Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2026, pp. 52-53
Three Views: Mecca Joint Defense Agreement: What Does It Mean?
By Nawaf Obaid
FOR YEARS, SAUDI ARABIA’S strategic patience was mistaken for strategic dependence. Riyadh absorbed provocations, avoided unnecessary wars, preserved its relationship with the United States and concentrated on internal transformation and development. That restraint was never an acceptance that a U.S.-designed regional security order would endure indefinitely.
The mutual defense agreement signed in Mecca on Aug. 7 between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye shows that it will not. It brings together the three most powerful and influential countries of the Sunni Muslim world. An armed attack against one will now be regarded as an attack against all three. This is the institutional beginning of a new regional security architecture.
The U.S.-Iran war accelerated a transformation already under way. Iranian retaliatory strikes exposed the vulnerability of the U.S. basing structure in the Gulf and forced the repositioning of substantial combat forces. Several U.S. bases will eventually close, as they have lost strategic utility. Washington will increasingly struggle to justify the resources required to sustain the overstretched posture of an earlier era.
The United States is not disappearing from the Middle East. Its intelligence relationships, military power, technology and economic influence will remain formidable. But the war exposed the limits of U.S. dominance. Regional states are now bound to organize their own security.
The military logic of the new pact is compelling. Pakistan possesses the Muslim world’s most powerful army and its only nuclear arsenal. Türkiye possesses its second-most powerful army, NATO experience, substantial naval power and a sophisticated defense industry. Both maintain large air forces, although significant portions of their combat-air inventories are aging.
Saudi Arabia provides the complementary capability. The Royal Saudi Air Force has become the Muslim world’s most powerful air force, centered on one of the world’s largest concentrations of advanced 4.5-generation combat aircraft and sophisticated intelligence, command-and-control, air-defense and precision-strike capabilities.
Pakistan’s involvement in providing regional security is already tangible. Pakistani forces are deployed alongside Saudi forces and have participated in the kingdom’s defense. Pakistani capabilities are integrated into Saudi-led structures, while Islamabad has warned Tehran against coordinated attacks on Saudi Arabia’s principal strategic infrastructure. Türkiye is joining an established Saudi-Pakistani strategic relationship.
The next logical step is the rest of the Gulf. Nabeel Alhamar, media adviser to Bahrain’s monarch, has advocated moving beyond the Gulf Cooperation Council toward a Gulf Union in which Bahrain’s future defense becomes increasingly integrated with Saudi Arabia’s. Similar arguments for stronger collective security have emerged in Kuwait and Qatar.
The rest of the Gulf states should also join to maintain their security. Without the U.S. military umbrella of the previous regional order, none can individually generate the military mass required to secure themselves against a major regional power.
The logical response is deeper Gulf integration around Saudi Arabia. No state should be compelled to join. But those remaining outside should not have any illusions about their relative military weight. Remaining outside the principal regional defense architecture risks strategic isolation.
A wider Arab and Muslim circle can develop by choice. Major states such as Egypt, Algeria, Malaysia and Indonesia could participate where their interests converge without assuming identical defense obligations.
The maritime component demonstrates how this architecture can function. The Saudi-led maritime coalition already includes Pakistan and Türkiye, alongside 11 other states. It will safeguard the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb, Strait of Hormuz, Arabian Sea and the Gulf coast to protect the commercial and energy routes passing through them.
Saudi geography makes Riyadh its natural anchor. The kingdom is the only major regional state whose vital interests directly encompass both the Strait of Hormuz system and Bab al-Mandeb. It connects the Gulf and Red Sea security theaters physically, economically and militarily.
The economic stakes reinforce that geography. Saudi Arabia is by far the largest Arab and Middle Eastern economy, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, OPEC’s leader and the holder of the world’s greatest spare production capacity. Its petroleum infrastructure is not merely a national asset. Its continued operation is fundamental to the global economy.
For that reason, Saudi Arabia was always the principal regional prize. Iran cannot consolidate an order built around its power and armed non-state actors while an economically stronger and increasingly militarily powerful Saudi Arabia remains at the center of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Diminishing Saudi power has therefore been central to Tehran’s regional strategy.
That is why Riyadh has faced Iranian strikes on three fronts: Iran directly to the east, Iranian-aligned Iraqi Shi’a militias to the northeast, and the Houthis in Yemen to the southwest. Direct Iranian attacks triggered Saudi retaliation and eventually subsided. The Iraqi and Yemeni fronts remain active.
The result of this aggression has been the opposite of that intended. Pressure on the kingdom has accelerated military partnerships around it. What Iran intended to constrain Saudi power is helping create an architecture capable of negating it.
None of this makes the emerging pact anti-Shi’a. It must never become one. Iran is a regional power whose legitimate security interests must ultimately be accommodated. What cannot continue is Tehran’s reliance on armed non-state organizations to exert military pressure on neighboring sovereign states.
Iran has repeatedly failed to understand the limits of that model and, increasingly, its own power. Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq have already brought themselves into confrontation with Saudi Arabia and its partners and have paid dearly for it. In Yemen, the Saudi-led Joint Forces Command is consolidating Yemeni and allied forces for a campaign intended to degrade and ultimately neutralize Houthi military capabilities, removing their ability to threaten Saudi territory, maritime security and neighboring states.
Saudi-led coalition structures across these theaters now encompass more than 650,000 personnel. They are not a single army. They represent substantial indigenous military power organized around a common regional security purpose. All that, along with the maritime coalition and the new pact, should signal to Iran that it needs to reconsider its aggressive approach to regional geopolitics.
The same should apply to Israel. Israeli adventurism will not be treated differently. The strike on Qatar on Sept. 9, 2025, demonstrated what happens when military superiority becomes confused with unlimited strategic license. Attacking a Gulf state is unacceptable regardless of who conducts it.
Israel has legitimate security requirements, but it does not possess an unrestricted military veto over the region. The emerging architecture will establish strategic boundaries for Tehran and its proxies as well as for Israel. A new balance of regional power will force restraint on both.
Skeptics will dismiss the Mecca agreement as symbolism. But Pakistani forces are already involved, the Saudi-led maritime coalition has been created, Saudi-led military structures in Yemen are operating and the Gulf is debating deeper integration. The agreement gives political form to an architecture already being built.
This is the beginning of the post-United States Middle East—not a region without the U.S., but one no longer dependent upon U.S. power to organize its security. Participation remains a sovereign choice, but geography and power are not.
And the center of gravity of the order now emerging is Saudi Arabia.
Nawaf Obaid is a senior fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and founder of Project AURORAH GeoSignal MASINT System, a multidomain intelligence fusion platform. This article was published by Al Jazeera and is reprinted with permission.
