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Amid conflicting reports of a deal to end the Iran war, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey stood together in Islam’s holiest city and signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, a pact declaring that an attack on one will be treated as an attack on all three. The geopolitical manoeuvring is pretty clear.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and army chief Asim Munir performed Umrah before Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan arrived, and the three leaders then sat with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to put ink on a document that officials insist is purely defensive and aimed at no one in particular. That last claim calls for closer look, because everything about the timing of this pact points to a region being impacted less by the three signatories than by the power that has spent the last five months bombing Iran.

Look at what Washington has been doing in parallel. It has signed a civil nuclear agreement with Riyadh that leaves the door open for domestic uranium enrichment, a concession it refused to give the UAE. It has let Turkey host the 36th NATO summit while easing sanctions on Ankara. And it has allowed Pakistan to style itself as a mediator in the Iran war, a role that flatters Islamabad’s diplomats even as its troops, fighter jets and air-defence batteries sit inside Saudi Arabia defending the kingdom’s oil infrastructure.

None of these three arrangements happened in isolation, and none of them happened before the Mecca pact by accident. Each state has been given a reward, a role, a status boost, precisely at the moment it deepens the military entanglement that keeps the region orbiting American strategic interests. Call it a trilateral defence pact, if you like. It reads just as easily as three subcontractors being issued fresh contracts. 

That is the uncomfortable geopolitical plan that gets lost in the language of ‘strategic autonomy’ now filling newspaper columns. Analysts at the Gulf Research Center have suggested that if this mechanism becomes institutionalised, it could give all three states greater diplomatic and military weight and nudge the region toward a security order less dependent on Washington. But autonomy is not what the last week of diplomacy looks like. It looks like three........

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