The Middle East’s coalitions of convenience

The announcement of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan was advertised as the resurrection of an earlier pipe dream of an ‘Arab NATO’ mooted in 2015. Some observers responded by declaring the emergence of a new ‘Sunni Crescent’ to counter Iran and its allies. But Saudi Arabia’s Article 5 moment came recently, when its East-West oil pipeline was struck by the Houthis, followed by their takeover of the town of Mokha, which controls access to the Bab el-Mandeb. Neither Pakistan nor Turkey came to Saudi Arabia’s aid, although both have since offered words of support.

On 19 September, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Turkey ‘would have no issues’ meeting Saudi Arabia’s military needs under the trilateral defence pact with Pakistan. Two days earlier, Pakistan’s military spokesman, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, said Islamabad stood with Saudi Arabia ‘both diplomatically and physically’.

Rather than a new NATO, the Mecca Agreement points to a different trend. The future of the Middle East may belong not to a grand regional alliance but a network of overlapping coalitions, each built around a narrow set of threats and interests. The record of collective security arrangements in the Middle East is decidedly mixed. The Baghdad Pact of 1955, which included Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Britain, was supposed to create a powerful regional bulwark against the Soviet Union, but nationalism, competing ambitions and anti-imperial coups and revolutions unravelled the arrangement.

The pact, later known as CENTO, was modelled explicitly on NATO. Although it appeared to form a formidable northern tier to contain Soviet influence in the Middle East, the pact ran almost immediately into the problem that has bedevilled so many regional alliances. A security alliance cannot simply assemble military power around a common threat. Its members must agree on whose security is being protected, what interests they share and what they are prepared to do for one another.

Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser outright rejected the pact because he saw it as an extension of Western influence that threatened his pan-Arab ambitions. Rather than joining one camp, Nasser opted to play the United States and Soviet Union against each other, extracting concessions from both. His approach brought Soviet arms to Egypt and eventually a Soviet presence in the region. The 1958 Iraqi revolution then removed one of the pact’s principal pillars, showing just how precarious the arrangement was. It was officially dissolved in 1979 after the Shah of Iran was overthrown.

At the first Strategic Political and Defence Committee meeting in Istanbul on 31 August, the three signatories to the Mecca Agreement agreed to establish a permanent secretariat in Saudi Arabia and deepen defence cooperation. Since 1945 and the formation of the Arab League, the regional collective security environment has changed dramatically, and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey have compelling reasons to develop greater strategic autonomy. The architects of today’s Mecca Agreement will need to avoid the same stigma that dogged CENTO by demonstrating that it is a regional security arrangement designed by and for its members, rather than a vehicle for any Western power’s geopolitical agenda.

Europe’s experience is certainly no template for the Middle East. NATO, and eventually the European Union, emerged from the ruins of two world wars fought within a single generation. France and Germany, historic rivals that had repeatedly gone to war with each other, came to understand that another European war could be catastrophic for everyone. The United States provided an external security guarantee, while European institutions gradually turned former enemies into stakeholders in the same system. Economic integration, beginning with coal and steel, made cooperation more rewarding and conflict more costly.

While it is too simplistic to state that NATO has ‘worked’, it has endured largely because two devastating wars made the costs of pursuing national interests through war intolerable. The Middle East has suffered no shortage of wars, but none has affected the entire region as much as the 2026 war. Still, the current conflicts have not yet produced the same convergence of interests, or willingness to surrender a measure of strategic autonomy. The discussion needs to reflect that and examine whether Mecca can be a step toward a more flexible regional security system.

In the Gulf, where one might expect cultural and political affinities to make collective security easier, the record is not encouraging. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has existed since 1981, yet its members have time and again pursued competing foreign policies. Saudi Arabia and Qatar spent years at odds, culminating in the 2017 blockade, while the Gulf states have taken different approaches to Iran, Turkey and political Islam, as well as to the wars in Syria and Yemen. Unlike Europe, where coal and steel helped create interdependence, the GCC members are rentier states and their economic integration has not erased competition over energy, trade or regional influence.

Although the GCC has weathered these differences, it has come perilously close to institutional paralysis, perhaps just short of breaking down. The ongoing Iran war is a case in point. Despite meeting after the Qatar attacks, the GCC has yet to respond coherently to Israel’s assaults. The Gulf states may share concerns about regional security, but when national priorities pull in different directions, they will respond to the same conflict in very different ways.

Military cooperation alone will not make the Mecca Agreement durable. The history of the Baghdad Pact and the Arab League’s defence arrangements shows that even formally ambitious security agreements can struggle to survive in the face of events. Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are not responding to the same strategic problem. Turkey looks primarily to its concerns with Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, increasingly to Israel, Pakistan to India, and Saudi Arabia to Iran, as well as to the UAE. But, unlike CENTO, the Mecca Agreement is a regional initiative rather than a collective security arrangement designed and sponsored by a Western power. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey have all had direct experience of the consequences of relying too heavily on outside powers.

Saudi Arabia is making a parallel effort to build a Red Sea security architecture. In August, Riyadh announced that it helped establish a 14-country Multinational Maritime Defence Alliance to protect shipping through the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden. The grouping includes Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia, but notably excludes the UAE and Oman. Where Washington once had the capacity to deter the Houthis through airstrikes, Riyadh seeks a collective maritime security network across a wider group of states rather than relying on a single external power.

Unlike the Mecca Agreement, this alliance is organised around a specific shared problem rather than a broad mutual defence commitment. Egypt, which chose not to join the Mecca Agreement, has nevertheless joined this regional security arrangement where its interests are more narrowly defined. Pakistan and Turkey are doing something similar by participating in both groupings.

These arrangements suggest that the region may be experimenting with a different model of collective security. States do not necessarily have to agree on every threat, or bind themselves to every conflict, to cooperate on the problems they do share. A country can belong to several security arrangements at once, each serving a different purpose.

Critics will ask whether the region really needs another pact that divides countries into insiders and outsiders. But an all-encompassing regional security framework may be a non-starter. The region’s interests are too diverse, and its threats too varied, for every state to agree on everything. Smaller coalitions may be less ambitious, but they may also be more realistic.

The Mecca Agreement could become significant if Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey move past the rhetoric and engage in genuine intelligence sharing, joint exercises, interoperable forces, agreed responses to attacks and mechanisms for resolving disputes. The first institutional steps have now been taken, but the emerging regional picture may ultimately be more complicated than a new NATO or another Baghdad Pact. It needs to become one building block in a new regional security architecture, a web of overlapping coalitions, each built around different interests and threats. That may be a better fit for a region whose states increasingly want strategic autonomy without giving up the flexibility to choose their partners. An interesting experiment is in train.