The Mecca pact is not just another regional alliance

Executive Director of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.

The joint defence agreement signed by Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, and Pakistan in Mecca on Friday is not another entry in a region already crowded with alliances and communiques. Its significance lies less in its provisions than in what it signals: a shift in how the Gulf states conceive of their own security.

Riyadh and its neighbours appear increasingly unwilling to tie strategic security to a single guarantor. The alternative is a wider network of partnerships that diversifies options, capabilities, and room for manoeuvre.

Read this way, the pact does not mark the end of the United States-led order. It marks the start of preparation for a more pluralistic one — a system in which regional powers produce security rather than import it. It is, in effect, an insurance policy against a world where the US is less present and less predictable.

The pact has all the potential to jump-start a major transformation of regional security.

Events of the past decade have changed the calculus in the Gulf. The question is no longer the magnitude of American power, but the predictability of its use.

A state can buy tens of billions worth of US weapons, host bases and troops, and cultivate deep ties with Washington — then discover in a crisis that the decision to act is determined by American domestic politics and geopolitical calculations largely unrelated to allied security.

Gulf capitals have now concluded that partnership, however deep, is not an automatic guarantee of protection.