When Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement on August 7, 2026, its central promise sounded formidable: an armed attack against one member would be regarded as an attack against all three. The Saudi government described the agreement as a mechanism for strengthening “collective deterrence,” while Turkish officials compared its basic concept to NATO’s Article 5. (
My Government)
Barely a month later, however, the renewed Saudi-Houthi confrontation has exposed a fundamental problem. An alliance intended to deter adversaries ultimately depends less on the capabilities its members possess than on whether potential opponents believe those capabilities will actually be employed on one another’s behalf.
So far, the Mecca Pact has struggled to establish that credibility.
An Alliance Without a Clearly Defined Enemy
One of the pact’s greatest weaknesses was embedded in its construction. Unlike NATO during the Cold War, the Mecca agreement did not identify a specific common adversary. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan explicitly stated that Iran—or any other state—had not been designated as a common threat. He also explained that assistance was not necessarily automatic: the attacked member would request help and specify what form of assistance it wanted. (
Al Jazeera)
That flexibility is diplomatically useful. Militarily, however, ambiguity can weaken deterrence.
Pakistan, Türkiye and Saudi Arabia do not necessarily perceive threats in identical ways. Islamabad’s principal conventional security concern remains its rivalry with India. Türkiye’s major strategic disputes include Israel and Greece, as well as security problems surrounding Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean. Saudi Arabia’s most immediate concerns are concentrated around the Gulf, Iran, Yemen and the security of its energy infrastructure and maritime approaches.
An agreement binding three militarily capable states together therefore does not automatically produce a unified strategic bloc. Without an agreed adversary, agreed thresholds for intervention, detailed rules of engagement and clearly demonstrated mechanisms for collective military action, the pact risks becoming three overlapping security relationships rather than a genuine integrated alliance.
That distinction matters enormously to deterrence.
Yemen Has Become the Pact’s First Credibility Test
Ansar Allah has provided exactly the sort of test that could demonstrate whether the Mecca Pact represents an operational military alliance or primarily a political commitment.
The Houthis have attacked Saudi territory and energy infrastructure while simultaneously expanding their position along Yemen’s Red Sea coast. Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif publicly stated that unprovoked aggression against Saudi Arabia could make the Mecca agreement operational. Yet Pakistan’s government subsequently said that no Pakistani military response had been discussed under the pact. (
Al Jazeera)
Pakistan has instead emphasized diplomacy, including communicating with Iran in an effort to restrain the Houthis. Its Foreign Ministry has reiterated its commitment to Saudi security while simultaneously stressing dialogue and regional stability. (
Ministry of Foreign Affairs Pakistan)
There is an important qualification here: Riyadh has apparently not formally invoked the agreement and demanded that Pakistani and Turkish forces enter Yemen. That means it would be inaccurate to say that either country has technically violated the pact. The agreement itself remains young, and its operational structures are still developing. (
Al Jazeera)
But deterrence is not merely a legal question.
An adversary watching events does not need to determine whether Article X, paragraph Y has technically been activated. It asks a simpler question: If I attack one of these countries, how likely is it that I will find myself fighting all three?
The Yemen crisis has not yet produced a convincing answer.
The 2015 Precedent Never Really Disappeared
Pakistan’s reluctance to become directly involved in Yemen also has deep precedent.
When Saudi Arabia sought Pakistani military participation against the Houthis in 2015, Pakistan’s parliament unanimously called for neutrality rather than committing troops, aircraft and ships to the Saudi-led campaign. (
Al Jazeera)
That history matters because the Mecca Pact was supposed to transform longstanding Saudi-Pakistani and Saudi-Turkish relationships into something institutionally stronger.
Yet Yemen demonstrates that national interests remain capable of overriding alliance symbolism.
Pakistan may be willing to defend Saudi territory without wanting Pakistani forces fighting an open-ended war inside Yemen. Türkiye likewise has little incentive to inherit the enormous political and military costs associated with another Yemeni intervention.
Those positions may be entirely rational from Islamabad’s and Ankara’s perspectives. But rational restraint and credible collective deterrence are not necessarily the same thing.
Saudi Arabia Cannot Simply Purchase an Alliance
There is also a deeper historical problem with Saudi expectations about coalition warfare.
For decades, Saudi Arabia’s enormous financial resources have allowed it to acquire sophisticated weapons, finance partner governments and obtain foreign military manpower. During the earlier Yemen intervention, however, Saudi Arabia and the UAE discovered that money could not automatically generate capable and politically committed ground forces.
Research by Germany’s SWP notes that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi initially hoped countries including Pakistan and Egypt would provide significant forces. When that did not materialize, Saudi Arabia and the UAE increasingly relied on foreign manpower. Sudan and Senegal supplied personnel for compensation, while the UAE employed a mercenary force containing substantial numbers of Latin American veterans. (
Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP)) Brookings similarly documented Saudi recruitment of thousands of Sudanese troops and Emirati employment of Colombian mercenaries during the Yemen war. (
Brookings)
The distinction is important: much of the best-documented Latin American mercenary recruitment was Emirati rather than directly Saudi. Nevertheless, the broader Saudi-led coalition repeatedly relied upon externally supplied manpower.
The Mecca Pact cannot operate on the same principle.
Pakistan and Türkiye are sovereign regional powers with their own strategic interests, domestic politics and military doctrines. Saudi financing may facilitate arms purchases, joint exercises, basing arrangements and defense-industrial cooperation. It cannot transform Pakistani or Turkish soldiers into forces that Riyadh can automatically deploy whenever Saudi interests require them.
An alliance is not a military labor contract.
The Turn Back Toward Washington—and Reportedly Israel
Perhaps the most damaging development for the pact’s image is where Riyadh has looked as the situation deteriorated.
Reuters reported that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sought U.S. military support as the Houthis expanded along Yemen’s Red Sea coastline. Washington declined direct involvement. (
Reuters)
There have also been reports that Saudi Arabia sought Israeli intelligence assistance against Ansar Allah, although this element should be treated more cautiously because the reporting is less firmly established than the Saudi request to Washington. India Today reported that Riyadh had approached Israel after Pakistan ruled out deploying forces to fight inside Yemen, with potential Israeli assistance focused primarily on intelligence. (
India Today)
If confirmed more authoritatively, the symbolism would be extraordinary.
A Saudi-led defense architecture involving two of the Muslim world’s strongest militaries would have encountered its first serious regional crisis only for Riyadh to seek assistance from the United States and potentially Israel.
That does not demonstrate that the Mecca Pact is militarily worthless. Pakistan and Türkiye possess formidable conventional capabilities, and Pakistan adds an additional strategic dimension as a nuclear-armed state. It does, however, raise a much more important question: under what circumstances are those capabilities actually available to another member?
Until potential adversaries know the answer, aggregate military strength on paper provides limited deterrence.
What India, Israel and Greece Are Likely to Notice
This problem extends well beyond Yemen.
The pact theoretically complicates strategic calculations for countries involved in disputes with its members. India must consider Pakistan; Greece has longstanding disputes with Türkiye; and Türkiye and Israel have increasingly serious strategic disagreements.
But none of those states needs to conclude that confronting one Mecca Pact member automatically means confronting all three.
Indeed, Yemen currently suggests the opposite lesson: the political context of an attack may matter more than the collective-defense language itself.
India could reasonably ask whether Türkiye or Saudi Arabia would actually enter a major Indo-Pakistani war rather than provide Pakistan with diplomatic, financial, intelligence or logistical assistance.
Greece could ask whether Pakistan and Saudi Arabia would genuinely fight a NATO member alongside Türkiye over an Eastern Mediterranean confrontation.
Israel could similarly ask whether a Turkish-Israeli confrontation would cause Pakistani military intervention or whether Islamabad would limit itself to diplomatic and material support.
These questions do not prove how any member would behave in those scenarios. They demonstrate why deterrence requires more than an agreement.
An alliance becomes credible when an opponent believes escalation against one member creates an unacceptable probability of confrontation with the others.
Yemen has so far demonstrated ambiguity rather than inevitability.
The Paradox of Strategic Ambiguity
The architects of the Mecca Pact may have deliberately avoided identifying a common enemy because doing so made the agreement politically easier to construct.
Pakistan does not want the alliance explicitly directed against Iran. Türkiye likewise stated publicly that Iran was not the pact’s target. Saudi Arabia benefits from avoiding an arrangement that permanently commits it to Pakistan against India or Türkiye against Israel and Greece.
That diplomatic flexibility helped create the alliance.
It may simultaneously undermine its deterrent effect.
The members effectively gained freedom of action by refusing to define their common adversaries—but potential adversaries gained uncertainty about whether the alliance would respond at all.
This is the central contradiction of the Mecca Pact.
The broader its theoretical security guarantee becomes, the more politically difficult fulfilling that guarantee may become.
From “Islamic NATO” to Coalition of Convenience?
The Mecca agreement should therefore not yet be dismissed as meaningless. It could evolve into something considerably more serious. Joint command structures, exercises, integrated air and missile defense, intelligence sharing, common contingency planning and clearly defined intervention mechanisms could gradually transform political declarations into military credibility.
But alliances establish deterrence through demonstrated behavior.
The first major crisis since the agreement’s creation has instead shown Pakistan emphasizing diplomacy, Türkiye avoiding direct intervention, and Saudi Arabia continuing to look beyond the alliance for outside assistance. Even the Council on Foreign Relations noted that Houthi attacks began testing the agreement almost immediately after its signing and questioned whether Riyadh believed Pakistan and Türkiye were actually prepared to enter the Arabian Peninsula conflict. (
Council on Foreign Relations)
That is why Yemen matters far beyond Yemen.
The Houthis are not India, Israel or Greece. They possess nowhere near the combined conventional military capabilities of those states. Yet Ansar Allah has already demonstrated how difficult it is to translate a collective-defense declaration into collective warfare.
Potential opponents of Pakistan and Türkiye will study that precedent carefully.
The lesson they may draw is not that Pakistan or Türkiye are militarily weak. Both possess substantial armed forces and significant indigenous defense industries. Nor is Saudi Arabia financially or technologically incapable of defending itself.
The weakness lies elsewhere.
Military power that allies are unwilling to employ collectively does not automatically become collective power.
Until the Mecca Pact establishes precisely what constitutes aggression, what assistance members are obligated to provide, and—most importantly—demonstrates that those commitments will actually be honored during a serious crisis, its impressive language will remain ahead of its demonstrated capability.
For the moment, Yemen has exposed that gap.
And in deterrence, the gap between what an alliance promises and what its adversaries believe it will actually do is precisely where a “paper tiger” is born.
bill.
