Abraham offered normalisation. Makkah offers security

There’s a striking irony sitting inside this year’s diplomacy.

Back on May 25, Donald Trump publicly pushed Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkiye, Egypt and Jordan to join the Abraham Accords en masse — part of a wider attempt to reshape the region while he negotiated an end to the war with Iran. Pakistan pushed back. Saudi Arabia wouldn’t move without progress on Palestinian statehood. The mass expansion Washington wanted simply didn’t happen.

Then, less than three months later, something quite different did.

On August 7, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye — three of the very countries Trump had wanted inside an expanded Abraham framework — met in Makkah and signed a defence pact of their own. Its logic runs almost opposite to Abraham’s: an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all.

To be fair, there’s no real evidence this was conceived as a rebuttal to Abraham. None of the three describe it as anti-Israel, anti-Iran or anti-American, and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan says the groundwork had been laid nearly three years earlier. But the contrast is hard to miss all the same. Abraham offered normalisation. Makkah offers protection. And that difference may be exactly why one model has stalled while the other has suddenly found momentum.

What Abraham got right — and where it hit a wall

It would be unfair to call the Abraham Accords a failure. Signed in 2020, they did something decades of Middle East diplomacy hadn’t managed: they gave Arab states formal relations with Israel without waiting for a final settlement with the Palestinians. Embassies opened. Trade followed. That’s real.

But the very thing that made Abraham possible is also what capped it. Arab diplomacy had long run on a simple sequence — resolve the Palestinian question, then normalise. Abraham flipped that order, betting governments could normalise now and let peace catch up later. A handful of governments were willing to make that bet. Their publics largely weren’t. Arab Barometer’s polling after October 7, 2023, found support for normalisation with Israel never topped 13 percent in any of the seven countries surveyed — and in Morocco, an Abraham signatory itself, support collapsed from 31 percent to 13 percent in a single year.

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Saudi Arabia was always going to be the real test. Had Riyadh signed on, Abraham could plausibly have become the organising idea for the whole region. It didn’t. The Saudis have kept recognition of Israel tied to Palestinian statehood even after Trump warned in July that a US-Saudi civil nuclear deal was contingent on normalisation.

Pakistan has been just as unambiguous — its Foreign Office restated on June 4 that its red line remains a viable, contiguous Palestinian state on the pre-1967 borders, with Al-Quds Al-Sharif as its capital.

Makkah asks a different question

Makkah doesn’t ask Pakistan to recognise Israel, or Saudi Arabia to soften its stance on Palestine, or Türkiye to give up its own relationships with NATO, Washington, Moscow or Tehran. What it offers instead is something no government needs to explain away at home: if we’re attacked, we won’t be alone.

In a region worn down by missiles, drones, proxy wars and doubts about how far outside guarantees actually stretch, that’s a hard offer to turn down — and a far easier one to sell to a domestic audience than an opening to Israel ever was.

What’s more interesting than the security promise itself is the flexibility built into it. Turkiye sits inside NATO. Saudi Arabia remains close to Washington. Pakistan balances a deep partnership with China against ties to the US, Riyadh, Ankara and Tehran all at once. None of these three see eye to eye on Syria, Iran, Israel or the wider order. And yet none of that stopped them from agreeing to defend each other. That, more than anything, might be Makkah’s real innovation — proof that states don’t need to agree on everything to agree on the one thing that matters when missiles start flying.

Iran’s reaction says something too. Tehran didn’t treat the pact as hostile. Its Foreign Ministry said on August 10 that regional states leaning on their own security arrangements could actually be constructive — so long as those arrangements stayed inclusive and addressed real threats rather than manufactured ones. If Makkah can avoid curdling into a Sunni-Shia standoff, its room to grow gets a lot bigger.

Egypt, and why the caution matters

There’s already talk of who might join next, and some of it deserves a raised eyebrow. Claims that Indonesia, Malaysia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait or Azerbaijan are lining up aren’t backed by anything public yet. Egypt is different — Ankara has floated Cairo openly as a future member, and Egypt already works with all three signatories through the emerging R4 framework.

If Egypt does join, the pact stops looking like a trilateral arrangement and starts looking like something with real regional gravity: Pakistan’s strategic depth, Turkiye’s military and defence industry, Saudi Arabia’s money and diplomatic reach, Egypt’s foothold across North Africa and the Mediterranean.

Even so — it’s a nucleus, not yet a Muslim NATO, and it’s worth resisting the urge to call it one too soon.

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An agreement still being written

The Abraham Accords have had almost six years to prove themselves, and whatever their limits, what they built is tangible. Makkah is days old. Its hardest questions haven’t been answered yet — what actually triggers the collective-defence clause, whether members are obligated to send troops or can simply offer intelligence and air defence, who decides what counts as aggression in the first place. Reuters has pointed out that the agreement’s public text doesn’t spell any of this out yet. Until it does, Makkah is significant, but it isn’t finished.

Two sequences, not two camps

Maybe the real contest here isn’t between two treaties at all, but between two ways of thinking about order. Abraham says: normalise first, and trust that peace follows. Makkah says: build your own security first, and work out the politics later. Right now, the second story is simply easier to tell a nervous public.

There’s a lesson in that for Washington too — security pledges and economic sweeteners can’t stand in for actually resolving the Palestinian question, which isn’t a technicality waiting to be negotiated away but something bound up in how governments across the Muslim world see their own legitimacy.

And Makkah’s architects would do well to keep the pact exactly what it claims to be — defensive, flexible, and regionally owned — because the moment it starts looking like an ideological bloc is the moment it loses what makes it work.

Three months ago, Washington was asking Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye to join an order built on normalising with Israel. Today, those same three countries are quietly building one based on defending each other instead. Whether Makkah becomes something lasting or just another signed document will come down to what its members actually do next — but the message has already spread beyond the room where it was signed: this region no longer wants to choose only between leaning on outside powers or normalising on someone else’s schedule. It’s starting to ask whether it can build something of its own.

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

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