The Mecca Agreement shows the end of the U.S.-led Middle East order
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement on Aug 7, a pact that commits each signatory to treat an attack on any one as an attack on all, echoing NATO’s Article 5.
Source: Council on Foreign Relations · August 14, 2026 at 4:08 AM · AI-assisted report
Opinion
KUALA LUMPUR, 14 AUGUST 2026 —
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement on Aug 7, a pact that commits each signatory to treat an attack on any one as an attack on all, echoing NATO’s Article 5.
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The security guarantee is the first of its kind among the three capitals and immediately invited a test when Ansar Allah fired missiles and drones at a Saudi Aramco refinery in Jazan on July 13; Riyadh did not invoke the pact.
Analysts say the episode shows that the pact’s real importance is not the promise of troops but the signal that the regional order Washington built since the 1970s is coming apart.
The U.S.-led architecture gathered Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain and Israel under a security umbrella that kept oil flowing, guaranteed Israel’s safety and blocked any rival from challenging American primacy.
Success came at a price: Washington shouldered most of the burden while its partners provided bases, intelligence and political cover; when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the U.S. assembled a coalition that expelled Saddam Hussein and restored Kuwaiti sovereignty.
Stresses appeared after the 2003 Iraq war, Washington’s tepid backing for Saudi Arabia’s Yemen campaign, the 2019 Iranian attacks on Saudi oil sites that went unanswered, and Israel’s Gaza offensive after October 7, 2023.
The policy debate inside Washington shifted toward retrenchment, fueled by two assumptions: that U.S. reliance on Middle Eastern oil was ending and that alternative energy would make the region expendable.
The first claim ignored the global nature of oil markets; the second underestimated the time and capital needed to decarbonize energy systems and societies.
At the same time, U.S. policy became less predictable: Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran was scrapped by Donald Trump, who pursued an “anything-but-Obama” doctrine and kept regional partners guessing; Joe Biden reversed course again when Egypt’s Gaza help and Saudi oil policy mattered.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif joined Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Mecca to sign the pact.
Observers note that even as the three leaders pledged mutual defense, Saudi Arabia chose not to call on Ankara or Islamabad when Houthi missiles struck Aramco, suggesting limited faith in the new partners’ willingness to fight on the peninsula.
The Abraham Accords of 2020—normalization between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco and the UAE—once promised to institutionalize the U.S.-led order through minilaterals such as the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, Saudi-Emirati tensions over Israel, Sudan and Yemen, and the undeclared war between the U.S., Israel and Iran have since torn those arrangements apart.
With Washington’s reliability in question, Riyadh is diversifying its security ties; the Mecca Agreement is the clearest sign yet that the Middle East no longer looks to the U.S. as its sole guarantor.
The strongest objection to this reading is that the Mecca pact remains untested; its Article 5-style clause has not been invoked in combat and may never be.
Until then, the episode confirms that the regional order Washington built over decades is fracturing faster than any of its architects anticipated.
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