The Makkah pact is not a Sunni NATO — the Middle East is testing a security order of its own

It took barely 48 hours for the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement to run into the question that will ultimately decide what it becomes: a historic security arrangement, or just another ambitious regional declaration.

Two days after Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed the pact on 7 August, Yemen’s Houthis said they’d struck Saudi Aramco’s Jazan refinery with a drone. Saudi authorities put the fire out quickly and reported no injuries. The political fire was harder to contain. If an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all three, what exactly were Pakistan and Türkiye now expected to do?

Neither rushed to announce anything military.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan had already said, before the strike, that assistance under the agreement would be worked out through consultation and would depend on the nature and scale of the threat. So the Jazan attack became, almost immediately, a live test of both what the pact means and how little of it has actually been pinned down.

Then, on 10 August, came something arguably more telling. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said Tehran had no reason to think the agreement was aimed at it — and went further, framing the pact as proof that regional states are leaning more on their own capabilities and less on outside powers.

That single response undercuts the easiest, laziest read of the Makkah agreement: that this is a “Sunni Muslim defence pact” built to counter Shia-majority Iran. It isn’t. Yes, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan are all Sunni-majority states — that’s just a fact. But turning that fact into the agreement’s purpose is a different claim entirely, and not one the evidence supports.

Nothing in what’s been made public ties membership to Sunni Islam or names Iran as an adversary. Quite the opposite — all three governments have gone out of their way to say so. Riyadh has called the idea of a military axis or sectarian bloc off base, and pushed back on any link to a nuclear arms race. Erdoğan has described the pact as collective deterrence aimed at no one in particular, open to other “brotherly countries” who want in. Fidan put it even more plainly: no state becomes a common enemy just because three others signed a defence pact together — Türkiye only treats a country as a threat if it actually attacks a member, and he specifically ruled out Iran as a target. Pakistan’s Ishaq Dar echoed all of this, calling the pact purely defensive, grounded in Article 51 of the UN Charter, and open to other countries willing to buy into its principles — while stressing it doesn’t override any existing bilateral or multilateral commitments Pakistan already holds.

Tehran’s response changes the conversation

If Iran had come out condemning the pact as encirclement, the sectarian framing would have written itself. Instead, Tehran more or less accepted the underlying logic — greater regional self-reliance on security — with one caveat: any such framework needs to be inclusive and not eventually turn into a tool against it.

That tracks with how Pakistan and Türkiye actually behave toward Iran. Pakistan has spent much of this year quietly mediating between Tehran and Washington, not building a coalition to isolate it. Türkiye, despite real disagreements with Iran on regional issues, has kept the economic and political relationship running. And the four-country R4 mechanism — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Egypt — has stayed engaged on Iran too; at its June meeting in Cairo the four welcomed movement toward a US-Iran understanding.

Put simply: this looks less like a bloc forming against Iran and more like an attempt to institutionalise deterrence without turning every regional disagreement into a permanent confrontation.

Whether that distinction holds is probably the thing that decides whether this initiative actually works.

From three members to a wider architecture

The founders are already talking expansion. Fidan has said Erdoğan doesn’t want this locked at three members forever, and Egypt has been floated as the natural next addition once the technical details are ironed out. That’s not a stretch — Egypt, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan already coordinate through the R4 mechanism on Iran, Gaza and regional stability, so much of the groundwork is already there.

Qatar, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Malaysia and others have come up in speculation too, and that’s worth flagging as exactly that — speculation. Until a government actually says it’s joining, treating it as a member-in-waiting gets ahead of the facts. What matters more, at this stage, is that the conversation around membership is happening in political and strategic terms, not sectarian ones.

If Egypt does eventually join, this stops being a trilateral pact and starts looking like the security nucleus the R4 process has been circling for a while. At that point the interesting question isn’t whether Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye built an alliance — it’s whether they built the institution a wider regional order eventually grows around.

Not a replacement for NATO — or Washington

It’s tempting to read this as Türkiye drifting from NATO or Saudi Arabia stepping back from Washington. Neither holds up. Fidan has drawn a technical comparison between the pact’s mutual-defence clause and NATO’s Article 5, but Türkiye is still a NATO member with the alliance’s second-largest military, and Ankara has been careful to call the new arrangement complementary, not a substitute. Dar has said much the same for Pakistan.

Think of it instead as layered security. For decades, the region’s security has leaned heavily on outside guarantees — American bases, Western arms, bilateral protection deals. None of that disappears overnight, and none of these three countries seems eager to make it disappear overnight either. What’s shifting is the assumption that a state has to choose between depending on outside powers and cutting them off entirely. The Makkah pact offers a middle path: keep the external relationships, but build up indigenous capacity — deterrence, defence production, intelligence-sharing, crisis response — alongside them. Which is exactly why Iran’s reaction matters as much as it does.

The real test is still ahead

The collective-defence language reads well on paper — an attack on one is an attack on all — but deterrence only works if an adversary believes those words translate into something real. Would an attack trigger intelligence support? Air defence? Troops? Would a strike from a non-state actor like the Houthis count the same as one from a state? What happens if members disagree on how hard to respond? None of this is hypothetical anymore — Jazan put it on the table within days.

Fidan says the actual scope of assistance will come out of consultation, with a ministerial structure and permanent secretariat in Saudi Arabia meant to work out the details over time. There’s a real upside to that flexibility — automatic military escalation could just as easily turn a defensive pact into a way of dragging three countries into someone else’s war. But too much ambiguity cuts the other way, weakening the deterrent value the pact is supposed to have. Somewhere between those two failure modes is where this agreement needs to land.

It should also steer clear of nuclear mythology. Pakistan’s nuclear status is going to hang over any discussion of this pact, especially given how close Riyadh and Islamabad already are on defence. But nothing in the agreement — or in anything officials have said — extends Pakistan’s deterrent to Saudi Arabia or Türkiye, and Saudi officials have explicitly rejected any nuclear framing. Calling this a Pakistani “nuclear umbrella” goes well beyond what’s actually on the record.

‘Attack on one is attack on all’: Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan sign landmark Mecca defence pact

A regional order of its own

In the end, the Makkah agreement shouldn’t be judged by the religion of its founders or measured against NATO. Saudi Arabia brings economic weight and reach across the Arab and Islamic world. Türkiye brings one of the region’s larger militaries and a fast-growing defence industry. Pakistan brings conventional military strength, nuclear deterrence, and operational reach spanning South Asia and the Middle East. Together, they’ve built something the region has talked about for years but rarely managed to institutionalise — a collective security mechanism run, substantially, by the region itself.

Whether it grows — whether Egypt signs on, whether others follow — comes down to credibility: can the pact avoid becoming just another instrument of rivalry. Its whole future rests on whether the founders keep the principle they’re emphasising now — collective defence without sectarian exclusion.

That principle is already being tested faster than anyone expected. In three days, the pact weathered a Houthi attack, ran headfirst into questions about how collective defence actually works, picked up membership speculation, and got an Iranian response that landed on something more interesting than anyone predicted: regional states starting to trust their own capabilities more than they trust anyone else’s.

That’s not a new Middle Eastern security order yet. But it might be how one starts.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.