Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan all have longstanding security ties to the United States. But now the three have entered what is known as the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement.
Signed on August 7 in Mecca by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, the mutual defense pact establishes a collective security clause declaring that an armed attack on any member is an attack on all three.
Turkey has said it is not aimed at Iran or any other country; the agreement is being presented as defensive and as a way for regional countries to become more capable of handling their own security.
But Mehrdad Youssefiani, director of the Middle East Forum's Iran Freedom Project, is reading between the lines.
"Much of such accords can be best understood through the optics offered," he says. "The Mecca pact appears to be a defense pact … to be a protection mechanism against who? The Islamic Republic of Iran today is causing that trouble."
Another element is what each country in the alliance brings to the table.
"You have the nuclear-powered Pakistan; you have the enormously wealthy Saudi Arabia, and then you have the enormously significant military industrial base that Turkey, the second largest army of NATO, offers in this pact, this alliance," Youssefiani relays.
He does not see this pact as being against the United States, whose leadership has publicly welcomed the accord as a positive step for regional burden-sharing.
Israel has not issued a formal, centralized statement regarding the agreement, but senior officials and security analysts in Jerusalem have expressed deep concern, viewing it as a significant strategic challenge that pushes the prospect of Saudi-Israeli normalization further out of reach.
The regional defense network Saudi Arabia is building could eventually limit Israel's strategic freedom of action while simultaneously reducing Riyadh's dependence on Washington. The pact is not meant to attack Israel, but it does create a new Muslim defense bloc that could challenge Israel's military freedom of action and complicate Abraham Accords strategy.
As AFN recently reported, at least one expert on international security and foreign policy has said even though some of these countries have not been the greatest friends to Israel, he does not see them lining up to attack Israel.
