Jakarta watches, waits, and weighs its options on the Mecca Pact

When Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement on 7^th August, declaring that an attack on one signatory would be treated as an attack on all three, the reaction from most of the Muslim world’s capitals fell somewhere between quiet approval and studied silence.

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, has so far offered neither. There has been no statement from the Foreign Ministry, no comment from President Prabowo Subianto, and nothing from the Defence Ministry. That silence is not indifference. It is, in effect, the position itself.

Indonesian foreign policy has been governed since 1948 by the doctrine of bebas aktif, “free and active” non-alignment, which commits Jakarta to pursuing its national interest without binding itself to any bloc or alliance.

Foreign Minister Sugiono set out the logic plainly in late 2024, well before the pact existed, when he said Indonesia would not join any military pact, invoking President Prabowo’s own formulation that a thousand friends are too few and one enemy is one too many. The remark predates Mecca by nearly two years, but it remains the clearest available guide to how Jakarta is likely to read it.

That does not mean the pact has gone unnoticed. An adviser at the state ideology body BPIP, Darmansjah Djumala, described it as evidence of a new regional awareness rather than a declaration of war on Iran, arguing that Gulf and South Asian states are simply reclaiming responsibility for their own security instead of leaning on Washington.

A more consequential voice belongs to Mahfuz Sidik, secretary-general of the Gelora Party and a former chair of parliament’s Commission I, which oversees defence and foreign affairs. Sidik has urged the government to track the pact along three axes: its implications for the global order, its effect on regional security, and its consequences for energy and trade.

On security, he went further than most Indonesian commentators have dared, suggesting that if the alliance proves it can genuinely stabilise the region, this could open a door to Indonesian cooperation, or even eventual membership. He also noted that only Israel and India have openly rejected the arrangement, Israel viewing it as an existential threat, India wary of a strengthened Pakistan.

He even set a rough diplomatic clock: roughly seventy-five days, he argued, running to 10 September and the run-up to the American midterms, for the pact to help de-escalate the standoff between Washington and Tehran before the region risks a wider conflict.

A separate strand of commentary argues that Jakarta need not choose between joining and standing aside. One widely discussed framing treats the Mecca Pact as a hard security core, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation as the broader political umbrella above it, and countries such as Indonesia as strategic partners rather than treaty members, contributing economic weight, maritime reach and diplomatic credibility instead of troop commitments.

In this reading, Indonesia’s contribution to a post-Mecca Muslim world looks less like collective defence and more like the deepening bilateral ties it already maintains with Ankara, Islamabad and Riyadh.

Any Indonesian tilt toward the pact, however, would run into a domestic complication that is easy to overlook from outside the country. Although the overwhelming majority of Indonesian Muslims are Sunni, like Saudi Arabia’s population, sympathy for Iran runs deeper in Indonesian public opinion than religious demography would suggest, driven less by sectarian affinity than by longstanding resentment of American and Israeli policy in the region.

When Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed earlier this year, President Prabowo conveyed his condolences to Iran’s president, and domestic critics argued the government’s response was too muted compared with Malaysia’s, whose prime minister condemned the killing outright.

The Mecca Pact, whatever its signatories insist about its defensive and non-directional character, is widely read as oriented against Iran. That reading makes any overt Indonesian endorsement politically costly at home, regardless of how the calculation looks from Riyadh or Islamabad.

None of this amounts to a policy. What it amounts to is a set of pressures Jakarta will have to weigh without much urgency to resolve them quickly: a foreign policy doctrine built around avoiding entanglement, a domestic conversation that ranges from cautious welcome to open speculation about membership, an intellectual framework that would let Indonesia matter to the pact’s fortunes without joining it, and a domestic mood on Iran that counsels against being seen to take sides.

Indonesia’s most probable course, consistent with decades of practice, is to keep watching, keep its options open, and let the pact’s own trajectory, rather than any early Indonesian commitment, determine how close Jakarta eventually chooses to stand.

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