While Trump vacillates between total war and détente with Iran, Turkey has moved quickly to fill the regional vacuum. Last week, Hakan Fidan announced the Mecca Agreement, a defensive pact between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The pact was nearly three years in the making and its signatories insist that it is defensive and directed at no particular state. Yet agreements do not exist only in the intentions of those who negotiate them. Within a day of its announcement, Pakistan’s defense minister was already calling Israel a threat to the entire Muslim world and urging a united military front against it. Whatever the agreement ultimately becomes, its strategic meaning for Israel is already taking shape. It reflects a region responding to the Israel that emerged after October 7, a state that can no longer be isolated at will, and to an American order whose regional allies are increasingly hedging against Washington itself.

The question for Israel and the United States is no longer whether a new alignment is forming. It is what they intend to do about it.

Turkey has made its direction unmistakable. Erdogan and Fidan speak with growing hostility toward Israel. Ankara hosts Hamas leaders, challenges Israeli sovereignty through its Jerusalem presence, backs flotillas to Gaza and builds military power around its expansionist Blue Homeland doctrine. Turkey is no longer the Kemalist republic that entered NATO. It is a revanchist power led by a president who increasingly imagines Turkey through the historical memory of Ottoman ambition sold as stability. Its NATO membership rests on assumptions from another age, even as Ankara enters a defense pact with a nuclear power and speaks of a wider Sunni alignment.

Saudi Arabia now appears to be making its own choice. For years Riyadh balanced between Washington, normalization with Israel and the politics of the Muslim world. The Mecca Agreement suggests that, when........

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