Three Muslim powers converged in the heart of Islam, Mecca, to sign a trilateral Mecca Joint Defence Agreement that sent shockwaves across the world. Signed by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkiye on August 7th, the pact introduced Article 5 of mutual defence affirmation. It explicitly declares that an armed attack against one signatory will be treated as an attack on all three.

Mainstream commentators have rushed to frame this as an unprecedented development triggered entirely by the active and highly volatile current US-Israel war on Iran. However, through the lens of structural realism and diplomatic history, this alliance represents something deeply familiar: a modern reincarnation of the 1955 Baghdad Pact, also known as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO).

As Pakistan navigates its role in this newly minted architecture, comparing the Mecca Pact to that of CENTO reveals a critical truth – while the structural blueprint looks nearly identical, the underlying power dynamics have been completely inverted over time.

In 1955, the United Kingdom and the United States orchestrated the Baghdad Pact, to unite Iraq, Turkiye, Pakistan and Iran under a single defence umbrella. The goal was a top-down, Eurocentric containment strategy designed to build a “security wall” along the southern border of the Soviet Union. But CENTO turned out to become a textbook study in alliance failure, remaining largely ineffective long before its official demise in 1979 due to a lack of internal cohesion and hollow mutual defence promises.

Ultimately, CENTO collapsed because it was imposed by Western........

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