V-Max(imize) Security: The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement

“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” In the case of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Türkiye and a number of other Gulf states and even NATO, abrasive US policies threaten to shake these eternal interests and inflict collateral damage.

Illustration by The Geostrata

Signed in Mecca on 7 August 2026, the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement brings Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan into a collective-defence framework under which an armed attack on any one is treated as an attack on all three. Beyond that political commitment, the pact is designed to institutionalise defence minister and senior military coordination, joint land, sea and air exercises, and cooperation in air defence, drones, electronic warfare and AI, alongside joint defence development, production and technology transfer.

Its significance lies in connecting three complementary capabilities: Saudi capital and strategic geography, Turkish defence technology and industrial capacity, and Pakistani military manpower and experience. For Riyadh, this creates an additional deterrence layer against regional threats while reducing reliance on Washington; for Türkiye, it extends its role as a regional security provider beyond NATO; and for Pakistan, it institutionalizes its longstanding Saudi military relationship while giving Islamabad greater strategic relevance. The agreement is explicitly presented as defensive and remains open to possible additional members, including Egypt. 

SAUDI-PAKISTAN AXIS

Saudi-Pakistan relations have come a long way since Pakistan’s refusal to provide military support to Saudi Arabia during the Yemen war in 2015. Since then, the two nations have engaged a lot more, with Pakistan featuring greatly in the Vision 2030 of Prince Mohammed bin Salman and numerous defence deals amounting to billions of dollars. Pakistan was already training Saudi forces after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and Pakistani pilots were involved in the defence of Saudi territory against South Yemeni incursions in 1969. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the relationship gained more depth. The 1982 Protocol Agreement on the deputation of Pakistani armed personnel and military training institutionalised the arrangement, and at various points as many as 15,000 Pakistani troops were stationed in the Kingdom. 

Given all this, the timing of the Mecca Agreement is particularly significant because Pakistan has already demonstrated that it is willing to put actual military assets into Saudi Arabia during the current crisis: Pakistani fighter aircraft, troops and air-defence personnel were deployed to the Kingdom in 2026, making the relationship much more tangible than a diplomatic promise. For Saudi Arabia, this gives it an additional layer of deterrence against Iran and other regional threats without having to depend entirely on the US; for Pakistan, it converts its longstanding military usefulness to Riyadh into a more formal strategic role while also bringing financial and diplomatic benefits. 

IRAN-SAUDI TROUBLES

Saudi Arabia's problem with Iran has never really been merely a religious Sunni-Shia difference. The deeper problem is that Iran developed a method of regional power projection which made Saudi Arabia vulnerable without requiring Iran to fight Saudi Arabia directly. Hezbollah, Iraqi armed groups, the Houthis, missile programmes, drones and the ability to threaten maritime traffic all allowed Tehran to impose costs at distances from Iran itself.

Yemen was particularly uncomfortable for Riyadh because the Houthis were not some distant Iranian partner; they were operating directly on Saudi Arabia's southern border, and their missiles and drones could reach Saudi territory and increasingly important economic infrastructure.

The 2019 attacks on Abqaiq and Khurais were therefore particularly damaging. The attacks had temporarily knocked out around half of Saudi oil production, despite the Kingdom possessing one of the most expensive and technologically sophisticated defence establishments in the Middle East.

The recent US-Iran war has exposed that being closely aligned with Washington can result in collateral damage. Saudi Arabia has recently been economically and politically vulnerable due to the US-Iran conflict. Although bin Salman’s foreign policy focuses on greater strategic engagement, it refuses to capitulate to foreign pressures, seen clearly in the refusal to let foreign allies utilise Saudi airspace or bases for regional aggression. However, it has been caught in the crossfire; closures and instability around the Strait of Hormuz forced Saudi Arabia to rely heavily on its East-West crude pipeline to shift transport terminals toward the Red Sea and redirect funds towards domestic supply chains.

Saudi territory and installations such as Ras Tanura faced retaliatory Iranian projectile strikes. Since the Mecca Agreement established a strictly regional Islamic alliance, it signalled that Saudi territory will not be used as a US military base, at least in the near future. Moreover, by maintaining diplomatic distance from the US, the agreement prevents Saudi Arabia from becoming a major Iranian target. Moreover, Türkiye provides advanced drone warfare systems and naval expertise to defend vital Saudi oil facilities and shipping lanes from Iranian swarm attacks.

UAE-SAUDI TROUBLES

Saudi-UAE issues persist too, culminating in the withdrawal of the UAE from OPEC in May 2026. Saudi Arabia sees Tehran as a major threat and has traditionally practiced deterrence, while the UAE, because so much of its economic model depends on Dubai and Abu Dhabi remaining stable commercial and financial hubs, has increasingly preferred closer relations with Iran.

The differences become even more obvious in Yemen, where both countries entered the Saudi-led intervention in 2015 against the Houthis but gradually developed very different ideas. Saudi Arabia wanted to preserve a unified Yemeni state under an internationally recognised government because fragmentation on its southern border could create a permanent security problem and potentially give Iran-aligned actors more room to operate, whereas the UAE increasingly backed the Southern Transitional Council (STC), which seeks an independent South Yemen, and helped build local southern forces that were sometimes fighting the Saudi-backed Yemeni government.

The same divergence has appeared in Sudan, where Saudi Arabia has generally tried to maintain relations with the Sudanese Armed Forces through mediation and the Jeddah peace process, while the UAE has faced persistent accusations of supporting the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) with weapons and financial assistance. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement safeguards Saudi Arabia by surrounding it with heavy security partners to counterbalance the UAE’s increasing regional independence and its pursuit of a more aggressive and unilateral economic policy. 

THE TURKIYE QUESTION

Türkiye’s case is interesting because it has the second-largest NATO military, sits in an exceptionally important geographical position, and benefits from the US. The United States has historically stationed B61 nuclear gravity bombs at Incirlik Air Base in southern Türkiye, near Adana, as part of NATO's nuclear-sharing arrangements.

Türkiye has hosted US nuclear weapons, controlled by the US during peacetime, since the early Cold War, although the numbers and arrangements have changed substantially over time.

Ankara therefore has considerably more security built into the Western system than either Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Its push for alternative partnerships is instead about what happens when Turkish regional interests stop matching American preferences.

Syria is a good example. Ankara considers the Kurdish YPG and associated structures in northern Syria a major national-security problem, while the US developed a close operational relationship with Kurdish-led forces in the fight against ISIS. That produced a situation where two NATO members could be cooperating against the same broad security problem while supporting different actors on the ground.

The S-400 crisis produced another version of the same problem. Türkiye purchased Russia's S-400 air-defence system despite American objections and was subsequently removed from the F-35 programme and subjected to CAATSA sanctions. From Ankara's perspective, this demonstrated that dependence on Western military technology could become a source of political leverage over Turkish foreign policy.

The South Caucasus has made Turkish autonomy even more consequential. Turkish military technology and training played an important role in Azerbaijan's military transformation before and during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, and the two countries have subsequently deepened defence and transport cooperation following the Shusha Declaration of 2021. Türkiye has secured major energy transit routes like the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the Trans Anatolian Pipeline, and railway construction.

The strategic geography matters because Azerbaijan provides Türkiye with a route towards the Caspian Sea and Central Asia, and Türkiye increasingly sees itself as a state with interests running through the Caucasus rather than a country whose strategic attention should stop at NATO's eastern frontier. 

The Mecca agreement gives Türkiye a particularly useful platform because Saudi Arabia has the money to finance major defence-industrial projects, a huge potential market and access to the Gulf, while Pakistan gives Ankara an established military relationship further east. Turkish defence companies therefore get a chance to become part of the security architecture of the Gulf without that role having to be mediated through NATO.

If Saudi Arabia begins buying more Turkish systems, jointly producing them and integrating Turkish technology into its military, then Ankara is no longer simply a NATO member protecting its own territory; it is becoming a provider of military capability to another major regional power. 

MAKING AMERICA LESS EXCLUSIVE AGAIN

The United States continues to have enormous structural advantages, and these three states are not interested in giving all of them up. What is being challenged is the assumption that the security of the Gulf, Türkiye and Pakistan has to be organised primarily through American military power. 

Saudi Arabia cannot simply replace its longstanding US alliance with Pakistan and Türkiye. However, it does aim to be better equipped in case of a sudden absence of American assistance and a reduced dependence on it. This best explains why Riyadh is simultaneously strengthening its relationship with Washington while building alternatives to it.

The industrial dimension is particularly important.

Saudi Arabia has spent years trying to localise defence production as part of Vision 2030, with the ambition of making a much larger proportion of military expenditure stay inside the Kingdom. Importing American weapons (like Saudi Arabia has been doing) keeps Saudi dependent, whereas developing more and better weapons with a partner like Türkiye is more viable. Türkiye is therefore attractive because its defence industry has moved from being primarily an importer of Western technology to being an increasingly important exporter of drones, missiles, electronic warfare systems, naval platforms and other equipment.

The Mecca framework explicitly includes defence-industrial cooperation, and that gives the Saudi-Turkish relationship an importance that goes beyond the immediate collective-defence clause. 

Pakistan supplies a different part of this equation. Riyadh gets an established military relationship, access to a very large and experienced armed force, training and advisory capacity, and a country whose strategic weight is greater than its conventional equipment alone suggests because Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state. Islamabad's nuclear status does inevitably affect the strategic weight of its relationship with Riyadh, particularly in this region where Iran's nuclear programme has been one of the primary security concerns of many states.

The Mecca agreement gives many capabilities an institutional framework, and that is probably its most consequential feature, because over time the question is not whether these three states can replace American power but whether they can build enough overlapping regional capacity that American power becomes one component of their security rather than the organising principle of it.

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BY AISHEE

TEAM GEOSTRATA

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