The world has got an almost clear message from Makkah (Saudi Arabia)that the Arab world is in the grip of a serious kind of fearpsychosis. Gone are the days when affluent Arab countries thought thatthe US protective shield was enough for them to live a life ofsecurity with virtually no threat to their local and regionalinterests.This situation had come about after the demise of the USSRas a super power.
Now the Arabs, it seems, strongly believe that under the prevailingcircumstances, they must find a new system to ensure their survivaland the security of their natural and other resources. This meanstheir failure to become wiser after what happened in the wake of theAmerican-Israeli joint attack on Iran, besides certain previousdevelopments, may throw them into a quagmire from where it would bedifficult to come out unscathed.
The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, reached among Saudi Arabia, Turkiyeand Pakistan on August 7, should be viewed against this backdrop. Thetrilateral pact has a clause modelled on the lines of the NorthAtlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO’s) Article 5, which has it thatan attack on one member-country will be treated as an attack on all.But the response of the Makkah pact nations will depend on thecircumstances or the assistance request from the affected member asclarified by Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan. He has alsospecifically stated that the Iranian attacks on the US bases in ArabGulf countries should not be considered as the cause for the historicdefence agreement. However, world watchers are unlikely to take theclarification on its face value. As it is said, “Nahin, nahinkarnabhihaan ka pratiroophai” (Expressing ‘no, no’ is also a way ofsaying in a subtle manner, ‘yes, yes’).
Of course, the Makkah development can also be interpreted to mean thatSaudi Arabia and its camp followers in the region like the UAE andQatar wanted to have a deterrent to prevent Israel from behaving in amanner it did in the case of Iran. But this line of thinking does notappear to be as convincing as is the case with Iran in view of themassive US defence presence in the Arab world which is unlikely tobecome a thing of the past, at least in the foreseeable future. Israelmay attempt to disturb the status quo in the regional states where theUS has no military bases like Lebanon and Syria. It has already beentargeting these countries, but Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and othershave been accepting it as a given.
The NATO-type military alliance among Saudi Arabia, TurkiyeandPakistan has a history of its own. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan enteredinto such an arrangement last year (2025) with a view to creating afeeling in Riyadh that it too had access to the ultimate weapon (thenuclear bomb) to work as a deterrent. The Riyadh-Islamabad pact too
had the NATO-type arrangement that an attack on any of the twocountries would be treated as an aggression against both.
The idea to include Turkiye might have been born out of the fact thatAnkara is the world’s leading arms and ammunition manufacturer,excelling in the military drone technology. The world has seen in theRussia-Ukraine war and the US-Israel attack on Iran that the extensiveuse of drones plus missiles proved to be a major factor to defendone’s interests effectively.
Saudi Arabia has been in search of nuclear weapon technology for along time, though unsuccessfully. There have been reports in the pastreferring to the Saudi viewpoint that it must be allowed to go in forthe ultimate weapon technology owing to the fact that Iran was set tobecome a nuclear weapon-state despite claiming that its uranium
enrichment facilities were meant for peaceful purposes only. This hasbeen one of the reasons why the US and the European Union have doneall they could to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, citingTeheran’s status as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty(NPT). That Israel was already a nuclear-weapon state (though
undeclared) was nobody’s concern.
The July 22, 2026, US-Saudi Arabia nuclear agreement for peacefulpurposes was aimed at allaying Riyadh’s concern, but it was tied tothe condition that the Saudis must agree to accept the 2020 AbrahamAccords primarily aimed at benefiting Israel. The Saudis obviouslythought that the civilian nuclear accord with the US was meaninglessbecause of this conditionality and hence the idea to expand theRiyadh-Islamabad defence agreement by including Ankara. There areindications that Egypt, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, etc. may also be madepart of it in the near future.
It would be interesting to mention here the setting up of the SaudiArabia-led 39-nation Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism(IMAFT) with its headquarters in Riyadh (also called the IslamicMilitary Counter-Terrorism Coalition). As announced on December 15,2015, by a Saudi minister, it was intended to function as an Islamicarmy.
Saudi Arabia wanted Pakistan’s Gen Raheel Sharif (retd) to head themultinational army, but rules prevented him from accepting the offeras by that time he had not completed two years after retirement. Whatultimately happened in this regard is not known. It also cannot besaid with certainty if the military alliance remains intact today.Only the future will tell us how effective the NATO-style SaudiArabia-led defence pact will ultimately prove to be.
[The writer, a former Dy Editor of The Tribune, is a Delhi-basedpolitical commentator.]