هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
Despite the uproar that accompanied the military operation launched by Washington and Tel Aviv against Tehran since last February, and its devastating impact on the Gulf monarchies and the countries of the region, the most consequential outcome of this war was the one that emerged quietly and cautiously, reshuffling the Middle East’s priorities and signaling fundamental changes in its geopolitical calculations to safeguard the security and interests of the region’s states, after the latest war demonstrated both Washington’s inability and its unwillingness to provide those countries with the protection they had hoped for. The Mecca Mutual Defense Agreement, signed last August by Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, was the crown jewel of these efforts.
So how did Washington view this nascent Sunni alliance? What messages did it carry? How does the Trump administration intend to deal with it? Does the alliance imply a reshaping of the region away from Washington? Or is it merely a limited, desperate reaction to Washington’s failure to protect the region’s states from Iran? This article explores these and other questions.
The alliance’s limits: The boundaries of the possible and the unlikely
On Aug. 7, a major step toward allying with the region’s largest powers was taken, as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed the Mecca Mutual Defense Agreement. This move brought together powers with extensive diplomatic, industrial and military ties across the Islamic world and crowned years of bilateral relations and alliances in the region.
Despite the sensitive timing, the Sunni alliance enshrined in the Mecca Agreement is not a spur-of-the-moment development. It had been in preparation for some time and resulted from strong strategic relations among Ankara, Islamabad, and Riyadh. It is not so much a purely ideological bloc as it is a strategic convergence driven by shared objectives dictated by differing circumstances and calculations aimed at reducing dependence on any single external power that burdens these states, while at the same time avoiding total isolation amid the imbalance in global power.
The Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement had already brought together Islamabad and Riyadh, or SMDA, signed Sept. 17, 2025, which marked the first building block of what is symbolically known as the Sunni axis in the region, in reference to its position opposite the largely Shiite Iranian axis through which Tehran manages its influence in the region.
Analysts believe the region’s new Sunni alliance carries important implications. Although some view this alliance as a hollow structure lacking real power because its armies are not integrated under a unified military command like NATO, the member states are not seeking to create a unified military force; instead, they are trying to cover existing shortfalls and achieve specific goals. Through the alliance, Saudi money and Turkish industry are being brought together with Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and military establishment.
The agreement provides additional defense guarantees to the participating countries, increasing their military and strategic weight in a troubled region where Washington has shown weak defensive effectiveness. While Riyadh wants to push back the Iranian threat and challenge Emirati ambitions without sacrificing its economic and strategic ties with Washington, Ankara appears to be seeking additional defensive strength alongside NATO to shield itself from both Tehran and Tel Aviv. Pakistan, meanwhile, is looking for two influential regional powers to serve as a protective umbrella amid its long-running conflict with India.
In addition, Ankara’s participation in particular carries a strategic dimension of the utmost importance given its status as a NATO member. This prominent Turkish entry into the agreement points to Ankara’s desire to play a larger role in the region, one that may seek to compete with Tehran’s influence at a time when the latter is suffering from a loosening grip and shaken influence amid successive US-Israeli blows, whether at the level of direct military action or the level of a suffocating economic blockade.
Despite the promising start among the participating countries, the complex regional reality may prevent the emergence of a direct military alliance in which the parties to the agreement engage in military conflicts that run counter to their interests and their entrenched relations with other states. It seems unlikely, for example, that Türkiye would enter into a confrontation with India if India attacked Pakistan. Likewise, Pakistan may not wish to clash directly with the UAE in Yemen or elsewhere in support of Saudi Arabia, especially given the influential trade and diplomatic ties between those countries and the agreement parties, with whom it has no direct hostility.
In April of this year, Abu Dhabi withdrew deposits worth $3.5 billion from Pakistan’s central bank in a clear message to Islamabad that drawing closer to Riyadh could cost it dearly.
Neither Pakistan nor Türkiye appears interested in a military confrontation with Tehran at the moment. Accordingly, the agreement is ambiguous about its future trajectory and the extent of its military effectiveness, particularly since the defense systems it seeks to frame remain independent, separate, and driven by differing priorities.
Washington’s position: Its hopes and fears
The Trump administration’s wavering, improvisational approach and the loss of confidence in its commitment to its allies played an important role in prompting its traditional partners to seek alternative security alliances and supporting arrangements at a time when international relations and the future of the global order are shrouded in a degree of uncertainty and rapid change. The NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025 was tense after Trump increased pressure on alliance members to double their defense spending from 2 percent to 5 percent by 2035. This came in addition to his announcement of new arrangements related to East and Southeast Asia, under which host countries of US military bases and forces, such as Japan and South Korea, would share the burden of their protection with Washington to a greater and more effective degree.
Accordingly, such alliances were not confined to the Middle East, which is going through a critical and volatile period in its contemporary history. In 2025, France and Poland signed the “Nancy Treaty” to strengthen a package of new defense commitments, despite both being NATO members and under its protection. Britain and Germany also added another layer of mutual defense cooperation, including military cooperation, through the “Kensington Treaty.” Britain then signed a new “Security and Defense Partnership Treaty” with Poland in May 2026 to cooperate on missiles, air defense, military operational coordination, and other areas of cooperation.
As soon as the agreement was unveiled, Donald Trump quickly congratulated the participating countries for finally taking responsibility for their regional security, describing the agreement as a bold move and a major beginning for the region’s leaders. The position aligns with his policy of blaming allies for their excessive dependence on Washington and for draining its resources to defend their own security. Official Washington, however, remained cautiously silent before commenting on the agreement, weighing its impact on US interests and influence in the region. Washington appeared on the verge of losing its leadership role, without literally losing its allies in the bluntest sense.
This helps calm Washington’s nerves. The leaders of the countries party to the agreement repeatedly said they do not want to enter arms races or contests for influence in the region, and that they are content with additional defense guarantees that ensure the region’s stability and security.
Meanwhile, sees Magazine newspaper, from another perspective, that the nascent alliance can, over the long term, unify divergent strategies and visions that until recently had run in parallel without intersecting in the calculations of the largest military and economic powers in the Islamic world. That is where the danger lies for Washington. Although the implementation mechanism remains incomplete and may not involve direct military intervention in the foreseeable future, its diplomatic and political consequences for the member states are no less important.
By contrast, The Hill believes the agreement carries contradictory signals for Washington. On one hand, the countries in the region appear to be seriously seeking to reduce their military reliance on Washington and look for an alternative that is more effective and better aligned with the region’s concerns. That means Washington may no longer be able to dictate all the terms from this point forward or control those countries’ destinies as it once did.
On the other hand, The Hill argues that the region’s countries still cannot dispense with Washington entirely. American technology, intelligence services, and the military and diplomatic weight Washington brings to the global stage remain needed. This means that after this agreement, Washington can breathe a sigh of relief and shift some of the burden on this file onto countries considered among its closest allies in the Middle East, without fearing for its interests in the region — especially since the Trump administration has long complained about these countries’ free reliance on Washington’s resources to protect their security.
The Council on Foreign Relations goes even further. It sees Steve Cook, an expert on US policy in the Middle East and the author of “The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East,” arguing that the agreement is the clearest proof that the regional order in the Middle East has come to an end, as it clearly points to the erosion of American influence in the region and the loss of accumulated trust in Washington.
Cook explains that despite legitimate doubts about the effectiveness of the security guarantees offered by the agreement, and the extent to which the member states are prepared to engage in regional military conflicts that concern some of them but not others, the agreement’s significance does not lie primarily in that aspect, important as it is. Rather, it points to the accelerating regional transformation in the Middle East and the shrinking leadership role Washington has long played among countries considered its allies and central to its interests in the oil-producing lands and, naturally, the belt surrounding its favored state, Israel.
He attributes the United States’ success in achieving its goals in the Middle East — the free flow of oil and guaranteeing Israel’s security — to a great extent to the cooperation provided by the region’s countries, without which those goals would have required far greater resources than Washington could muster to keep things as they are, according to Cook.
Accordingly, it notes that Brahma Chellaney, the veteran American journalist, says the era of Washington’s dominance and exclusive security role in the Islamic world is nearing its end. That wisdom, in his view, dictates that Washington should not resist this inevitable shift, but rather seek to shape and steer it to maximize the benefits of its effects.
Signals and Messages: Washington’s Allies and Adversaries
The agreement carries divergent implications for Washington regarding Beijing’s influence in the region. While Washington’s grip on the Islamic world is gradually loosening, its countries do not appear ready to hand the reins to Beijing as an alternative to Washington — something the latter sees as the lesser of two evils. And he pointed out that Chinese analysts and commentators say the alliance does not appear to be any substitute for Washington; the region’s countries remain far from breaking free of Washington’s grip, as projecting strategic independence is far easier than achieving it.
Still, the long-term negative impact on Washington continues to cast a shadow, amid Beijing’s unwillingness to assume responsibility for the region’s security, given the defense commitments, military bases, and the possibility of being drawn into costly conflicts that do not serve its interests. At the same time, Beijing is well positioned to make the most of Washington’s loosening security grip; the near future holds the possibility of exporting defense and military industries and strengthening technological and intelligence cooperation with the countries of the region without paying exorbitant and unsustainable costs, and without at the same time sacrificing its relationship with Tehran. Not to mention the possibility of strengthening defense cooperation among member states and directing Saudi money to support the Turkish and Pakistani defense industries.
The agreement also carries another message from Ankara to NATO: The US-Israeli policy that shaped its war with Washington and left the Gulf monarchies exposed, even as advanced defense systems were deployed to protect Tel Aviv and Washington’s own interests, accelerated the emergence of the Sunni alliance and pushed Ankara to hedge against a similar potential betrayal by NATO — to which Türkiye is sending, through this agreement, a message that it is not satisfied. Despite this striking Turkish inclination, Washington believes that the strategic independence embodied by the nascent Sunni alliance still revolves within the orbit of the alliances led by Washington and, so far, does not extend beyond the limits of its regional order.
Egypt’s last-minute decision not to join the agreement, despite its sustained involvement in the discussions, adds another dimension from Washington’s perspective. Egypt, which for nearly half a century ranked second only to Israel among recipients of US aid, appears to have balanced its desire to join a regional defense alliance against its acute economic crisis, which Washington’s displeasure could push to the breaking point. By contrast, states in the Sunni alliance have more economic room to maneuver, allowing them to loosen their close dependence on Washington.
There is also Israel — the hidden player whose impact on the region’s alliances cannot be denied. Egypt has been bound to Israel by a 1979 peace treaty and fears that Tel Aviv, and Washington behind it, may view the new regional agreement as a breach of Cairo’s historic commitment. Meanwhile, Ankara, Riyadh and Islamabad appear to be drifting ever farther from the framework of normalization with Israel and posing a regional challenge to its influence in the region. This reflects concern that Tel Aviv saw the participating countries’ identities as deliberate rather than coincidental, and what that requires in terms of strengthening Israeli relations with New Delhi to form a counteralliance.
Thus, the alliance carries special significance for the Trump administration, as efforts that until recently topped its international priorities could have reshaped the political map of the Middle East—namely, crowning the Abraham Accords with Riyadh’s accession.
Galya Lindenstrauss believes that the agreement is intended to send a message to Iran and Israel, and perhaps the UAE as well. Lindenstrauss, an expert on Turkish-Israeli relations at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, says Saudi Arabia’s inclusion in the Abraham Accords has now become, in her view, a distant hope — posing a challenge to both Netanyahu’s government and the Trump administration, which had regarded the matter as a regional priority.
Meanwhile, Cook argues that the Mecca Agreement stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Abraham Accords, as the Turks and Saudis had already begun removing Israel from the region’s calculations even before the agreement was signed. The clearest evidence, he says, is the consultations between Riyadh and Ankara to reroute the IMEC railway line, which had been expected to run from Saudi Arabia to Jordan and then Israel before reaching Europe via Cyprus and Greece. The proposal now is to extend it from Saudi Arabia to Jordan, then Syria and Türkiye, and onward to the rest of Europe. It marks a striking shift in economic relations and in present and future regional alliances across the region as a whole.
This reading is reinforced by the reference to “Islamic solidarity” contained in the agreement and by the choice of Mecca as its launching point, carrying an implicit rejection of and challenge to Israel — and to the Western recklessness that supports it — more than a challenge to Iran alone. Iran, for its part, publicly endorsed the agreement, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi framing it in the language of Islamic unity. This is especially significant given that the countries of the region that have paid the highest price for Washington’s recklessness and indifference have shifted from a policy of strict, US-backed containment of Tehran to attempts to find common ground with it in search of a moderate breakthrough that would secure stability for a region whose stability, it seems, matters little to Washington.
Despite this, the most prominent clause in the agreement treats any armed attack on any of the member states as an attack on them all — language inspired by NATO’s Article 5 — in a clear deterrent message to Tehran, which has chosen restraint as a strategic necessity to avoid losing Ankara and Islamabad, both of which have become effective diplomatic channels in its strained relationship with Washington.