There’s a striking irony sitting inside this year’s diplomacy.

Back on May 25, Donald Trump publicly pushed Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkiye, Egypt and Jordan to join the Abraham Accords en masse — part of a wider attempt to reshape the region while he negotiated an end to the war with Iran. Pakistan pushed back. Saudi Arabia wouldn’t move without progress on Palestinian statehood. The mass expansion Washington wanted simply didn’t happen.

Then, less than three months later, something quite different did.

On August 7, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye — three of the very countries Trump had wanted inside an expanded Abraham framework — met in Makkah and signed a defence pact of their own. Its logic runs almost opposite to Abraham’s: an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all.

To be fair, there’s no real evidence this was conceived as a rebuttal to Abraham. None of the three describe it as anti-Israel, anti-Iran or anti-American, and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan says the groundwork had been laid nearly three years earlier. But the contrast is hard to miss all the same. Abraham offered normalisation. Makkah offers protection. And that difference may be exactly why one model has stalled while the other has suddenly found momentum.

What Abraham got right — and where it hit a wall

It would be unfair to call the Abraham Accords a failure. Signed in 2020, they did something decades of Middle East diplomacy hadn’t managed: they gave Arab states formal relations with Israel without waiting for a final settlement with the Palestinians. Embassies opened. Trade followed. That’s real.

But the very thing that made Abraham possible is also what capped it. Arab diplomacy had long run on a simple sequence — resolve the Palestinian question, then normalise. Abraham flipped that order, betting governments could normalise now and let peace catch up later. A handful of governments were willing to make that bet. Their publics largely weren’t. Arab Barometer’s polling after October 7, 2023, found support for normalisation with Israel never topped 13 percent in any of the seven countries surveyed — and in........

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