A trilateral defence pact signed in Islam’s holiest city promises collective security. History, and the pact’s own first weeks, suggest a more modest and more complicated story

Seventy years ago, a Pakistani prime minister looked at the parade of Arab and Muslim unity pacts passing through his region and delivered a verdict that has outlived every one of them: “Zero plus zero plus zero still amounts to zero.” Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy was not being cynical for its own sake. He had watched, or would go on to watch, a succession of grand regional groupings rise on ceremony and dissolve on reality. The United Arab Republic, Egypt and Syria’s federation founded in 1958 as the high-water mark of pan-Arab ambition, collapsed in 1961. The Baghdad Pact lost Iraq within a year of its founding, limped on as the Central Treaty Organisation, and expired quietly in 1979. The Regional Cooperation for Development, launched in 1964 by Iran, Turkey and Pakistan — then, as now, the region’s three major non-Arab Muslim states — was rebranded the Economic Cooperation Organisation in 1985 and achieved little of consequence. Even the Gulf Cooperation Council, founded in 1981 explicitly to present a united front against Iran, remains today visibly split on how to handle Tehran.

That history is the essential backdrop against which to read the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed on 7 August 2026 by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey at Al-Safa Palace in Islam’s holiest city. The headline provision is simple and dramatic: an armed attack on any one of the three is to be treated as an attack on all. It is language borrowed, consciously or not, from NATO’s Article 5, and it arrived amid genuine regional alarm — a war between the United States, Israel and Iran that began on 28 February 2026 and has since drawn missiles and drones onto every Gulf Cooperation Council state, a revived conflict in Yemen, and a Strait of Hormuz that no longer feels like open water. Riyadh, Islamabad and Ankara have spent the past week insisting the pact is defensive, not conspiratorial. Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, put it bluntly: there is no common threat that the three states have put into writing, and any country that does not attack a signatory has nothing to fear from the agreement. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, called it “purely defensive in nature” and said the door remains open to other states willing to resolve disputes peacefully — a hint that Egypt, among others, has been sounded out.

Solidarity this quickly assembled, however, sits on genuinely recent estrangement. Only a few years ago, President Erdogan was campaigning to make Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman an international pariah over the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a campaign inseparable from Ankara’s patronage of the Muslim Brotherhood — an organisation Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Cairo all regard as an existential threat to their own systems of rule. Pakistan’s own loyalties have been tested before, too: Islamabad’s parliament voted unanimously for neutrality rather than troops when Saudi Arabia went to war in Yemen in 2015. None of this makes the Mecca pact meaningless. It does mean the coalition of convenience gathered in Mecca has less inherited trust to draw on than its signing ceremony suggested, and Suhrawardy’s arithmetic — that regional solidarity pacts have a long history of adding up to less than the sum of their announced ambitions — is exactly the test this one now has to pass.

What the Text Does and Does Not Commit Anyone To

Strip away the ceremony and the pact is a single operative sentence: an attack on one is an attack on all. What it does not yet contain is almost as important as what it does. There is no standing joint command, no integrated planning staff, and no publicly specified list of what military action a signatory would actually be obliged to take if another were struck. Officials on all three sides describe committees, a permanent secretariat and a push toward interoperability, intelligence-sharing and joint training as the next steps — which is another way of saying the substance is still being built, not already in place. Nor, despite a wave of early commentary, does the pact appear to extend Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent over Saudi Arabia or Turkey. Islamabad has historically reserved its nuclear capability for the threat it perceives from India, and nothing in the public text or in officials’ own statements suggests that calculus has changed.

What each partner actually brings to the table is more prosaic, and arguably more telling: Pakistan supplies a combat-tested military and the Muslim world’s only nuclear arsenal; Turkey brings NATO’s second-largest standing army and an increasingly formidable drone and defence-industrial base; Saudi Arabia brings capital, religious-diplomatic weight and the setting itself. Combined, the three countries field close to 1.4 million active personnel, roughly 3,400 aircraft, 6,000 tanks and more than 340 naval vessels — a formidable roster on paper, assembled from three militaries that presently run on incompatible equipment, doctrine and command culture, a mismatch analyst have flagged as the pact’s first practical obstacle to becoming anything more than a declaration.

Against Whom, Really?

Every signatory insists the pact targets no one. The circumstantial evidence points elsewhere. Turkey has the most active live confrontation of the three. Ankara has accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, joined South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice. Watched an Istanbul court indict Prime Minister Netanyahu, and clashed diplomatically with Israel over Turkish military activity in post-Assad Syria, to the point that Erdogan and Netanyahu have traded open insults. Saudi Arabia’s friction with Israel is milder and runs through its now-familiar refusal to normalise relations absent real progress toward Palestinian statehood.

 Iran is the more obvious backdrop. Riyadh has absorbed repeated Iranian and Iranian-proxy strikes since February — yet Tehran’s own reaction to the pact has been dismissive rather than alarmed. The Iranian parliamentarian has mocked the idea that a paper agreement with Turkey and Pakistan would deliver Saudi Arabia any more security than years of hosting American forces did.

The most honest test of the pact’s real solidarity, though, is not rhetorical but empirical, and it has already happened. Pakistan has been fighting an actual, bloody war along its Afghan border since October 2025, a conflict its own defence minister has called open war. United Nations has recorded hundreds of Afghan civilian deaths in a single quarter. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Turkey has lifted a finger, militarily or diplomatically, to help Pakistan there — the mediating role, such as it exists, has come from China instead. A pact tested this early against a live conflict involving one of its own members, and found wanting, tells you more about its current operational weight than any joint statement does.

The View From New Delhi

Indian commentary has been unusually engaged, and unusually candid about the stakes. The Hindu’s international affairs editor, Stanly Johny, described the pact plainly as a new triple alliance taking shape in West Asia — a characterisation more assertive than the “just a hedge” framing favoured by some Western analysts. The Week went considerably further, calling the pact’s implications for India “ominous” and laying out the logic bluntly: it dilutes American and Israeli influence in a region where India has built substantial business and military ties of its own. It says that the pact hands Pakistan a louder strategic voice and the promise of potential military backing in any future confrontation with India. It goes on to state that all this by binding together, in one bloc, the Muslim world’s only nuclear power, NATO’s second-largest army and the traditional custodian of Islam’s holiest sites. Former Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal has pushed back hard on those inclined to dismiss the pact as symbolic, asking pointedly which other defence pact besides NATO contains a provision quite like this one, and warning that if Pakistan succeeds in building a narrative of shared regional threats, India could eventually find itself cast as a target within that narrative. A more measured note has come from Takshashila’s Aishwaria Sonavane, who points out that the three militaries simply lack the institutional foundations for NATO-style interoperability given how differently each is equipped and trained — a caution echoed in a Hindu editorial analysis that flagged the same interoperability gap as the pact’s most immediate practical constraint.

India’s official response, by contrast, has been carefully unhurried. The Ministry of External Affairs said it was closely following developments and would study the implications for India’s national security, language nearly identical to what New Delhi said about the Saudi-Pakistan bilateral pact a year earlier. That calibration looks justified on the narrow nuclear question, where the evidence does not support alarm. It looks less complete on three other fronts that deserve sustained attention rather than a one-off statement. First, Turkey’s entry meaningfully widens the circle of states with a formal defence relationship to Pakistan, at a moment when Ankara’s own ties with New Delhi have cooled over Turkey’s vocal support for Islamabad during recent India-Pakistan tensions. Second, the pact adds fresh urgency to an old vulnerability: as Saudi-Pakistani military interoperability deepens, the Bab al-Mandeb Strait — a chokepoint critical to Indian energy imports and trade — could increasingly fall within the orbit of a bloc in which India has no seat. Third, China’s shadow role deserves closer watching than it has received. Chinese-origin air defence systems already sit inside Pakistan’s contribution to Saudi security, and any formal deepening of that relationship, especially if Iran’s pressure on the Gulf continues, would be a development India could not treat as peripheral to its own two-front planning. None of this argues for alarm. It argues for the kind of patient, specific monitoring that India’s own commentators, rather than its official statements, have so far done best.

What It Could Mean for Washington

Washington’s own position in this story is awkward. The pact was signed without American blessing and, more strikingly, without an American reaction. More than a day after the signing, the Trump administration had issued no formal response at all. A silence regional analysts read as its own kind of statement. Analysts at the Baker Institute and the Center for International Policy have both framed the pact less as a rejection of the United States than as a hedge. Gulf states diversifying their security options after more than a decade of accumulating doubt about American staying power, doubt the 2026 Iran war has sharply intensified rather than created. That distinction matters, but it may matter less over time than the pact’s practical effect. A Gulf security architecture in which Washington is no longer the only, or even the first, port of call. For a United States already stretched between the Iran conflict, its own domestic debates over troop commitments abroad, and a Gulf increasingly willing to hedge its bets, the Mecca pact is less a challenge to American power than a quiet vote of diminished confidence in it — delivered, pointedly, by three of Washington’s own longstanding regional partners.

A Pact Still Being Written

The days since the signing have brought a steady trickle of detail rather than a single clarifying moment. Islamabad’s police marked the agreement with a flag march; Saudi landmarks lit up in celebration; Turkish officials have floated Egypt as a possible future member, which would turn a trilateral pact into something closer to a standing Sunni-majority security caucus. None of this settles the deeper question. Suhrawardy’s old arithmetic was never really about the sincerity of the leaders signing such pacts — it was about the gap between declared solidarity and the institutional machinery needed to make that solidarity mean anything under pressure. The Mecca pact has, for now, more declared solidarity than machinery. Real capability on paper, a genuine and understandable shared anxiety about American reliability, and a founding trio whose most serious quarrels are barely a few years old. Whether it becomes the exception to seventy years of regional pacts that added up to less than they promised, or simply the latest entry in that list, will be decided less by what was signed in Mecca on 7 August than by how the three governments behave the next time one of them is actually attacked.

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The US, Britain and Australia announced, on 15 September, a new trilateral security alliance for the Indo-Pacific to take on the threats of the 21st century and allow for greater sharing of defence capabilities, including help Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines, in a bid to counter China’s growing power in the strategically vital region.

Unveiling the ambitious security initiative, US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Australian counterpart Scott Morrison in a joint statement said their move will promote stability in the Indo-Pacific and support of their shared values and interests. “We are taking another historic step to deepen and formalise cooperation among all three of our nations because we all recognise the imperative of ensuring peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific over the long term,” President Biden said at the virtual launch of the new alliance known as AUKUS on Wednesday.

Biden said that the three countries will update and enhance their shared ability to take on the threats of the 21st century, just as they did in the 20th century, together. The United States, Australia, United Kingdom have long been faithful and capable partners and we’re even closer today. Today, we’re taking another historic step to deepen and formalise cooperation among all three of our nations because we all recognise the imperative of ensuring peace stability in the Indo-Pacific over the long term, he said.

Interestingly, the announcement of AUKUS came a week before a meeting of Quad leaders to be hosted by US President Biden in Washington on September 24. The meeting was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of Australia Morrison and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.

What is AUKUS

Under the AUKUS alliance, the three nations have agreed to enhance the development of joint capabilities and technology sharing, foster deeper integration of security and defence-related science, technology, industrial bases and supply chains.
Under the first major initiative of AUKUS, Australia would build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines with the help of the US and the UK, a capability aimed at promoting stability in the Indo-Pacific region.

France Indignant

The announcement is significant not only because it involves the transfer of nuclear submarine technology to Australia but also since it implies the cancellation of an ongoing U.S.$90 billion project by France to manufacture conventional submarines for Australia.

Paris recalled its Ambassador to Australia, accusing Canberra of “backstabbing” and betrayal. When Australian and French ministers met less than a month earlier, French officials said there had been no talk of cancelling the deal. The two sides had even issued a joint statement indicating the continuation of the submarine programme. But Australia, it seemed, was secretly negotiating a deal with the U.K. and the U.S. Beyond Canberra’s unceremonious termination of the submarine contract, France was angry because it was kept in the dark about the discussions surrounding the new pact.

Chinese Reactions

In Beijing, the Chinese foreign ministry sharply criticised the trilateral military partnership, saying it would closely monitor the pact that will gravely undermine regional stability and aggravate the arms race and hurt international non-proliferation efforts.
Chinese State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, on 29 September, in a phone conversation with the Malaysian and Bruneian foreign ministers, said the AUKUS move was likely to bring about five dangers to the region.

• Firstly, it will cause risks of nuclear proliferation. While the United States has unilaterally imposed sanctions on countries developing enriched uranium technology, it gave Australia a green light, which will inevitably give rise to more risks of proliferation of nuclear technology and materials, impacting the global non-proliferation regime.
• Secondly, it will induce a new round of arms race. Australia’s move will break the strategic balance in the region. It could not be ruled out that other countries would follow the move to wage a new round of arms race, even crossing the nuclear threshold.
• Thirdly, it will undermine regional prosperity and stability. AUKUS will surely to create tensions, casting a shadow on the region’s peace, stability, and development.
• Fourthly, it will sabotage the building of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in South-East Asia.
• Fifthly, it will revive the Cold War mentality. AUKUS, in line with the Quad, complies with and serves the US-led Indo-Pacific strategy, seeking to overturn the current status quo and start all over again, with an eye to provoking rivalry among blocs in the region and ushering in geopolitical zero-sum games.

What does AUKUS mean for India

Australia will receive top quality nuclear submarine technology from the U.S. and the U.K., strengthening China deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. But if Australia and the U.S. could deceive France, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) partner, what is to prevent them from doing the same with lesser allies?

The Indian Navy presently dominates the Eastern Indian Ocean, but its conventional underwater capability has been shrinking. An Indian plan to develop a fleet of nuclear attack submarines has elicited no offer of help from the U.S. that does not share its prized nuclear submarine technology with even its closest allies; all except Australia, evidently.

Washington’s willingness to help Canberra build SSNs raises the possibility that Australia could deploy nuclear submarines in the Eastern Indian Ocean well before India positions its own. The Indian Navy is not building submarines at a pacecommensurate with needs. Notwithstanding shared concerns over China’s growing submarine presence in the region, however, Indian officials are not comfortable with the prospect of friendly SSNs in India’s backyard.

India is being careful in its official response to AUKUS. The bottom line for New Delhi is that it cannot be seen to be taking sides in a feud among friends – France, U.S., U.K. and Australia – some of India’s closest partners.

Officially, foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla distanced Quad — “a plurilateral grouping of four countries that have a shared vision of their attributes and values” — from AUKUS — “a security alliance between three countries”, adding that “from our perspective, it is neither relevant to the Quad nor will it have any impact on its functioning”.

Comments

The objective of AUKUS is “to deal with rapidly evolving threats”, and it envisages closer intelligence-sharing and cooperation in areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), cyber-warfare and quantum computing. The US, UK and Australia are already part of the Five Eyes intelligence network, together with Canada and New Zealand. And so, up to this point, AUKUS would have been seen as an attempt to shore up an Anglo-Saxon grouping in the Indo-Pacific, attracting dismissive commentary from Beijing and mild speculation about how AUKUS would engage with Quad. However, it is the abrupt cancelling of the submarine deal that has shocked and angered France.

There was no denying a sense of wariness in New Delhi. It did not help that AUKUS took the focus away from the Quad. The agreement suggested preferential treatment on the part of Washington for a close Anglo-alliance partner. That led some in Delhi to wonder why the U.S. should make an allowance for one Quad partner and not another.
The Indian Navy’s indigenous SSN programme requires a nuclear reactor more powerful than the one installed in the Arihant (a non war-fighting platform). Some in India were hopeful that the U.S. would consider providing the Indian Navy with nuclear submarine propulsion technology.

New Delhi must seize the opportunity to push France to transfer its nuclear propulsion technology. Despite the less than satisfactory experience with the Project 75 ‘Scorpene’ class submarine programme, India, some say, should accept French assistance with building an SSN reactor.

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