Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan forge new defense pact amid doubts over US commitment

Three of Washington’s closest military partners signed a mutual defence agreement in Mecca, and geopolitical analysts read it as a signal that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan no longer fully trusted American security commitments. The timing raised questions about whether the United States was retreating from its traditional role as the region’s primary defender.

President Donald Trump’s response, delivered on Sunday via Truth Social, suggested he welcomed the development. “Very happy to see that Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan have recently, and finally, signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement,” Trump wrote. “It shows that the Middle East is coming together and how Countries will finally be able to defend themselves in a more meaningful way.”

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif responded within hours on Monday, thanking Trump for his “courageous and decisive leadership” and crediting him with helping avert “a nuclear catastrophe in South Asia.” The exchange reflected a broader pattern in Trump’s approach to US allies: a consistent push for countries to spend more on their own defence and reduce their dependence on American military resources.

Beneath this apparent alignment, though, lies a more complex reality. The question analysts are grappling with is whether regional security arrangements can genuinely substitute for the military infrastructure and commitment the United States has maintained in the Middle East for decades.

Trump’s messaging about allied defence spending has been unrelenting. At NATO’s summit in The Hague in June 2025, member states agreed to more than double their defence spending target from 2 percent of gross domestic product to 5 percent by 2035, following sustained pressure from the president. On the same day he praised the Mecca pact, Trump announced he was “substantially” reducing joint military exercises with South Korea, citing cost concerns and his relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un while criticizing Seoul for insufficient support against Iran.

Betul Dogan-Akkas, an assistant professor of international relations at Ankara University, argues that Turkey’s participation in the Mecca agreement must be understood within this broader context of American retrenchment. She points to February 28, when the United States and Israel launched military operations against Iran without consulting Gulf allies, who subsequently faced Iranian retaliation. “It is obvious that the Arab Gulf states lost their deterrence since February 28, and they have to re-establish their deterrence without relying on the US,” Dogan-Akkas told Al Jazeera. “Erdogan signals to the world and to the Gulf that he can support a regional security complex, as the world’s hegemony is not doing its job properly.”

Not all observers read Trump’s response as evidence of American withdrawal. Umer Karim, an associate fellow at the King Faisal Center for Islamic Research and Studies in Riyadh, offers a more nuanced picture. “I don’t think the US is stepping back as such, but perhaps the limits of its military presence and its impact, as well as the associated liabilities, have been exposed quite significantly, compelling all regional actors to speed up their attempts to diversify their security linkages,” Karim said. He predicts the US will remain in the region, but in a form where local partners assume greater responsibility for their own defence.

Mansoor Ahmed, an honorary lecturer at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, describes the Trump administration’s approach as “graduated retrenchment” aimed at rebuilding the US military-industrial base. Yet he distinguishes between Trump’s broader strategy and the origins of the Mecca pact itself. “While the Mecca pact inadvertently and indirectly helps US retrenchment, it was conceived and planned independently of any shifts in US policy or posture,” Ahmed said. He traces the agreement instead to a loss of confidence in American willingness and capability to defend Gulf Cooperation Council countries during the US-Iran conflict.

For Turkey, the strategic calculation extends beyond military security. Dogan-Akkas argues that Ankara’s primary interest lies in establishing itself as a security provider rather than a security consumer. Gokhan Ereli, an international relations expert at Istanbul’s Ibn Haldun University, frames Turkey’s position differently. “Where the Gulf states fear that the American umbrella has holes, Ankara suspects the umbrella was never really held over it in the first place,” Ereli said. He describes the pact as “a hedge with Turkish characteristics” and characterizes the posture as “not anti-American so much as post-dependent.”

The agreement’s binding language mirrors NATO’s Article 5, stating that an armed attack on one member “shall be regarded as an attack against them all.” Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has clarified, however, that states under attack must first request assistance and specify what form it should take, whether intelligence, logistics or troops. That conditionality suggests the commitment carries significant discretion.

Ahmed notes that each country will likely remain sovereign in determining the timing, nature and scope of military assistance. Reza Khanzadeh, a Middle East analyst at George Mason University, points to historical precedent: the bilateral Saudi-Pakistan pact signed in September 2025 did not escalate into wider conflict after Iran and the Houthis attacked Saudi Arabia this year, suggesting the automatic trigger language may not function as written.

Karim emphasizes that the commitments provide additional options rather than fixed guarantees. “This is an alignment that provides additional defence options and resources to every country but doesn’t really replace existing capabilities,” he said. The actual assistance available depends on the specific needs of the attacked state, available resources and the nature of the threat.

Despite these limitations, Karim calls the pact “a genuine institutional first, a new thing in the region since the time of the Baghdad Pact or CENTO.” The Baghdad Pact, renamed the Central Treaty Organization in 1959, was a Cold War alliance linking Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and the United Kingdom against Soviet expansion. It collapsed in 1979 after the Iranian revolution.

The ambiguity built into the Mecca agreement cuts both ways. It allows Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad to project unity without directly threatening Iran, but it also means the pact falls far short of matching the roughly 50,000 US troops stationed across the region. Karim remains cautious about whether that gap can narrow significantly. “In any case, this does create a workable alternative, but considering the structural reliance of Gulf states on the US, it doesn’t really replace it,” he said. “It should be considered as adding a separate layer of deterrence.” Whether that layer proves durable enough to matter is the question the region’s next crisis will answer.