It took barely 48 hours for the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement to run into the question that will ultimately decide what it becomes: a historic security arrangement, or just another ambitious regional declaration.

Two days after Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed the pact on 7 August, Yemen’s Houthis said they’d struck Saudi Aramco’s Jazan refinery with a drone. Saudi authorities put the fire out quickly and reported no injuries. The political fire was harder to contain. If an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all three, what exactly were Pakistan and Türkiye now expected to do?

Neither rushed to announce anything military.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan had already said, before the strike, that assistance under the agreement would be worked out through consultation and would depend on the nature and scale of the threat. So the Jazan attack became, almost immediately, a live test of both what the pact means and how little of it has actually been pinned down.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan had already said, before the strike, that assistance under the agreement would be worked out through consultation and would depend on the nature and scale of the threat. So the Jazan attack became, almost immediately, a live test of both what the pact means and how little of it has actually been pinned down.

Then, on 10 August, came something arguably more telling. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said Tehran had no reason to think the agreement was aimed at it — and went further, framing the pact as proof that regional states are leaning more on their own capabilities and less on outside powers.

That single response undercuts the easiest, laziest read of the Makkah agreement: that this is a “Sunni Muslim defence pact” built to counter Shia-majority Iran. It isn’t. Yes, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan are all Sunni-majority states — that’s just a fact. But turning that fact into the agreement’s purpose is a different claim entirely, and not one the evidence supports.

That single response undercuts the easiest, laziest read of the Makkah agreement: that this is a “Sunni Muslim defence pact” built to counter Shia-majority Iran. It isn’t. Yes, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan are all Sunni-majority states — that’s just a fact. But turning that fact into the agreement’s purpose is a different claim entirely, and not one the evidence supports.

Nothing in what’s been made public ties membership to Sunni Islam or names Iran as an adversary. Quite the opposite — all three governments have gone out of their way to say so. Riyadh has called the idea of a military axis or sectarian bloc off base, and........

© Middle East Monitor