RESOLVING THE LEDGER
This is one outlet's own report from The Times of Israel — the article as it was filed. Other outlets are covering the same event; open the full story to compare every source side by side.
See the full story · 1 sourcesLazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
After Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed a mutual defense treaty in Mecca last week, a senior Israeli official sounded the alarm.
"The agreement worries us," the official told the Ynet news outlet. "It is a pact aimed at Israel."
"We wouldn't be surprised if Egypt joins the Mecca Agreement," continued the official, expressing worries that it could bring hostile forces to Israel's doorstep.
That interpretation fundamentally misreads both the target of the tripartite pact and Cairo's relevance to it.
It was actually a reading offered by Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman that got closer to the heart of the agreement.
“Countries in the region cannot rely on the claim of security provided by the US as in the past,” said Esmaeil Baghaei.
Indeed, the failure of the US to effectively confront Iran and sustain pressure on Tehran is at the center of the agreement. "These countries are showing frustration with the lack of success and the muddle of US diplomacy," said Simon Henderson, Baker senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The three Sunni powers are not about to go to war for each other, and they know it. The pact is about signaling leadership, joint action, and diplomatic power, not about creating a unified military force.
The Middle East is littered with a litany of defense pacts that amounted to nothing.
The Arab League established its Joint Defense Council in 1950 after being defeated by the fledgling IDF. That council then created the Egypt-led United Arab Command in 1964.
Its chance to prove its effectiveness as a joint bulwark came a few years later, as Israel carried out Operation Shredder in the Jordanian-held West Bank in 1966 and then took on four Arab armies in the Six Day War the next year.
The UAC did nothing, and fell apart shortly thereafter.
Today, regional defense pacts still don't mean much.
After Israel's failed 2025 strike on Hamas leaders in Doha sent jitters through the region with the signal that nowhere was off limits, Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defense treaty with nuclear-armed Pakistan that officially regards any attack on either nation as an attack on both. A decade earlier, Pakistan had turned down a request from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman to join its war against the Houthis in Yemen.
This year's Iran war gave the countries a chance to see if things would change under the alliance. Saudi Arabia was hit repeatedly by Iran, and Pakistan did indeed send thousands of troops, a squadron of fighter jets and an air defense system to Saudi Arabia — after a ceasefire was in effect, and only after the Saudis forked over $3 billion to help Islamabad pay off debts to the UAE.
Even more feebly, the Pakistani troops were deployed in an "advisory and training role."
Turkey, for its part, has had 3,000 troops in Qatar for almost a decade and a number of defense pacts with the country. But they did nothing to stop Iranian strikes in 2025 and 2026, or the Israeli attack on Hamas leaders in Doha.
Further weakening the potential for any joint action in the newest defense agreement, the three countries are facing very different military threats.
To institutionalize an alliance is therefore to settle, or at least freeze, the struggle for primacy among states that have rarely accepted one another’s primacy.
The Saudis are under attack by Iran, the Houthis, and other proxies in Tehran's axis. Pakistan's bitter enemy is India, while Turkey is focused on the Kurdish threat and its role as a NATO member facing down Russia.
The Saudis and Turks aren't about to jump into war against the massive nuclear-armed India, nor are Turkey or Pakistan going to attack Iran over strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure and ships.
"The Saudis were attacked this week," said Yoel Guzansky, senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies "I didn't see a Turkish declaration of war against the Houthis."
Ankara and Islamabad are well aware that the Saudis will continue to be attacked by the Houthis, and signed the agreement anyway. It won't take long before the military aspects of the deal are proven meaningless.
Moreover, none of these countries want to make the concessions that a real military alliance demands.
"To determine the supreme commander is to determine hierarchy," according to Hussein Aboubakr Mansour of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.
"To place forces permanently in another regional country is to create political leverage inside it," Mansour continued. "To decide which threat activates the common force is to decide whose definition of regional order prevails. To institutionalize an alliance is therefore to settle, or at least freeze, the struggle for primacy among states that have rarely accepted one another’s primacy."
The logic of the agreement, then, is diplomatic, not joint defense.
"I wouldn't call it an alliance," said Guzansky. "I'd call it an alignment, perhaps. It has goals, but not necessarily military ones."
And even those nonmilitary goals diverge beyond the common desire to show diplomatic might in the wake of the US-Iran war.
Turkey is trying to show through the agreement that it is a regional power.
Pakistan wants to take advantage of its newfound role as a key mediator between the US and Iran to strengthen itself against India.
Saudi Arabia, for its part, wants to signal its ability to create an independent security architecture that doesn't depend on either Iran or the US, and can help it stay out of future conflicts.
The Saudis, who initiated the pact, have lost trust in the US security umbrella since US President Donald Trump's non-response to the 2019 drone-and-cruise-missile attacks on its oil sites that it blames on Iran.
That feeling has only gotten worse given Trump's desperation for a deal with Iran while Tehran openly mocks the US president and keeps raising its demands.
"It's a message to Iran that [Sa...
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