The Gulf has learned that buying American weapons and hosting US bases is not the same as having a guarantee from America that holds. Washington’s appetite for absorbing the costs of being the Gulf’s permanent security guarantor has visibly diminished. A sobering realisation now dawns: there is no going back to the status quo ante.
The Mecca pact is, therefore, principally about Saudi insecurity and its inability to protect itself and its interests. As a collective, it has a 3E gap.
But first, let’s deconstruct the headlines.
The N bluff
The biggest headline is that Pakistan has extended its nuclear umbrella to the Saudis. However, no public protocol establishes this. Pakistani officials previously walked back suggestions that nuclear weapons were covered even by the bilateral Saudi-Pakistani agreement signed last year.
Yet an ambiguity on the nuclear front has strategic value.
The UAE has moved considerably closer to Israel, an undeclared nuclear power, since the 2020 Abraham Accords. During this year’s war, Israel reportedly sent surveillance equipment, air-defence systems and an Iron Beam laser to help the UAE intercept Iranian missiles and drones. Israeli defence companies now maintain a continuing presence in the Emirates.
This does not amount to an Israeli nuclear guarantee to Abu Dhabi. Nor has Pakistan promised nuclear retaliation on behalf of Riyadh. Nevertheless, optics are part of deterrence and regional posturing.
If the Emiratis have Israel, Riyadh now has an answer in Turkey and Pakistan.
Beneath the surface, though, the collective-security claim—and especially its nuclear shadow—is a bluff that is hard to call, but equally hard to dismiss.
For now, the pact’s real challenge is the three Es— the questions of common enemy, economic challenges and efficiency – which has impeded clarity on its contours.
Also read: Pakistan orders Islamabad restaurants to go red and green to celebrate Saudi-Turkiye pact
Common enemy problem
Alliances work best when their members agree upon a common enemy. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey do not.
Pakistan’s principal military fixation remains India, and specifically Kashmir. Turkey’s immediate concerns include Kurdish armed groups in Syria, Israel and the eastern Mediterranean. Saudi Arabia must contend with Iran and the Houthis while simultaneously managing its growing competition with the UAE.
Iran’s foreign ministry said it saw no reason to fear the pact and welcomed moves towards regional self-reliance—provided they confronted what Tehran considers the actual source of instability: Israel.
But to re-assert, it is not an anti-Iran alliance. Its partners have more convergence on containing Israel, but even that is not evenly distributed and certainly not enough to start a war on each other’s behalf. Calling it the common enemy would be too linear, despite the unease over Israel and its actions.
Saudis seem to be responding to an altered distribution of power in which Israeli military capabilities have become increasingly useful to the UAE, while unease lingers about Israel’s 2025 strikes on Hamas leaders in Qatar, despite US assurances against them.
The Saudi-Emirati relationship has steadily deteriorated across Yemen, Sudan and the Horn of Africa. This makes a single Gulf security posture difficult despite the Iran war. What is taking shape instead are camps: an Israeli-Emirati convergence on one side, and a Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani geometry on the other.
Turkey’s relationship with Israel also demonstrates why the expectation of a ‘direct war’ is the wrong test. Israel may have no appetite to invade Turkey, nor Turkey to invade Israel. But the two can still collide in third countries. Syria already provides both the theatre and the precedent. In April 2025, Israel struck T4, Palmyra and Hama—Syrian bases where Turkey was said to have its deployments. Ankara and Tel Aviv subsequently opened technical talks to prevent an unintended military escalation.
According to several sources from the region, Israel’s unease over Turkey’s increasing footprint was the reason it lobbied Washington to allow Russia to retain its bases at Tartus and Hmeimim. One Israeli calculation was that a continued Russian presence could constrain Turkey’s free run in northern Syria.
That buffer is now weakening. Under the Syrian-Russian agreement announced this week, Damascus will take over civilian and commercial facilities at the two bases, while their military sections will be transformed into joint Syrian-Russian training centres. Russia is not being told to leave, but its hold is being systematically reduced.
This strengthens Turkey’s hand. If Israel and Turkey clash militarily, Syria is the most likely arena. There may be little appetite for direct war, but there is equally little reason to imagine there is any love lost.
And yet, none of the above dynamics crystallises a common enemy for the Mecca pact signatories.
Also read: Pakistan Army’s media wing has a song on Mecca defence pact. Be afraid of god, journalist says
Economic problem
The second E is the economy.
Saudi Arabia is the richest partner, but not an unlimited cheque book. It faces fiscal deficits, rising debt and the enormous domestic costs of Vision 2030. Despite the defence industrial success, Turkey’s basic economy remains fragile. Pakistan is, to put it charitably, hardly an economy. Its recovery remains tethered to an IMF programme and external financing.
The attractive formula—Pakistani manpower plus Turkish technology backed by endless Saudi money—is not backed by their respective economic challenges.
The same limitation also pushes the cost-effective defence synergy angle. Saudi Arabia does not necessarily need Turkey and Pakistan to launch wars on its behalf. It needs interceptors, drones, munitions, trained personnel, integrated command networks and production lines that could be sustained to defend its interests.
Pakistan and Turkey, meanwhile, do obtain access to Saudi capital and scale, even if not endlessly. The consequential story may ultimately be a Turkish-Pakistani technical-military synergy, financed partly by Saudi Arabia and connected through Pakistan to Chinese platforms and subsystems. After all, the Chinese drones have long been sourced by Emiratis and used against the Houthis by UAE-backed Sudanese militias. With the growing rift with Abu Dhabi, Riyadh has precedent and reason to match this undercurrent in a cost-effective way.
But “may” is considerable. There are no publicly disclosed financial commitments sufficient to assume that Saudi money will flow endlessly.
Efficiency problem
The third E is efficiency.
The agreement contains impressive language but little publicly available institutionalisation or clear pathways to achieve its aims. Its procedures, basing rules, procurement mechanisms, intelligence protocols or assigned force contributions all remain unknown. A ministerial committee and a Saudi-based secretariat are to be established, but operational details will be decided later.
Expanding to other relevant players could enhance efficiency, but few have the appetite to join.
Egypt possesses the largest ground force in the Arab world: roughly 310,000 army personnel, with an even larger reserve. It also occupies indispensable geography—Suez, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, Gaza and Libya.
But Cairo’s size disguises its constraints and dependencies. It is dependent on the Saudis for food and energy security, having received $24 billion since 2008. Riyadh also invests in Cairo to maintain its access to credit.
The UAE’s financial leverage is even more structural in Egypt. Its $35 billion Ras el-Hekma agreement supplied Egypt with desperately needed foreign currency and placed Emirati capital at the centre of one of the country’s largest infrastructure projects. The deal included $24 billion for development projects, alongside the conversion of $11 billion in Emirati central-bank deposits.
Egypt also receives approximately $1.5 billion annually in US Foreign Military Financing, rooted in the security framework created after the Camp David Accords. Its armed forces depend heavily on American platforms, maintenance and political access.
Cairo cannot alienate either dependency by joining a coalition that pitches one against the other. For different reasons, another important actor, Qatar, is not likely to join the Mecca agreement either.
On the contrary, a defensive maritime arrangement focused on freedom of navigation and securing sea routes has been far easier to appeal to the region. Egypt and Qatar were among the 14 states that joined the Saudi-led coalition to protect the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb and Gulf of Aden.
Collective security vs complementarities
The more nuanced analytical error is to judge contemporary military synergies through a Cold War heuristic: will all members automatically mobilise if one is attacked?
Even NATO’s Article 5 does not automatically declare war. Each ally takes the action it considers necessary. A guarantee becomes credible only through military preparation and political will, mostly centred around a dominant superpower.
Today’s alliances are frequently less about automatic collective mobilisation and even less about superpower capabilities than about building complementarities, posturing, managing threat perceptions and raising the costs of aggression.
Remember Turkey’s actions in Qatar in 2017? When Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain imposed their blockade, Ankara fast-tracked the deployment of additional troops at its base in Doha. Those troops did not create an Article 5 guarantee. They ensured that attacking Qatar might also mean attacking Turkish personnel—and that abandoning Doha would become costlier for Ankara.
Pakistan brings another form of utility. Its military relationship with Saudi Arabia dates back decades. Pakistani forces have undertaken training, advisory and security roles in Saudi territory. Around 11,000 troops were sent there after Iraq invaded Kuwait, while deployments during the 1980s were still larger.
During this year’s Iran war, Pakistan reportedly deployed about 8,000 troops, a squadron of largely JF-17 fighters, drones and a Chinese HQ-9 air-defence system to Saudi Arabia. Consequently, this new pact is not creating cooperation from nothing; it is formalising an infrastructure that already exists.
Turkey contributes the region’s most dynamic defence-industrial ecosystem. Turkish defence and aerospace exports have approximately tripled since 2021, reaching about $10 billion in 2025, with Turkish defence products now sold to nearly 40 countries, while the Gulf has been a steady customer.
Saudi Vision 2030 seeks to localise 50 per cent of Saudi military and security spending. Turkish companies are useful because they are willing not merely to sell platforms but to relocate parts of their production ecosystem.
The Baykar-SAMI agreement agreement provides for Saudi production, assembly, systems integration, testing and maintenance of Akinci drones. The Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI) said up to 70 per cent of the aircraft could be produced locally. Aselsan and Roketsan have parallel arrangements concerning electro-optical systems and guided munitions.
American and European companies also have Saudi localisation agreements. But the Turkish proposition is cheaper, faster and more open about adapting equipment, transferring technology and incorporating non-Western subsystems at scale.
The partners thus appear complementary: Saudi money and political weight, Turkish competitive, cost-effective technology that can be localised, and Pakistani manpower, operational experience and nuclear fanfare.
One could still argue that complementarities on paper do not necessarily produce an alliance.
Uncomfortable for India
The pact creates synergies that are not in India’s interest by and large, even if they do not impact India at the very outset.
The longer-term story is not the text signed in Mecca. It is whether Turkish-Pakistani military synergy and Saudi capital can begin to converge and deliver—and how that might play out. A tactical surprise for India, if at all.
That deserves a Part II.
Swasti Rao is a Consulting Editor (International and Strategic Affairs) at ThePrint. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)