A pact, divided within, with no single threat
The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey — between an oil-rich economic powerhouse, the only Islamic country with a nuclear weapon and a NATO member with the second-largest military — is significant. The agreement proclaims a NATO-like principle of collective defence: “Any armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all.” But it lacks the one thing that makes collective defence alliances work: A shared threat. Saudi Arabia and Israel (which has called Turkey the new Iran) may not have official diplomatic relations with each other but they engage in security cooperation, while both Pakistan and Turkey’s relationships with Iran — which has pummelled Saudi Arabia with ballistic missiles — are complicated. Consider, also, the fact that Pakistan, despite its mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia last year, has not responded militarily to Iran’s attacks on the kingdom. The Saudis did not help Pakistan, either, when the latter country went to war with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The pact will boost defence cooperation, intelligence-sharing and joint production of weaponry. But the tangled web of regional relationships and rivalries in a changing West Asia characterised by growing American unpredictability means that it is a far cry from a NATO-style alliance. For now, it is better understood as a hedge against a changing regional order and a response to Iranian and Israeli military manoeuvres, as well as the failure of the Donald Trump administration in assuring the security of the Gulf states against either actor. Each of the three signatories has its own calculus in the region: Riyadh, which recently signed a civil nuclear deal with Washington, is trying to assert its leadership; the pact embeds Islamabad more deeply in the emerging security architecture; and it advances Ankara’s long-standing ambition to play a larger security role in West Asia. India should not be overly concerned. It should cultivate stronger ties with the countries of the region, deepen its economic and strategic engagement with the Gulf and maintain working relationships across the regional rivalries.
- 1India's response to regional security pacts like this one is shaped constitutionally by the Union government's exclusive authority over foreign affairs and defence under Entries 1 and 2 of the Union List in the Seventh Schedule, exercised through the Ministry of External Affairs and the Cabinet Committee on Security. India's traditional doctrine of strategic autonomy, and more recently multi-alignment, lets it engage Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey's individual interests separately without being drawn into either camp, a flexibility the editorial implicitly endorses.
- 2The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement echoes past attempts at collective security arrangements in the Islamic world, but is complicated by Pakistan and Turkey's fraught relations with Iran and by the absence of a unifying adversary comparable to the Soviet Union for NATO in 1949. India, which imports over eighty percent of its crude oil needs and sources a significant share from Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, has strong incentives to maintain balanced ties across this fractured regional landscape rather than align with any single bloc.
- 3Formal defence pacts of this kind typically sit alongside, rather than replace, the United Nations Charter's Article 51 right to individual and collective self-defence, meaning their strength depends on political will rather than binding legal obligation, as shown by Pakistan's non-response to Iran's strikes on Saudi Arabia despite an existing bilateral defence pact. This mirrors long-standing international law debates about the gap between a treaty's textual commitments and its actual enforceability, a recurring theme when comparing NATO's Article 5 to looser regional security arrangements.
- 4Saudi Arabia holds among the world's largest proven oil reserves, Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority state with confirmed nuclear weapons capability, and Turkey maintains one of NATO's largest standing militaries with several hundred thousand active personnel. These figures underline why the editorial calls the pact significant despite its structural weaknesses, since the combined economic, nuclear and conventional military weight of the three signatories reshapes regional deterrence calculations even without a unifying threat.