Driven by instability from the Iran conflict, Israeli military assertiveness, and doubts about US security guarantees, the Mecca pact seeks to strengthen collective deterrence among key middle powers. While it could become the basis for a more inclusive regional order, it also risks deepening regional fault lines. For India, it would be important to understand the character of the pact in the context of both the ongoing, conflict-ridden security environment and the long-term transition in the order in West Asia.

On 7 August 2026, Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a joint defence pact called the Mecca Joint Deterrence Agreement. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan had earlier signed a Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement in September 2025. Turkiye, which has sought to build a new security architecture in the region through bilateral military cooperation agreements with several countries, including Egypt, Somalia and Syria, and has been expanding security cooperation with both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, has shown early interest in joining the Saudi–Pakistan military pact.[1]

Turkish leaders routinely describe their country as a middle power and articulate a vision of regional order in which regional powers with similar economic, political and other capacities engage in closer cooperation to cope with an intensely challenging security environment and fill the vacuum created in the wake of the changing role of the United States in West Asia.[2] Over the last three years, the expansion of Israeli military action into Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, airstrikes on a Hamas delegation in Qatar last September, and a failed US–Israeli regime-change war in Iran, which invited Iranian retaliation against the Gulf States and beyond, have resulted in an unstable security environment, pushing regional states to take greater initiative to protect their own security and regional stability.

A Middle Power Coalition

The US–Israel war with Iran gave an impetus to efforts towards creating an institutional basis for cooperation among key middle powers of the region. Turkiye and Saudi Arabia, among other regional states, supported diplomatic efforts to prevent the US war with Iran. Once the US–Israel launched the campaign against Iran, both had a shared interest in supporting diplomatic de-escalation pathways to ensure that the war does not spill over into an endless and dangerous regional war, as opposed to the US/Israel vs Iran military conflict.

The foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan met in Islamabad on 29 March and established a common diplomatic front to reduce the risk of miscalculation and escalation. They backed Islamabad’s role in mediating between Iran and the United States. The quartet emerged as a crisis-time diplomatic front with the potential to evolve into a more durable partnership to coordinate not only a collective diplomatic strategy but also collective defence. In this context, Egypt’s absence from the Mecca pact has been a subject of debate. Analysts note that Egypt is interested in expanding security cooperation with individual members of the pact and remains keen to play a role in the regional security arrangement.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan noted regarding Egypt that “We already act toward one another as if we were alliance members. There are a few technical issues. Once these are implemented, there is no reason for Egypt not to be part of it.”[3] The ‘technical issue’ that Fidan referred to may be the agreement’s binding mutual defence obligations, about which much remains unclear. Cairo will seek to avoid binding commitments and preserve its ability to diversify partnerships across the region’s fault lines.[4]

The Mecca Pact can be seen as a middle-power balancing coalition against an assertive Iran in the aftermath of the US–Israel war and Israel’s bid for regional military dominance and greater ‘regional ownership’ in managing regional stability and security. It seeks to create........

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