Wen Jodie, Postdoc Fellow of CISS, Tsinghua University

On August 7, 2026, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Mutual Defense Agreement in Mecca. Under the terms of the agreement, an armed attack against any one of the three parties shall be regarded as a challenge to the collective security of all three, triggering a collective defense mechanism. This agreement is an expansion of the Mutual Defense Agreement reached between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in 2025, formally incorporating Turkey—a NATO member state with significant regional military influence—into the framework. Because the "collective defense" clause in the agreement formally resembles NATO's Article 5, speculation and discussion about the emergence of a "Middle Eastern version of NATO" quickly arose.

The Mecca Mutual Defense Agreement is not simply a regional military alliance, but rather the outcome of the long-term development of three sets of bilateral relationships—Saudi-Pakistani, Saudi-Turkish, and Turkish-Pakistani—against the backdrop of rising uncertainty within the U.S.-dominated regional security system, as regional states seek to construct an autonomous, diversified, and multipolar regional security architecture. Since the 1960s, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have maintained a long-standing institutionalized military cooperation. In September 2025, Israel launched an airstrike against Qatar, a U.S. ally, intensifying concerns among Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, over whether the United States could guarantee the security of the Gulf alliance. One week later, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a strategic mutual defense agreement, and bilateral military cooperation deepened rapidly, with Pakistan reinforcing its strategic security commitment to Saudi Arabia through defense cooperation and military personnel training. The security cooperation between Turkey and Pakistan is built upon long-standing political mutual trust, shared strategic aspirations, and complementary defense industries. In recent years, bilateral cooperation has gradually expanded from traditional military collaboration to strategic coordination, joint military exercises, and defense industry cooperation. The Turkey-Saudi relationship was originally the weakest link in the trilateral framework. After the "Arab Spring," the two countries held divergent positions on the Muslim Brotherhood, regional political transformation, and other issues, and bilateral relations remained at a low ebb for an extended period. The 2018 Khashoggi incident once brought bilateral relations to their lowest point. After 2021, Turkey actively sought to repair relations with Saudi Arabia in order to alleviate regional isolation, attract Gulf capital, and expand defense industry exports. Following reciprocal visits by the leaders of both countries in 2022, bilateral relations warmed rapidly.

In early 2026, the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict erupted, the regional security environment deteriorated sharply, and the three countries accelerated their security coordination, pushing existing cooperation toward a more institutionalized multilateral security framework. The extended deterrence provided by the United States has long been a critical pillar for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states in countering external security threats and maintaining regional stability. However, the current round of conflict has exposed the limitations of this security model: the U.S. military presence has not fully translated into effective protection for allies, and has instead increased the risk of these states being drawn into the conflict. Moreover, the United States has failed to eliminate security risks facing Gulf energy facilities and critical shipping lanes, further prompting Saudi Arabia to reassess its traditional security dependence model and actively explore the construction of diversified security cooperation mechanisms. As a declared nuclear-weapon state, Pakistan has long maintained close military ties with Saudi Arabia; Turkey, meanwhile, possesses the second-largest standing army within NATO and is actively developing its cooperative relationship with Saudi Arabia. Therefore, the trilateral security cooperation among Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey is not an ad hoc arrangement, but rather the product of a reassessment of the reliability of U.S. security commitments and the strategic calculus accumulated through long-standing bilateral relationships.

From the perspective of the regional security landscape, the Mecca Mutual Defense Agreement does not signify a replacement of the U.S.-led security architecture. As a NATO member, Turkey—along with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both of which have long maintained close military cooperation with the United States—still relies on the U.S.-led security network for its advanced weapons systems, air defense capabilities, and intelligence infrastructure. At the same time, in areas such as long-range strike, satellite reconnaissance, and maritime security assurance, trilateral cooperation is unlikely to replace the role played by the United States in the short term. Therefore, the agreement is more accurately understood as a reinforcement and supplement to the existing security system.

However, viewing the Mecca Agreement merely as a supplement to the U.S. security system may underestimate its deeper political implications. In recent years, the United States has sought to build upon the Abraham Accords to promote normalization of relations between Israel and Arab states, and to construct a regional coordination mechanism centered on security cooperation and targeting Iran and its "Axis of Resistance" network. The Mecca Agreement, by contrast, proposes an alternative security vision: although Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey maintain a certain distance from Iran, they equally oppose Israel's continued expansion of military operations and its unilateral use of force to alter the regional status quo. In this way, the agreement seeks to explore a third path distinct from either "relying on Israel to contain Iran" or "integration into the U.S.-led security architecture." For Saudi Arabia, this move carries particular symbolic significance. As one of the Gulf states most severely affected by the current round of conflict, Riyadh was once regarded as a key force in the U.S.-Israeli effort to restructure regional power dynamics and achieve Arab-Israeli normalization. Yet the signing of the Mecca Agreement demonstrates that Saudi Arabia's pursuit of its own security interests does not necessarily presuppose joining the Abraham Accords or accepting Israel's regional security role. Against the backdrop of no substantive progress on the Palestinian issue and Israel's continued expansion of military operations in the region, Saudi Arabia has maintained higher political conditions and greater autonomous space for advancing Saudi-Israeli normalization. This also implies that the U.S. and Israeli expectation of leveraging regional security crises to drive Arab-Israeli reconciliation now faces new challenges. Therefore, while the Mecca Agreement has not diminished the U.S. military presence in the Middle East in the short term, it poses a more direct challenge to America's capacity to shape the regional order.

Of course, the signing of the Mecca Agreement does not signify that a stable and enduring regional security alliance has already been formed. Although the three countries share common interests in enhancing strategic autonomy and strengthening security cooperation, as states with significant influence in the Islamic world, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan each have their own priorities, and their strategic objectives are not entirely aligned. Turkey's core security concerns center on the situation in Syria, the Kurdish issue, and the Eastern Mediterranean; Pakistan must simultaneously contend with India, the spillover from the situation in Afghanistan, and pressure from the direction of Iran; Saudi Arabia is more concerned with Gulf stability, the situation in Yemen, and the security of energy facilities and critical shipping lanes. Therefore, whether trilateral security cooperation can form a long-term credible collective defense mechanism depends on whether the parties can establish a sustained and stable political coordination mechanism on key issues such as regional conflicts, strategic priorities, and the balancing of external relations.

Overall, the Mecca Agreement represents a recalibration of regional security power. The future security order in the Middle East may assume a more complex dual-layered structure: the United States will continue to play an irreplaceable role in intelligence sharing, core military technology, and regional deterrence, while regional powers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan will strengthen risk response, strategic coordination, and strategic autonomy through new security cooperation mechanisms. Although the practical efficacy of the Mecca Agreement remains to be tested, its very emergence indicates that Middle Eastern states are moving beyond sole reliance on traditional external security guarantees, striving instead to construct a more diversified and networked security architecture within the existing international security framework. In the future, the Middle East security order may no longer be shaped by a single external power, but will evolve into a composite security landscape jointly shaped by the United States, regional powers, and cross-regional partners.