Three Alliances, One Winner: Erdoğan
Three Alliances, One Winner: Erdoğan
The real winner of the Mecca defense pact may not be Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. It may be Turkey — the only country with a seat in the new regional architecture and in NATO at the same time.
A month ago, the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement could still be dismissed as one of those Middle Eastern declarations destined to look more impressive in a photograph than on a battlefield.
That argument is becoming harder to make.
On August 31, the foreign and defense ministers and military chiefs of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan met in Istanbul for the first committee meeting created by the agreement. They decided to establish a permanent secretariat in Saudi Arabia, initially headed for three years by a Pakistani secretary-general, and committed themselves to increasing the cohesion and collective-defense capabilities of their armed forces.
This still does not make the Mecca pact a Muslim NATO. We do not know how its mutual-defense provision would work when confronted with an actual war. We do not know what each member would be obliged to contribute. And the full treaty has still not given us answers to many of the questions that matter most.
But we do know something we did not know on August 7: the pact is not simply being put into a drawer.
And that leads to a different question.
Not: Is the pact directed against Israel?
Not even: Is it directed against Iran?
The more interesting question may be: Who gains the most from its existence?
My answer is Turkey.
Saudi Arabia brings money, energy and the custodianship of Islam’s holiest places. Pakistan brings one of the Muslim world’s largest armed forces and, uniquely, nuclear weapons. Turkey brings something neither of them possesses: a powerful defense industry, a large and experienced military, a strategic position between Europe and the Middle East — and membership in NATO.
That last element changes everything.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has described the Mecca agreement’s collective-defense provision as technically comparable to NATO’s Article 5: an attack against one is considered an attack against all. At the same time, Ankara insists that the new agreement neither replaces nor contradicts Turkey’s existing alliances.
Legally, that distinction matters. Article 8 of the North Atlantic Treaty explicitly requires members not to enter into international commitments that conflict with their NATO obligations.
Politically, however, things can become considerably messier.
Imagine Iran attacks Saudi Arabia. Turkey responds under the Mecca agreement. Iran then retaliates against Turkish territory.
The other NATO members would suddenly be confronted with a question they never agreed to answer when Saudi Arabia signed a treaty in Mecca: how far does NATO protection extend when a member has entered a conflict because of obligations assumed in another defense system?
Article 5 does not simply press a button and automatically send every NATO army to war. Each ally determines the action it considers necessary, and the treaty contains geographical limits. But an attack on Turkish territory is precisely the kind of event that could bring the issue before the North Atlantic Council.
For Erdoğan, that ambiguity is not necessarily a weakness.
It can be leverage.
Turkey can tell Riyadh and Islamabad: We bring something nobody else in this pact can bring — a bridge into NATO.
And it can tell Washington, Brussels and European capitals: If you want to understand or influence the emerging security architecture of the Muslim Middle East, you cannot ignore Ankara.
That is an enviable position for a middle power.
And Erdoğan appears to understand perfectly well how to use overlapping relationships rather than exclusive alliances.
Just days after the first Mecca pact committee met, he returned from a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit and said Turkey could consider eventually becoming a full member of the China- and Russia-led organization.
Then came the crucial sentence: such membership, Erdoğan said, would not mean Turkey was breaking with the West or any other bloc.
That sentence may tell us more about contemporary Turkish foreign policy than a hundred diplomatic communiqués.
Erdoğan does not necessarily want to choose.
He wants everyone else to have to deal with the fact that Turkey does not choose.
NATO in the West. Mecca in the Middle East. Shanghai farther east.
Three alliances. One country trying to remain indispensable to all of them.
This is not neutrality. Nor is it the old Cold War idea of non-alignment. It is something more transactional: strategic autonomy through simultaneous participation.
The better Turkey becomes at making itself useful to competing systems, the more expensive it becomes to exclude it from any of them.
For Israel, this distinction matters.
The temptation is to look at the Mecca pact and see an emerging anti-Israel military coalition. That fear is understandable. Pakistan does not recognize Israel, and Ankara has for years produced openly hostile rhetoric toward the Jewish state.
But there is still no convincing evidence that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan are preparing a joint war plan against Israel.
The longer-term challenge may be subtler — and therefore more important.
For decades, the United States attempted to build a Middle Eastern security architecture in which Washington was the ultimate guarantor and Israel increasingly became part of a regional network of security, intelligence, technology and economic cooperation.
The Abraham Accords represented one expression of that vision.
The Mecca pact does not destroy the Abraham Accords. The UAE, Bahrain and Morocco do not suddenly cease to have relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia was never a signatory in the first place.
But it creates something that did not exist before: an alternative mechanism through which Saudi Arabia can strengthen its security without first normalizing relations with Israel.
That does not make normalization impossible. It changes Riyadh’s bargaining position.
Riyadh can now negotiate in a world in which it has additional options.
That matters.
And again, Turkey stands in the middle.
Saudi Arabia can supply capital. Pakistan can supply military depth. But Turkey can supply technology, drones, electronic warfare, air-defense expertise, naval capability, industrial production and access to Western military standards accumulated through more than seven decades inside NATO.
The first committee meeting in Istanbul specifically discussed interoperability, defense-industrial cooperation and joint production and development.
That is where the pact could become more consequential than its dramatic ‘attack on one is an attack on all’ sentence.
Treaties are tested only occasionally by war.
Weapons factories, exercises, command structures, communications systems and common military standards create relationships every day.
If Saudi money increasingly finances Turkish-designed systems, if Pakistani and Turkish forces train together, if Saudi air defense becomes integrated with technology and doctrine produced in Ankara and Islamabad, the alliance acquires substance even without a single soldier ever invoking mutual defense.
And Erdoğan gains influence without firing a shot.
This may actually be his best possible scenario.
A Mecca pact strong enough to matter, but never forced into a major war.
A NATO that distrusts Turkey from time to time, but cannot afford to lose it.
A relationship with Russia and China close enough to give Ankara alternatives, but not close enough to eliminate Turkey’s value to the West.
And a Middle East in which Saudi Arabia increasingly needs Turkish military capability while Turkey increasingly needs Saudi capital.
That is not a contradiction in Erdoğan’s foreign policy.
It may be the policy.
There remains one enormous unknown: whether the Mecca pact survives its first real test.
The Middle East has produced many impressive defense agreements that disappeared the moment national interests diverged. Saudi Arabia worries primarily about Iran and the security of the Gulf. Pakistan can never escape the gravitational pull of India. Turkey has its own disputes and ambitions stretching from Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean to the Caucasus.
Those interests overlap. They are not identical.
But perhaps we should stop asking whether the Mecca agreement will become another NATO.
It does not have to.
For Turkey, simply existing between alliances may be enough.
Because in the emerging Middle East, Erdoğan may have discovered something more useful than choosing the winning side: making every side believe it needs Turkey.
Dani Scherman