The Region’s Middle Powers’ Quest for a New Security Order

Earlier this month, three leaders stood together in Islam's holiest city and signed a document that became a headline. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, sealed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, commits each state to treat an attack on any one of them as an attack on all three. It would not be wrong to assume to look at this agreement as the harbinger of the erosion of American influence in the West Asian region. Even if that assumption is too simple, and probably too flattering to Washington's own sense of its centrality, more accurate story is not one of American absence but of regional presence, three states with very different geographies and very different threats concluding, independently, that their security is best served by holding several cards at once rather than one. That is the real significance of the Mecca Agreement, not a single power's decline, but a broader and increasingly normal pattern in world politics where mid-sized and regional powers building sources of security rather than betting everything on one patron. The United States may remain present, armed and invested in the region, however, its recent war against Iran has proven it to be futile for the security of the gulf states. What has changed is that its presence is no longer treated as sufficient on its own. Therefore, the Mecca Agreement, signed by the region’s middle powers gives us a glimpse of an emerging new order especially in the post US-Iran war era.

Three states, three different calculations

Saudi Arabia's motives are the most comprehensible. The kingdom has absorbed repeated missile and drone attacks from Iran and its allies since the start of the US-Iran war earlier this year, and its oil exports and development ambitions such as Vision 2030 have been thrown into doubt. Riyadh has not abandoned its relationship with Washington, it is still pursuing a civil nuclear cooperation deal and remains one of the largest buyers of American weaponry in the world. What it has done is conclude that a single security relationship, however close, is not the same thing as an ironclad guarantee, and that the cost of over-relying on any one partner is a vulnerability in itself especially when that partner has its own different interests to pursue on the region and has failed to protect Kingdom’s interests in the region.

Turkey's calculation, however, are different, and predates the current war by years. Ankara has spent this period asserting an increasingly independent foreign policy across Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus, and its rivalry with a Greece–Cyprus–Israel security axis sits awkwardly alongside its own NATO membership, which offers it little leverage over that specific dynamic. Turkey is not stepping outside its Western alliance so much as building capacity alongside it, rather it is hedging that lets Ankara act with more room to manoeuvre in a neighbourhood where its NATO partners do not always share its priorities.

Pakistan's reasoning is the least connected to the United States of the three. Islamabad has never relied on a single patron; its central strategic preoccupation remains India, not the Gulf or Washington. Its long, quiet defence relationship with Riyadh, formalised further just last September, made this agreement a natural extension of ties it already had, offering Pakistan a wider strategic space to manage a crowded threat environment that includes India, Afghanistan and its own economic fragility, and of course, offers it a greater diplomatic reach that transcends South Asian region.

Apparently, none of the three signed this agreement to fight a common enemy, and none of them frames it as a rupture with existing alliances. What unites them is a shared judgement that region’s stakeholders should try to create security atmosphere for the region’a stability thereby having a security order where dependence on the external actors diminishes in a region where threats are diffuse and fast-moving.
 

Hedging, not realignment

As aforementioned, it would be a mistake to read the Mecca Agreement as the three states quitting their existing partners. Turkey remains in NATO. Saudi Arabia still courts American investment and defence cooperation. Pakistan continues to balance relationships with the United States, China and the Gulf simultaneously. What the agreement represents is diversification rather than divorce — and diversification is a strategy that middle powers everywhere have leaned into in recent years, from the Gulf states courting both Washington and Beijing, to India balancing Russia, the US and its own regional interests. Seen in that light, the agreement is less an anomaly than an example of a wider trend, no single power, American or otherwise, commands the automatic deference it once did, and states are responding by keeping multiple options open rather than picking a single side.

In the same way, the symbolism reinforces the substance. As the agreement has been given a religious colour, choosing Mecca as the venue was not incidental. It ties a hard-nosed security arrangement to the religious and cultural unity available to any of the three states, which they believe would give the agreement a legitimacy and a constituency, and would also be serve as something for the domestic consumption.
 

What comes after the war

If the current war eventually burns itself out, the region it leaves behind will not simply revert to what came before. A few shifts look likely, though none of them are foregone conclusions.

One is more hedging, not less. Other states will have watched Saudi Arabia absorb direct attacks and will draw a fairly universal lesson in international relation that having a diversified security gurantees serve a state better than a single dependency, no matter how powerful that patron is. Regional officials have already suggested the agreement could expand, and Egypt's participation in a quadrilateral meeting alongside the three original signatories in March points toward that kind of widening. Whether that produces a genuinely inclusive architecture or a narrower club will be seen in the future.

A second shift concerns capacity rather than allegiance. Turkey's drone and missile production, Pakistan's military-industrial experience, and Saudi capital form a combination that could, over time, reshape arms markets well beyond the Muslim world. This is not primarily about displacing any single foreign supplier; it is about three states building the kind of self-sufficiency that reduces their exposure to any external supplier's decisions, American, European or otherwise.

Similarly, open question is Iran. Officially, none of the signatories describe the agreement as anti-Iranian, and Tehran has even welcomed the broader idea of a regional security system built without external powers, including the United States. But the agreement was born in a war in which Iran and its allies were striking Saudi Arabia directly, and analysts have noted that the three states are not unified in how they deal with Tehran. Whether the agreement evolves into a genuinely inclusive regional security framework or hardens into a bloc arrayed against Iran depends whether the post-war Middle East is more stable, or simply more divided along new lines.



For more...