The Coming Sunni Encirclement

While Trump vacillates between total war and détente with Iran, Turkey has moved quickly to fill the regional vacuum. Last week, Hakan Fidan announced the Mecca Agreement, a defensive pact between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The pact was nearly three years in the making and its signatories insist that it is defensive and directed at no particular state. Yet agreements do not exist only in the intentions of those who negotiate them. Within a day of its announcement, Pakistan’s defense minister was already calling Israel a threat to the entire Muslim world and urging a united military front against it. Whatever the agreement ultimately becomes, its strategic meaning for Israel is already taking shape. It reflects a region responding to the Israel that emerged after October 7, a state that can no longer be isolated at will, and to an American order whose regional allies are increasingly hedging against Washington itself.

The question for Israel and the United States is no longer whether a new alignment is forming. It is what they intend to do about it.

Turkey has made its direction unmistakable. Erdogan and Fidan speak with growing hostility toward Israel. Ankara hosts Hamas leaders, challenges Israeli sovereignty through its Jerusalem presence, backs flotillas to Gaza and builds military power around its expansionist Blue Homeland doctrine. Turkey is no longer the Kemalist republic that entered NATO. It is a revanchist power led by a president who increasingly imagines Turkey through the historical memory of Ottoman ambition sold as stability. Its NATO membership rests on assumptions from another age, even as Ankara enters a defense pact with a nuclear power and speaks of a wider Sunni alignment.

Saudi Arabia now appears to be making its own choice. For years Riyadh balanced between Washington, normalization with Israel and the politics of the Muslim world. The Mecca Agreement suggests that, when forced to choose, the security of a Sunni bloc proved more attractive than the promise of regional integration.

That should end certain illusions in Washington and Jerusalem. Mohammed bin Salman may be a modernizer, but modernization is not the same thing as political transformation. Skyscrapers, capital markets and technology can coexist comfortably with older instincts of power and communal alignment. The emerging regional order may therefore be shaped less by commerce and coexistence than by competing civilizational and strategic blocs.

The consequences are immediate. The future of IMEC becomes more uncertain. Jordan also becomes more vulnerable to the gravitational pull of any consolidated Sunni alignment. But that question becomes truly consequential only if the bloc expands further. The immediate hinge is not Amman. It is Cairo.

Pakistan’s entrance into this equation is even more consequential. The moment Trump elevated Islamabad into his Iran diplomacy, Pakistan gained a new opening into Middle Eastern power politics. A country that had largely remained outside the central regional balance now offers Turkey and Saudi Arabia something neither possesses alone, nuclear weight.

That changes the strategic geometry.

The greatest unanswered question is Egypt. Al-Sisi has not joined the agreement, but Turkish statements suggest that the possibility is real. If Egypt enters, the character of the pact changes. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan constitute a worrying alignment. Add Egypt and the bloc acquires a different strategic weight altogether, combining Turkish and Egyptian military mass, Saudi capital, Pakistani nuclear weight and geography stretching across the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea. What is now an ominous alignment would begin to resemble a direct strategic challenge to Israel.

That makes Egypt the hinge. And because Cairo has not yet joined, Israel still has something it may not possess for long. Time.

Israel should not wait for that alignment to harden.

Its first move should be Washington. Israel must force a serious American discussion about what this bloc means for IMEC, freedom of navigation and the future balance of power in the Eastern Mediterranean. The United States should be pressed to make clear that Turkish or Egyptian coercion against maritime trade will carry diplomatic and strategic consequences.

The second arena is Libya. The window for disrupting Turkish rapprochement with Egypt is closing, but it is not closed. Israel should reinforce Egyptian leverage in eastern Libya and prevent Ankara from turning its growing relationship with the Haftar camp into strategic dominance across both sides of the Libyan divide. The purpose should not be to acquire a Libyan client. It should be to restore friction between Cairo and Ankara where their interests naturally diverge.

That is what strategy is supposed to do. It creates choices for the other side.

Pakistan’s rise also gives the Israel India relationship new urgency. Israel will face growing pressure on its trade routes and maritime position. It therefore needs a much larger navy, and it should build one through a strategic industrial framework involving India, South Korea and the United States. Joint shipbuilding, procurement and export should turn naval expansion from a budgetary burden into an industrial project.

Israel does not merely need more ships. It needs an ecosystem of maritime power.

That should sit near the center of Israel’s response. Turkey and Pakistan bring expanding military industries. Saudi Arabia brings capital. Egypt would add serious strategic geography and naval weight. Israel cannot answer such a development with diplomacy alone. It needs industrial depth, maritime reach and the capacity to protect its trade routes beyond its immediate coastline.

The larger principle is simple. Israel must think bigger, speak more quietly and build a much bigger stick.

It should make clear the limits it will tolerate in any Turkish Egyptian alignment in the Eastern Mediterranean. It should force Europe and the United States to decide what kind of Eastern Mediterranean order they actually support. The IDF has little option but to build a genuine blue water navy able to secure Israeli trade and complicate hostile planning. And it should search the map for relationships that impose costs on its adversaries.

Israel should deepen the emerging maritime axis with Greece and Cyprus while widening the board through less obvious relationships such as Bulgaria. Bulgaria’s position on Turkey’s northern frontier makes deeper intelligence, defense and technological cooperation strategically useful. Sofia need not become a frontline partner for the relationship to matter. The point is simply to widen the board and remind Ankara that pressure applied in one theater can generate consequences in another.

Israel must now play the entire board.

But Israel should not answer a Sunni alignment by trying to manufacture an opposing bloc of its own. Its advantage lies elsewhere. It should build a geometry of overlapping interests so dense that no hostile coalition can consolidate against it without generating resistance somewhere else. Greece and Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean, India in the east, Europe and Bulgaria to Turkey’s north, Egypt and Libya to its south, American maritime power, and Israeli, Indian and South Korean industrial capacity should not be treated as disconnected relationships. Together they can form a system of counterweights.

The Mecca Agreement is not yet an encirclement that will replace the Iranian octopus. But Israel has learned before what happens when hostile architecture is allowed to mature undisturbed.

The time to break a ring is before it closes.