Mecca Pact: Face-saver or game-changer?

TURKEY - In Brief 10 Aug 2026 by Atilla Yesilada

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First, my apologies for posting this Market Brief at this Godawful hour, but my humble dwelling in Istanbul turned into a mini-heat sink frying my brains during the day. The heat wave is a nice segway to jump to the Holy City of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, which is also suffering from it and has recently lent its sacred name to a three-partite mutual defense pact between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey. While few except so-called experts care about the Pact at home, my humble Google search leads me to believe it is the most frequently debated topic in the region after the Hurmuz-cum Bab al Mandep conflict. I will argue that at this very early stage, the Pact is largely symbolic, meaning that it lacks the joint military operational capacity and the diplomatic coherence to check future regional conflicts. However, under the two critical assumptions I make next, it has the potential to evolve into a game changer. These assumptions are: Regardless of how the Hurmuz Conflict ends, Iran and Israel are not only mortal enemies, but also hugely disruptive actors vying for regional supremacy at the expense of other states.The US policy establishment wishes to reduce its involvement in the Middle East as soon as possible to better focus on its competition with China in the Asia-Pacific theatre. In other words, years of bloody instability wait in store for the states of the Middle East, which necessitates a home-spun security architecture and a new and effective forum hopefully involving Iran and Israel as well, to arbitrage disputes before they evolve into wars. So, at this point, the Pact is largely symbolic, but symbols do matter in geo-politics. For Pakistan, the Pact is a means to...