ON Friday in Makkah, three leaders knelt together for prayers at Masjid al-Haram before walking to Al-Safa Palace to sign a document that may come to define the next phase of Middle Eastern security. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif put their names to the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, a pact that binds their three states into a formal collective-security arrangement: an armed attack on any one of them, the joint statement declares, “Shall be regarded as an attack against them all.”
The timing and setting are not accidental. This agreement did not emerge in isolation but grew out of a year of accelerating anxiety across the Muslim world. In September 2025, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a bilateral Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement, itself a response to Israel’s unprecedented strike on Hamas negotiators inside Doha, an attack that shook Gulf capitals to their core. If Qatar, hosting the largest American air base in the region, could be struck despite its ties to Washington, then no Gulf state could take its safety for granted. That episode, layered onto months of upheaval from the Gaza war and, more recently, escalating US-Iran confrontation, convinced Riyadh that its security could no longer rest solely on American guarantees. Pakistan, the only nuclear-armed state in the Muslim world, offered an alternative pillar of deterrence.
What has now happened in Makkah is the widening of that bilateral arrangement into a trilateral one, drawing in Türkiye, a NATO member with the alliance’s second-largest standing army and a defence industry that has become a major global exporter of drones and military technology. The logic of the expansion is straightforward. Saudi Arabia brings financial power and religious authority as custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites; Pakistan brings nuclear capability and a battle-tested military; Türkiye brings conventional military weight, an expanding arms industry and its own ambitions of regional leadership. Together, the three states span the Arab Gulf, South Asia and Anatolia, giving the pact a geographic and demographic reach far beyond a typical bilateral treaty.
The core salient of the agreement is its Article 5-style mutual defence clause, mirroring the logic of NATO’s founding treaty: aggression against one member is treated as aggression against all. Beyond this headline commitment, the joint statement speaks of “enhancement of all aspects of defence cooperation” among the three states, suggesting an intention to move toward deeper interoperability, intelligence sharing, joint exercises and possibly coordinated defence production, though the full text of the agreement, like its 2025 predecessor, has not been made public.
That opacity is itself significant. Officials on both sides of the earlier Saudi-Pakistan pact were careful to avoid explicit confirmation that Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella now extends over its partners, even as suggestive remarks were made and then walked back. The ambiguity appears deliberate, a way of raising the cost of aggression in the minds of adversaries without crossing declared nuclear red lines.
Whether the pact truly “mandates” all three countries to defend one another in a binding, treaty-enforced sense or whether it functions more as a political pledge of solidarity, remains an open question. Precedent from the Pakistan-Saudi agreement suggests the latter: analysts have noted that such Gulf-South Asian defence arrangements are political commitments rather than institutionalized collective-defence structures like NATO, with no standing joint command or automatic military obligation. Still, the symbolism carries its own weight, particularly given where it was signed. But as the cardinals of the agreement are not public, we must expect that it has the requisite guarantees from all the member states.
That symbolism reaches back centuries. Long before modern nation-states existed, the defence of Makkah and Madinah was understood as a shared Islamic trust rather than the possession of any single people. Arab dynasties descended from the Prophet’s own tribe of Quraysh held guardianship of the sanctuaries in the earliest centuries of Islam. Later, as the frontier of the Muslim world expanded, that duty passed through Turkic hands: Mamluk sultans, many of Turkic origin, defended the Hejaz against Crusader incursions and Mongol threats and after 1517 the Ottoman sultans formally adopted the title Khadim al-Haramayn al-Sharifayn, Servant of the Two Holy Places, treating their protection as a central obligation of the Caliphate for four centuries. The idea that Turks and Arabs together bore responsibility for guarding Islam’s sacred geography is therefore not new invention but historical memory, one that this agreement, signed within sight of the Kaaba, deliberately invokes. The addition of Pakistan, home to the world’s second-largest Muslim population and its only nuclear-armed state with the strongest and most trained army, extends that old civilizational partnership into South Asia for the first time in a formal defence context.
Ultimately, the Makkah agreement should be read on two levels at once. Practically, it is a hedge by three states, each anxious in its own way about a volatile regional order, against a future in which Western security guarantees look increasingly conditional. Symbolically, it is a strategic alliance of Islamic brotherhood and historic guardianship of the holy places, lending it a legitimacy that a purely secular alliance could never claim. Whether it evolves into genuine operational integration or remains chiefly declaratory will depend on what neither Riyadh, Ankara nor Islamabad has yet disclosed: the substance behind the signatures.
—The writer is an international law expert and an internationally accredited arbitrator and mediator.
