Flashpoints | Diplomacy | South Asia

Why the Mecca Agreement Might Fail

If each member preserves its own partnerships while expecting the others to absorb its security risks, what does the promise that an attack against one is an attack against all mean when a crisis arrives?

On August 7, 2026, Turkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, and Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif jointly signed the Mecca  Joint Defense Agreement, which commits their countries to collective defense and expands defense cooperation. It builds on the Saudi-Pakistani Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement of September 2025. On August 31, their foreign ministers, defense ministers, and military chiefs met in Istanbul, announcing a secretariat in Saudi Arabia, initially headed by a Pakistani secretary general, alongside cooperation in military technology and production.

The most important question about the Mecca agreement is whose war they are prepared to fight. Although the text of the agreement is not publicly available yet, according to a Pakistan Foreign Ministry statement, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, and Pakistan have agreed that an armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all. However, with a look at their conflicting interests, one can easily predict that they will struggle to agree on what should happen next.

What makes one doubt whether such an accord could realistically function is the agreement’s central weakness: its publicly announced terms do not specify which forces would fight, under whose command, or on what timetable. All parties to the accord want greater security while retaining the freedom to decide which regional conflicts concern them. But when countries commit to collective defense, they must also agree on when and how they will defend one another, what strategic purpose the accord serves, and which threats they consider common. They must also be clear about who decides when military action is necessary, how they will share the costs, and how far each country is prepared to go if the conflict escalates; what economic interests they are willing to sacrifice, whether greater financial contributions give one country greater authority, and how they will reconcile their competing ambitions.

The first problem is that all three countries aspire to lead the Muslim world, but each has a different idea of what that leadership means. For instance, Erdoğan’s Turkiye invokes its Ottoman heritage to project authority beyond its borders. Turkiye’s reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque in 2020 to restore symbols of its Ottoman past was part of that ambition. In a 2018 speech to provincial muftis in Ankara, Erdoğan presented Turkiye as a country entitled to shape the Muslim world’s future because of the authority its Ottoman predecessors once exercised. Since Erdoğan’s rise to power, nostalgia for an imperial and caliphal past has helped shape Turkiye’s claim to leadership in the Muslim world today. 

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, bases its claim to leadership on its custodianship of Mecca and Medina and its established position in Islamic diplomacy. In the meantime, while Mohammed bin Salman wants to preserve that position and keep religion as a source of legitimacy, he is also making the kingdom a center for investment, technology, and regional diplomacy to serve the country’s economic and political ambitions. Saudi Arabia therefore wants a form of Islamic leadership that reinforces its own position, which raises the question of how far it would support an alliance that also strengthens Turkiye’s competing claim to that leadership. 

For its part, Pakistan has long sought to turn its military strength into a claim to leadership of the Muslim world. This ambition is visible in how its leaders have explained the purpose of its nuclear program. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto famously said that other civilizations already possessed nuclear capability, writing: “Only the Islamic civilization was without it, but that position was about to change.” He was presenting Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions as an achievement that would alter the position of the entire Islamic civilization. Almost half a century later, addressing religious scholars in December 2025, Field Marshall Asim Munir, Pakistan’s first chief of defense forces and the country’s top military official,  declared: “Among all Muslim countries, Allah has given Pakistan the honor of helping safeguard the Haramain,” referring to Islam’s holy sites in Mecca and Medina. Munir was thereby presenting Pakistan’s military role as a religious responsibility extending beyond its borders, giving Islamabad another basis for claiming a special position in the Muslim world.

Further, in 2020, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi threatened to organize Muslim countries outside the Saudi-led OIC over Kashmir. Pakistan has therefore shown a willingness to challenge the existing framework of Muslim diplomacy led by Saudi Arabia or Turkiye when it fails to serve Pakistani priorities, and this is where these ambitions could become difficult to reconcile with Saudi Arabia and Turkiye’s.

These three countries have also had differences in their foreign policies, and those differences have sometimes led them to work against one another’s regional objectives. For instance, during the 2017 blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, it was Turkiye that sent troops and food supplies to Doha, helping Qatar to resist pressure from Saudi Arabia and its partners. Pakistan has also resisted Saudi expectations of military support. In 2015, after Riyadh requested Pakistani troops, aircraft, and warships for its intervention in Yemen, Pakistan’s parliament voted to remain neutral; this refusal showed that close relations did not mean Islamabad accepted Riyadh’s judgment about when military action was necessary. 

Pakistan has also not shown up to defend Saudi Arabia against the current attacks by Iran, despite the so-called “NATO-like” agreement that both countries signed last September. Most recently, on September 11, Saudi Arabia announced a precautionary shutdown of its East-West pipeline following drone attacks that Riyadh said originated in Iraq. The pipeline provided a vital alternative for oil exports disrupted by Iran’s restrictions at Hormuz. Separately, the Houthis captured Mokha and Perim, also known as Mayun, strengthening their........

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