The author says 2026 is power without self-restraint. The August 7 Mecca pact (Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Pakistan) faced Houthi strikes on Saudi sites on September 8. Pakistan condemned them but Khawaja Asif set conditions and the FO said no military reply was even discussed. Riyadh had not invoked the pact; MBS went to Paris and Cairo instead.

BRICS in New Delhi (12–13 September, India’s chair) issued a unanimous text from 11 states, including Iran and the UAE: concern, restraint, no forced Palestinian displacement, no hits on civilian or nuclear sites. Softer than Rio 2025. BRICS never promised collective defence; Mecca did.

The frame is “Progressive Unrealism” and a “Gangland Global Order.” BRICS is called the better data point—process over a bloc. India held a text; Mecca is treated as signalling, not an operational alliance yet.

2026 has been the year the world’s strongest actor kept demonstrating that power no longer feels obliged to restrain itself. Against that backdrop, two very different multilateral instruments faced real stress in the same week. On September 8, Houthi missiles tested the month-old Mecca Joint Defence Agreement between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan. On September 12–13, the BRICS Summit in New Delhi tested whether eleven states, several of them at odds, two of them at war with each other’s allies, could still produce a common text. What separated the more credible outcome from the more fragile one was not solidarity, ideology, or size. It was collaborative competence: whether an institution’s structure could actually deliver what it had promised.

The Mecca Pact’s First Test

The Mecca Pact, signed on August 7, promised that an armed attack against any of its three signatories would be treated as an attack against all. Its deeper logic was never really about civilisational or sectarian kinship, whatever the venue and language suggested, it was a hedge by mid-sized powers responding to a global order whose apex actor has stopped modelling restraint. That hedge was tested almost immediately.

On September 8, Houthi forces launched one of the largest operations against Saudi Arabia since the US-Israeli war on Iran began on February 28, a distributed strike hitting the military hub of Khamis Mushait, the Aramco-linked refining centre at Jizan, Najran near the Yemeni border, and Abha. Pakistan condemned the attack and voiced solidarity with Riyadh with Shehbaz Sharif calling it a cowardly assault on the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. But condemnation is not commitment.........

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