Mecca’s new joint defense pact has a Gulf problem. Saudi Arabia signed. No other Gulf state did.
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, anchored by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan, presents itself as an open-architecture framework built for regional participation. Yet not a single additional country has moved toward membership, leaving the pact’s most consequential question unresolved: can it expand within the Gulf, and if it does, will it grow alongside the Gulf Cooperation Council or pull against it?
The starting configuration deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. Riyadh is the sole Gulf signatory, a fact that carries real weight. Saudi Arabia functions as arguably the GCC’s most influential member across historical, military, and financial dimensions. A framework anchored by the region’s central power but joined by none of its neighbors is an unusual foundation for something marketed as regionally inclusive.
The structural case for broader Gulf participation is not inherently weak. Both Türkiye and Pakistan have cultivated security relationships across the Gulf that have expanded steadily in recent years. Turkish military cooperation with Qatar has deepened. Kuwait has grown its coordination with Ankara on maritime and energy-route security. The UAE has shown increasing willingness to work with Türkiye on security matters. Pakistan’s connections run equally deep, rooted in decades of military training partnerships and personnel exchanges. Both external partners maintain working relationships with Gulf capitals independent of the pact itself, giving Riyadh, Ankara, and Islamabad a practical foundation for expansion.
Formal membership has not followed. Qatar and Kuwait have limited their public engagement to welcoming statements rather than accession talks. The UAE has offered essentially no positive response. For Doha and Kuwait City, the calculus centers on a straightforward question: would formal membership deliver meaningful additional security benefits beyond the bilateral arrangements each state already maintains separately with the pact’s three founding members? Without a clear answer, the incentive to assume new institutional obligations stays limited.
Abu Dhabi’s hesitation cuts deeper. Longstanding friction with Riyadh across multiple files, Yemen policy differences, divergent approaches to Israel and Iran, and skepticism toward a Saudi-led format built around non-Gulf external powers rather than the GCC’s own institutional machinery, all factor into Emirati caution.
The GCC itself becomes central to understanding this dynamic. The Mecca Pact does not position itself as a GCC replacement, and nothing in its architecture suggests intent to supersede it. Yet the GCC has never delivered the kind of functional, binding security cooperation its charter promises. On Iran, the six members have never converged on shared policy. That same fragmentation now extends to Israel and Palestine, where GCC members have adopted visibly different positions rather than unified stances.
This fragmentation creates operational space for the Mecca Pact. The GCC possesses a defense component on paper, but in practice has struggled to translate that into deployable, credible collective action. The Mecca Pact, anchored by a single Gulf state and two capable external partners, offers something more concrete on that specific dimension, even if its own obligations remain deliberately loose.
The real test of the pact’s expansion potential lies not in formal accessions but in how Gulf states manage competing institutional commitments. If the GCC remains fragmented on matters that most concern its members, individual Gulf states face a practical incentive to hedge through the Mecca framework without abandoning GCC membership. Growth inside the Gulf may therefore unfold not through additional signatures but through gradual layering of bilateral defense ties, Turkish and Pakistani, atop the existing Saudi anchor, until informal architecture begins to resemble a functioning Gulf wing well before any new formal commitment appears.
Beyond the Gulf, Egypt and Syria represent possible expansion cases, though on different timelines and for different reasons. Egypt stands as the more immediate candidate. Cairo’s defense-industrial cooperation with Türkiye has developed into joint production arrangements worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Military and intelligence coordination with Saudi Arabia remains a longstanding pillar of Arab regional security. Egypt shares direct operational stakes with the founding trio in Red Sea corridor security and Gaza post-conflict stabilization.
Syria occupies a much longer timeline. Damascus faces institutional fragmentation and limited capacity to assume formal collective-defense commitments. Syria’s current role remains symbolic rather than operational, tied to reconstruction and to the growing positive footprint Türkiye and Qatar already maintain there.
Neither Egypt nor Syria, however, represents where the pact’s genuine challenge lies. That challenge remains the Gulf itself, and specifically whether the states closest to Riyadh will eventually decide that informal proximity to the framework is no longer enough.