Key Takeaways:

• The August 7, 2026 Mecca Pact (Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Pakistan) is being tested by Houthi attacks, not a conventional state army; the article says the three states are now consulting on how—and when—collective defence should apply to an armed group with uncertain Iranian backing.
• Extra partners and weapons do not settle attribution: who ordered, enabled, or merely tolerated a strike, and whether a response should hit the group, the host state, or the external sponsor.
• Author Rashed M. Aba-Namay argues the pact should evolve from a closed alliance into a wider, gradual regional compact—rules on non-aggression, investigation, and infrastructure—potentially open to Iran and neighbours, rather than only swapping U.S. guarantees for Turkish and Pakistani ones.

Signed on August 7, 2026, by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan, the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement extends collective defence across three pivotal regional powers. Less than two months later, the agreement is confronting precisely the challenge that may determine its credibility: how should a collective-defence pact respond when the immediate threat comes not from another state’s regular armed forces, but from an armed non-state actor with external support, its own political objectives, and an uncertain degree of operational dependence on a regional power?

That question has now moved from theory to practice. As Houthi forces expand their position around the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb and Saudi Arabia faces renewed threats from an armed movement linked to, but not simply controlled by, Iran, the Mecca Pact partners have begun urgent military consultations. The meeting of the Saudi, Turkish and Pakistani military leadership gives the three governments an immediate opportunity not merely to discuss military assistance, but to define how the pact will deal with precisely the kind of non-state threat for which conventional collective-defence arrangements are least prepared.

The Problem Conventional Alliances Do Not Solve

The 1991 Gulf War demonstrated that coalition management can be as important as battlefield superiority. Washington persuaded Israel not to retaliate against Iraqi missile attacks because Israeli participation could have fractured the coalition’s Arab component. The 34-country coalition also possessed an advantage absent from many contemporary regional crises: the adversary was a clearly identifiable state operating through conventional armed forces within a defined conflict.

Today’s regional security problem is structurally different. A missile or drone may be launched by an armed organisation operating from one state, receiving varying degrees of support from another, while pursuing objectives that are partly local and partly regional. The military act may be clear; responsibility for it may not be.

The present confrontation is more difficult because regional governments must navigate overlapping relationships with Washington, Tehran, neighbouring states and armed movements whose actions may not correspond neatly to the policies of any single government. This makes political responsibility and legal attribution harder to determine and encourages regional states to develop greater capacity to manage crises themselves.

Changing the Guarantor Does Not Change the Problem

The Mecca Agreement gives Saudi Arabia meaningful strategic diversification. Türkiye contributes NATO experience, substantial armed forces and an expanding defence industry, while Pakistan adds considerable military capacity, longstanding ties with Riyadh and the strategic weight of a nuclear-armed state—without necessarily extending a nuclear guarantee to the pact’s other members. The relationship already has an operational foundation, including previous Pakistani military deployments to Saudi Arabia. Together with Türkiye’s defence capabilities, this cooperation can strengthen Saudi air and missile defence, counter-drone capacity, intelligence sharing and critical-infrastructure protection.

Additional guarantors, however, do not automatically create strategic autonomy. Ankara and Islamabad maintain their own relations with Tehran and must weigh domestic constraints, economic interests and geographical exposure. Arms transfers and peacetime cooperation cannot by themselves determine how either state would respond to a major regional escalation. The pact’s credibility therefore depends on transparent rules for activating collective-defence obligations, rapid crisis-coordination procedures, and a clear understanding of what forms of operational support each member is prepared to provide.

The deeper difficulty is the mismatch between the Pact’s conventional collective-defence commitment and the irregular character of many regional threats. The Houthis, Hezbollah and Iran-aligned Iraqi factions combine local political interests with varying degrees of Iranian support. Their partial autonomy complicates attribution: an attack may serve Iranian interests or rely on Iranian material assistance without necessarily having been ordered directly by Tehran. The Houthi attack on Saudi Arabia’s Jazan refinery, followed by the present escalation, illustrates precisely this difficulty. The Pact must therefore determine what degree of external support, direction or operational involvement would activate collective defence, and whether a proportionate response should be directed against the armed organisation, the state from whose territory it operates, the external state supporting it, or some combination of the three.

The current consultations among the pact’s military leadership therefore provide an opportunity to establish, before a larger confrontation occurs, how the three states will distinguish support from control, influence from command, and political alignment from legal responsibility.

Iraq presents a parallel challenge. After American and Saudi forces struck Iran-aligned groups operating there, the Saudi intelligence chief met the Iraqi prime minister to discuss regional security. An attack may originate inside a neighbouring state without reflecting a decision by its government; yet retaliation can weaken the same government whose cooperation may be necessary to restrain the responsible faction. The legal and strategic question is therefore not simply where an attack came from, but who ordered it, who enabled it, and what degree of control or support can fairly be attributed to the state concerned.

Türkiye has already said that it could help meet Saudi military requirements under the Mecca Pact as Houthi attacks intensify. But additional capabilities alone will not resolve the attribution problem. The three states need integrated warning systems, interoperable defences, agreed procedures for determining responsibility and graduated responses that do not automatically transform a limited attack by a non-state actor into interstate war.

The institutional process is now accelerating. On September 25, the Saudi, Turkish and Pakistani foreign ministers discussed arrangements for an urgent meeting of their chiefs of staff to consider mechanisms for supporting Saudi Arabia under the pact. The ministers also condemned attacks on Saudi civilian and economic facilities and stressed the security of maritime navigation. At the same time, the three governments are continuing technical negotiations on how to institutionalise cooperation under the agreement.

The urgency is reinforced by the scale of the current escalation. The Houthis have claimed missile and drone attacks on Riyadh and Saudi energy infrastructure, while fighting in Yemen has expanded around strategic Red Sea locations and Bab el-Mandeb. These developments threaten not only Saudi territory but also oil exports and maritime navigation, making the distinction between collective defence, infrastructure protection and wider regional escalation increasingly difficult to maintain.

Even an operationally credible alliance cannot by itself settle Yemen’s conflict, define Baghdad’s relationship with armed factions, resolve Hezbollah’s position within Lebanon, or end the wider competition between Iran and its Arab neighbours. Nor can infrastructure corridors connecting South Asia, the Gulf, the Levant and Europe remain secure without political mechanisms capable of containing non-state violence. The Mecca Pact can diversify Saudi Arabia’s security partnerships, but lasting regional security requires a framework broad enough to address not only military threats, but also the political relationships that allow armed non-state actors to operate across borders.

From Exclusive Alliance to Inclusive Compact

The Pact was expressly presented as a defensive arrangement that does not target any country and as an affirmation of the right of collective self-defence under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. President Erdoğan also stated that it remained open to other friendly states seeking peace, prosperity and stability in the region. That leaves room for a more ambitious course: to treat the Mecca Agreement not as a finished alliance directed against an excluded adversary, but as the institutional starting point for a broader regional-security compact.

The Mecca designation itself gives the Agreement a wider significance. Mecca is a shared reference point for Muslim societies far beyond the three founding states, giving the Pact a natural potential to develop into a broader framework of cooperation among Muslim countries without turning it into an exclusionary military bloc. Iran, the remaining GCC states, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen could all have a natural place within such a framework, provided they accepted reciprocal obligations of non-aggression, sovereignty, attribution and restraint. Iran’s inclusion would be particularly important because of its relationship with several of the non-state actors that the Pact must now learn to address.

That possibility is especially important now. The more the Pact is tested by Houthi attacks associated with Iranian support, the greater the temptation will be to define it permanently in opposition to Iran. That may strengthen deterrence in the short term, but it would leave unresolved the underlying problem: how to prevent armed groups, state support and uncertain attribution from repeatedly drawing regional powers into wider conflict.

Iranian participation is not inconceivable. Tehran’s initial response suggested a possible opening for an inclusive transformation. Iran’s Foreign Ministry said there was no reason to fear the Pact, welcomed the trend toward greater regional reliance on internal capabilities, and indicated openness to arrangements that were comprehensive, inclusive and responsive to the region’s actual security conditions. This was not an Iranian offer to join the Pact, and it should not be presented as one. It does, however, suggest that a regional framework not explicitly organised against Iran may have diplomatic space in which to develop.

Iran’s participation would alter the character of the project. Instead of functioning principally as a coalition for deterring an excluded adversary, the wider framework could begin to resemble a collective-security system in which regional competitors accept reciprocal restraints. Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states could undertake not to permit their territory or facilities to be used for attacks against Iran. Iran, in return, would accept verifiable obligations not to provide material support for attacks against neighbouring states, commercial shipping or critical infrastructure, and to use its influence to restrain organisations with which it maintains political or military relationships.

All participants would reaffirm the sovereignty and territorial integrity of regional states, the prohibition on territorial acquisition by force and the applicability of international humanitarian law to states and non-state armed groups alike. Such obligations could not rest on declarations alone. They would have to be reciprocal and supported by credible procedures for attribution, investigation, consultation, compliance and dispute resolution.

Iranian participation alone, however, would not solve the problem of armed organisations. The Houthis, Hezbollah and Iraqi factions possess local constituencies, political interests and varying degrees of autonomy. They cannot simply be activated or dissolved by an Iranian decision. Iraq would therefore need to participate in defining the relationship between the state and factions operating within or alongside the Popular Mobilization Forces. Lebanon would be indispensable to any sustainable arrangement involving Hezbollah, while a legitimate Yemeni political settlement would be necessary if the Houthis are to be dealt with as a Yemeni political and military actor rather than merely as an extension of Tehran.

Inclusion would not reward coercion or legitimise attacks by armed groups. Its purpose would be to connect every state capable of generating, enabling or restraining insecurity to reciprocal obligations for reducing it.

Building such a system would require gradualism rather than a single grand bargain. It could begin with limited and verifiable commitments: military hotlines; a regional non-aggression pledge; a prohibition on permitting national territory to be used for attacks against another participant; common procedures for attributing missile, drone and maritime attacks; protections for commercial navigation; and reciprocal restrictions on supplying weapons to armed organisations operating beyond effective state control.

An independent regional mechanism could investigate disputed attacks before governments resort to retaliation. Demonstrated compliance could then support deeper cooperation in maritime security, infrastructure protection, reconstruction, energy, trade and, eventually, defensive early-warning systems. The purpose would be to create a ladder of cooperation in which compliance at one level makes deeper integration possible at the next.

The economic dimension is important because regional security cannot ultimately rest on military arrangements alone. In my 11 August Anadolu article, “Mecca Joint Defense Agreement: Strategic Complementarity and Regional Integration”, I argued that the durability of the Pact would depend on whether defence cooperation could be translated into wider economic and institutional integration. Alliances formed solely in response to a particular threat may weaken when that threat changes; arrangements anchored in trade, infrastructure, investment and shared economic benefits create broader constituencies with an interest in preserving them.

The historic Hejaz Railway and TAPLINE corridors offer two examples. The objective would not be to recreate either in its old form, but to use their routes as the basis for modern networks of railways, highways, logistics centres, pipelines, electricity grids and fibre-optic connections linking Saudi Arabia with Jordan, Syria, Türkiye and the Mediterranean. Such corridors could stimulate manufacturing, tourism, logistics, reconstruction and cross-border investment while providing the participating states with tangible economic benefits from regional stability.

Their importance goes beyond commerce. A railway, pipeline, power grid or data corridor crossing several states gives each participant a material interest in keeping the route open and the political relationship stable. Economic interdependence cannot eliminate strategic rivalry, but it can make escalation more costly and peaceful coexistence more rewarding.

This logic should eventually extend beyond the three founding members. If Iran, the remaining GCC states, Iraq and other neighbouring countries become part of a wider regional framework, economic integration should be structured so that all participants gain visibly from stability through trade, infrastructure, investment, energy, transport and industrial cooperation. The objective would not be to create a closed bloc, but a more connected regional economy capable of dealing with the wider international system from a position of greater stability and strength.

The present crisis makes this argument more relevant. Threats to Red Sea shipping, Bab el-Mandeb and Saudi energy infrastructure demonstrate the danger of relying on a limited number of exposed routes. The same principle applies in the Gulf. In my paper Breaking the Hormuz: The Musandam Alternative,  I proposed examining a navigable connection across Oman’s Musandam Peninsula as a strategic fallback capable of reducing dependence on a single maritime chokepoint. The proposal has since attracted attention in Persian-language regional media, where it has been discussed not as an announced Omani project but as a longer-standing strategic alternative whose relevance has increased with renewed tensions around Hormuz.It is not a substitute for the Strait of Hormuz, but an example of the wider principle that regional security requires redundancy in transport and energy infrastructure as well as military deterrence.

The central question is therefore not which guarantor should replace the United States. Turkish and Pakistani cooperation can diversify Saudi Arabia’s security relationships and provide valuable capabilities, but substituting one set of guarantees for another would leave the deeper regional problem unresolved. A more durable order would bring the region’s competing powers into a common framework in which none could increase its own security by transferring insecurity to its neighbours.