Condi Rice and the belated “birth pangs of a new Middle East”

Twenty years ago, as Israeli bombs pulverised Lebanon, Condoleezza Rice surveyed the carnage with the serene vocabulary peculiar to imperial officials who experience other people’s funerals as geopolitical opportunity. These, she suggested, were the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

History, which possesses a considerably darker sense of humour than Washington’s strategic planners, has finally delivered the child.

It is simply not the baby Rice ordered.

The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement between Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan is not yet a Middle Eastern NATO, whatever the breathless branding suggests. It has no visible integrated command structure, no demonstrated mechanism for automatic military mobilisation, and no reason to assume that Ankara will march against India because Islamabad is attacked, or that Pakistan will enthusiastically volunteer for another Saudi adventure in Yemen. Alliances become real not when rulers sign parchment beneath chandeliers, but when the first missile lands and somebody has to decide whether Article Five is poetry or policy.

But dismissing the pact as symbolism would be equally foolish. States do not casually connect Saudi money, Turkish military-industrial capacity and Pakistani manpower — with a nuclear arsenal lurking politely behind the curtains — and call an attack upon one an attack upon all.

Something has changed.

For most of the postwar period, West Asian “security” meant something remarkably simple: the United States supplied the architecture, Arab monarchies purchased admission, Israel received extraordinary license, and everyone else was instructed to behave. Washington provided bases, weapons, intelligence and guarantees; the Gulf provided hydrocarbons, capital and strategic obedience. The arrangement was described as stability because “hierarchy enforced by aircraft carriers” sounds less reassuring at policy conferences.

That order is now cracking.

The great significance of Mecca is therefore not that three Muslim states have suddenly discovered brotherhood.

States do not have brothers; they have interests, invoices and memories. The significance is that three governments which have spent decades operating inside different compartments of the American-built system are beginning to insure themselves against the possibility that the insurer can no longer insure.

Saudi Arabia supplies capital and geography. Türkiye supplies an increasingly formidable indigenous defence industry, drones, missiles, electronics and one of NATO’s largest militaries. Pakistan supplies what the other two conspicuously lack: a vast standing army, decades of operational experience and the only nuclear deterrent possessed by a Muslim-majority state. The division of labour is almost indecently obvious: Saudi money, Turkish technology, Pakistani muscle.

Washington spent generations demanding “burden sharing.” It may now discover the delicious ambiguity of getting exactly what it asked for.

The irony becomes richer when Israel enters the picture.

The strategic conceit behind the old “new Middle East” was that overwhelming Israeli military superiority, protected by American power and supplemented by compliant Arab regimes, would eventually force the region into acquiescence. Resistance would be destroyed, Iran contained, Palestine administratively liquidated, Arab capitals normalised one by one, and Israel would emerge not merely as a state in West Asia but as its armed metropolitan centre.

Instead, permanent war has taught neighbouring states a different lesson: dependence on American protection does not necessarily protect them, Israeli escalation does not necessarily remain confined to Israel’s enemies, and importing security from an external hegemon may eventually import the hegemon’s wars along with it.

Israel wanted a region intimidated into fragmentation. It may have helped frighten parts of that region into coordination.

There is the true historical joke. The pyromaniac, after decades of demonstrating the inadequacy of every fire code, complains when the neighbours begin purchasing hoses together.

Yet triumphalism would be premature — and intellectually unserious.

The Mecca pact may represent regionalisation without liberation, sovereignty for states without sovereignty for citizens. Those are not the same achievement.

Nothing in the agreement liberates political prisoners in Pakistan, democratizes Saudi Arabia, redistributes wealth in Türkiye, dismantles the Pakistani military’s domestic political supremacy or grants ordinary people meaningful authority over decisions that may send them to war. A security architecture can become less American while remaining profoundly authoritarian. An alliance can resist external domination while preserving internal domination with admirable efficiency.

Indeed, regime survival may be the pact’s most dependable common denominator.

Riyadh needs insulation from regional shocks that can wreck its enormous economic transformation projects. Ankara wants strategic depth, defence markets and freedom of manoeuvre between NATO, Eurasia and the Arab world. Pakistan’s ruling establishment has discovered, once again, that geopolitical relevance is among the country’s most reliable export commodities. When an economy struggles to generate dollars, apparently one can always monetise strategic location, military labour and nuclear mystique.

Pakistanis have seen this film before. The uniforms change slightly; the foreign patron changes occasionally; the soundtrack remains magnificent.

Another historic partnership. Another indispensable geopolitical role. Another solemn invocation of the Muslim world. Another opportunity for the state to become strategically richer while its citizens remain politically poorer.

That contradiction must sit at the centre of any serious assessment of Mecca. Because the pact could still become something genuinely transformative.

If it develops toward a broader, non-sectarian regional security system — one capable of accommodating Iran rather than organising permanent confrontation with it — it would strike at one of the foundational mechanisms of external control: divide the region into frightened camps, sell weapons to both, place foreign bases between them, and call the resulting dependency “balance.”

The exhausted “Sunni NATO” label therefore explains less than it conceals. Pakistan cannot reduce Iran to a sectarian enemy without threatening its own social fabric and strategic geography. Türkiye conducts too many overlapping relationships to fit neatly into anybody’s Cold War diagram.

Saudi Arabia itself has learned that endless confrontation with Tehran carries costs that no amount of imp

orted weaponry can abolish. The emerging fault line may increasingly be not Sunni versus Shia, but regional autonomy versus externally managed insecurity.

That would indeed constitute a new Middle East.

But the decisive question is: new for whom?

If Mecca merely gives three ruling establishments greater capacity to defend themselves while their populations remain spectators — taxed, surveilled, conscripted and occasionally invited to applaud — then the region will have achieved an important geopolitical rearrangement without an emancipatory transformation. It will have moved the furniture in the palace without opening the palace gates.

Still, one should not underestimate what has happened.

For decades, Washington and Tel Aviv assumed that history in West Asia moved principally through decisions taken in Washington and Tel Aviv. The Mecca Agreement does not abolish American power, neutralise Israel, unite the Muslim world or inaugurate some romantic post-imperial dawn.

It does something more modest and, for that reason, more credible. It announces that regional powers are beginning to imagine security without asking permission from the old architect.

And so, exactly two decades after Condoleezza Rice diagnosed Lebanon’s agony as the labour pains of Washington’s new Middle East, the contractions have returned.

Only now Washington is outside the delivery room, Israel is nervously checking the paternity test, and the child — still authoritarian, contradictory, immature and quite possibly troublesome — bears remarkably little resemblance to the one they thought they had conceived.

History can be terribly ungrateful to its self-appointed midwives.

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