First we had the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA) between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Much fanfare followed it. Thinner than a reed, it nonetheless had one line that got tongues wagging: any armed attack on either country is considered an attack on both. Much airtime was wasted on what it meant.

Now we have the trilateral Makkah Joint Defence Agreement (MJDA) between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkiye. Domestic drumbeating has a higher decibel level this time round. That is to be expected in an environment where the disconnect between internal disarray and external validation is growing and the dysfunction of the system has already been announced by the managers of the system themselves.

 In a short assessment for Dawn published on October 5, 2025, I had made two basic points about the SMDA: one, “there’s more assuredness here in words than there’s likely to be in action” and two, “the government must begin a debate in parliament on both the SMDA and the Trump [Gaza] plan to rid the policy of its opacity and avoid…[making] Pakistan complicit in the US-Zionist genocide.” Mercifully, we didn’t hear much about the SMDA after the initial hyperventilation. Meanwhile, the United States in collusion with and on the goading of its Zionist master, attacked Iran on February 28 this year. That inflection point has changed the foundations on which the Gulf states had raised their security edifices. That process has not ended and its endpoint remains largely unknown.

What is currently known, as things stand, are two facts: the US-Zionist war has so far failed to achieve its strategic objectives; the premise on which the Gulf states had built their security and development model — the US will protect them — lies dead in the waters of the Gulf. In the backdrop of this on-again, off-again war we now have the MJDA. Like the SMDA, this one too represents a structural paradox. While its language is vague and details unavailable, it nonetheless headlines itself by declaring that an armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all. This wording, predictably, has triggered immediate, widespread comparisons to NATO’s Article 5. That comparison is wrong as headline hype generally is since Article 5 is more nuanced in its collective defence obligations and is not grounded in automaticity. Our purpose here is to figure out, as best as one can in the absence of specifics and transparency, what to make of MJDA. How should this bird be drawn. 

Legally and operationally, as it stands, it lacks the institutional depth, unified command structures, joint military planning, and integrated logistics required of a functional collective-defence alliance.

Legally and operationally, as it stands, it lacks the institutional depth, unified command structures, joint military planning, and integrated logistics required of a functional collective-defence alliance.

Theory is generally a good starting point and we have at least two models against which to test the MJDA: Glenn Snyder’s concept of alliances and Stephen Walt’s balance of threat theory. Snyder distinguishes clearly between different gradations of security cooperation: Alignments and Ententes, which are informal commonalities of interest or general diplomatic understandings; Agreements or Pacts, which are issues-based, transactional frameworks; Alliances, which are highly institutionalised, legally-binding treaties with explicit military triggers. This is how Snyder defines an alliance: Alliances are formal associations of states for the use (or nonuse) of military force, in specified circumstances, against states outside their own membership. He also stresses that “Alliances are associations with a military or security purpose.” So there’s an “‘other’ orientation” to alliances and they are different “from tacit ‘alignments' based solely on common interests.”

 Alliances, under Snyder’s model, formalise “elements of specificity, legal and moral obligation, and reciprocity that are usually lacking in informal alignments.” In other words: The contract specifies, with varying explicitness, the identity of the opponent, what acts by the opponent will call for an alliance response, and what that response will be. Going by this, the MJDA........

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