Krieg noted.
Who does the Mecca pact target?
A Turkish official cited by Reuters said the agreement was purely defensive in nature and open to any regional neighbors who might want to sign on. Egypt is thought to be a potential partner but also has other allies to consider, including the United Arab Emirates. The latter have not joined and relations between the UAE and Saudi Arabia are currently strained.
The Turkish official also said the pact does not replace or negate previous bilateral or multilateral agreements between signatories, nor is it directed at any one actor or threat.
Yet there’s no doubt the agreement has been understood as a deterrent, mainly against two other nations, Iran and Israel.
The Mecca pact’s objectives are not about some kind of military victory, Khalid al-Jaber, director of the Doha-based Middle East Council on Global Affairs wrote in a Sunday op-ed for Qatari news outlet, Al Jazeera. “It is the prevention of hegemony.”
“Diminished American weight could leave the region inside an order whose rules are set by two actors alone: Israel and Iran,” he continued. “The Mecca pact is best understood as an early attempt to build a third pole — a bloc that does not need to fight either power, but one that has enough weight to deny either a monopoly over the region.”
How does Israel feel about it?
Two of the signatories to the agreement — Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — don’t recognize Israeland have no official relations with it, even though at least in Saudi Arabia’s case there are likely some covert ties. Turkey does recognize Israel but the relationship is strained at the moment, due to Israel’s activity in Gaza that Turkey has called genocide.
Turkish leader Erdogan said last week that Israel’s actions in Syria and Lebanon also constitute a threat to Turkish security.
“The development [of the Mecca pact] poses significant challenges for Israel, pushes the prospect of normalization with Riyadh further out of reach and cuts short the vision of a ‘new Middle East’,” Oshrit Birvadker, a research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, wrote in a Saturday editorial for the outlet Israel Hayom.
Birvadker also believes that the new trilateral alliance will increase the growing rivalry and tensions between Turkey and Israel.
Mixed reactions in Iran
The Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University looked at how the Iranians were reacting.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi did not seem too upset by the agreement. On the social media platform, X (formerly Twitter) he posted that “when Muslims stand together, we can face every challenge by malicious outsiders head-on.”
Observers took this to be a positive, part of Iran’s argument for pushing the US out of the region.
Some Iranian observers thought that the Saudis might be trying to leverage the better relations that the Turkish and Pakistanis have with the Iranians, to make itself safer from Iranian attacks. But other Iranian politicians were more critical, saying that Saudi Arabia wasn’t safe with the US as an ally and wouldn’t be safe with Turkey and Pakistan either.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
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