The Makkah Agreement Is Reshaping Iran’s Strategic Flanks

 

Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye form a new collective-defence framework, forcing Iran to reconsider how separate regional military relationships could develop into a coordinated security structure.

The new Makkah defence pact does not yet create a regional NATO, but it forces Tehran to calculate risks it once considered separately.

I still remember the sound of telex machines in a Karachi banking office during the Iran-Iraq War. In 1986, I sat in a dim back office near I.I. Chundrigar Road and watched international payments slow as the war spilled into Gulf shipping. Tankers were being attacked, while Kharg Island, the nerve centre of Iranian oil exports, repeatedly came under pressure. For a banker thousands of kilometres from the fighting, the Tanker War arrived through delayed instructions and nervous conversations about dollars.

That memory returned on August 7 when Saudi Arabia signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement with Pakistan and Türkiye. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stood with Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Shehbaz Sharif as their governments accepted a striking commitment: an armed attack against one member would be treated as an attack against all. The wording immediately invited comparisons with NATO's Article 5. The real test begins after the signatures dry.

A treaty can be signed in an afternoon. Building an alliance takes years because armies must learn to operate together, while governments must decide who will actually fight when a crisis arrives.

Iran has spent decades exploiting strategic fragmentation across its neighbourhood. Tehran rarely needed to match the conventional military strength of its rivals aircraft for aircraft or dollar for dollar. It developed asymmetric tools while cultivating armed partners across the region, pushing pressure outward without accepting the full political cost of direct confrontation.

Saudi Arabia presented a particularly useful strategic problem for Tehran. Riyadh possessed enormous financial resources and expensive military equipment, but Iranian planners could reasonably question how far Saudi Arabia would go in a direct confrontation without dependable military partners. Geography reinforced the uncertainty. Iran sat across the Persian Gulf with missiles and naval forces capable of threatening energy infrastructure. Drones gave Tehran a cheaper instrument for applying pressure without committing conventional forces to every confrontation.

The Makkah agreement does not erase those Iranian advantages.

It creates a different problem by connecting security relationships that Tehran previously had reason to calculate separately.

Pakistan brings a large conventional military and something impossible to ignore: it is a nuclear-armed state. The agreement does not establish an explicit Pakistani nuclear umbrella over Saudi Arabia or Türkiye, and treating it as one would go beyond the available evidence. Yet nuclear capability creates strategic ambiguity of its own. Iranian planners must consider what Pakistani participation could mean during a severe regional crisis without assuming that Islamabad's nuclear deterrent automatically extends to its partners.

Türkiye presents a different problem. It has NATO experience and a defence industry that has expanded rapidly, particularly in unmanned warfare. Turkish drones have accumulated combat experience in several theatres. Ankara also possesses electronic warfare capabilities and an industrial base capable of producing military systems at a scale that many regional states cannot match.

Saudi Arabia sits at the centre of the arrangement. Its contribution is not simply money. Riyadh gives the emerging structure a Gulf strategic centre, with its dependence on secure oil infrastructure making regional stability an immediate national interest.

None of these capabilities automatically produces an integrated alliance. Military integration requires institutions that the agreement has yet to demonstrate.

Analysis

NATO did not become formidable because somebody wrote Article 5 on a piece of paper. Its deterrent power emerged from decades of military integration, reinforced by command arrangements that can turn a political promise into preparations for war.

Makkah has not reached that stage.

I would therefore resist calling the agreement a Middle Eastern NATO. The label sounds dramatic but conceals the institutional question that matters most. Will the three capitals build the machinery required for genuine collective defence, including plans that officers can actually execute during a crisis?

Iran will study that machinery more carefully than the photographs from Makkah.

Tehran's regional strategy has long benefited from uncertainty about how its opponents would respond collectively. A confrontation with Saudi Arabia represented one calculation. Trouble along the Pakistani frontier raised a different set of military concerns, while relations with Türkiye developed through an uneasy mixture of competition and cooperation.

Makkah may now connect calculations that once occupied separate files on an Iranian planning desk.

The geography deserves precision. Türkiye borders Iran on the west, while Pakistan sits along Iran's eastern frontier. Saudi Arabia does not form Iran's southern land boundary because the Persian Gulf lies between them. Military geography extends beyond lines drawn on land maps when missiles and maritime routes determine vulnerability.

Calling the arrangement an encirclement goes too far. Dismissing its strategic implications would miss the change taking place underneath the diplomatic language.

The 2023 Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement makes the agreement more interesting. China helped restore diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tehran after years of hostility, lowering the immediate political temperature. Makkah now suggests that diplomatic accommodation did not eliminate Saudi Arabia's desire for stronger military insurance.

Riyadh appears to be separating diplomacy from deterrence.

Saudi leaders can maintain relations with Tehran while increasing the potential cost of coercion. Such an approach does not require Saudi Arabia to abandon the Beijing process. Governments regularly negotiate with rivals while military planners prepare for the possibility that diplomacy fails, an uncomfortable coexistence that international politics has accommodated for centuries.

Pakistan Has a Different Problem

Pakistan complicates the arrangement considerably. Islamabad shares a long border with Iran and has strong reasons to avoid becoming the eastern arm of an anti-Iranian military coalition. Its defence relationship with Saudi Arabia, however, reaches back decades. Makkah now places those interests inside a more explicit collective-security framework.

Pakistani social media noticed the tension almost immediately.

One Facebook discussion became particularly bitter. A widely circulated cartoon depicted Pakistani soldiers tied together beneath a banner reading "Foji for Sale Mandi." The message was crude but unmistakable: Saudi wealth was buying Pakistani military manpower.

Some commenters embraced the accusation and described the Pakistan Army as a "rental army." Another asked whether Pakistan itself would improve after this supposed "sale," exposing an economic resentment that sits beneath much of the mockery.

The opposing reaction was equally forceful. One commenter asked why American troops stationed abroad are associated with power while Pakistani troops serving overseas provoke accusations of mercenary service. Others interpreted the agreement through Muslim collective security, arguing that people demand Muslim unity when NATO states act together but ridicule cooperation when Muslim countries attempt something similar.

I find the disagreement more revealing than the insults surrounding it.

Pakistan's real test is not whether money accompanies military cooperation. Defence relationships routinely carry material interests. The harder question is whether Islamabad can convert military capability into greater strategic influence without accepting security obligations whose political costs eventually exceed their economic value.

The answer depends partly on something we still do not know.

What exactly has Pakistan promised to defend?

A collective-defence clause sounds straightforward until an actual crisis arrives. Would Pakistan respond if Saudi territory came under direct Iranian missile attack? Would the obligation still apply if a Saudi-Iranian confrontation began somewhere else before spreading to Saudi territory?

Such questions determine whether Pakistani soldiers could eventually enter a war that began beyond Pakistan's borders. The wording of the treaty matters, but the political decisions made during a crisis will matter far more.

Türkiye's Balancing Act

Türkiye faces its own constraints. Ankara competes with Tehran for regional influence but also maintains economic and diplomatic relations with Iran. Turkish policymakers have spent years preserving room to manoeuvre between competing regional powers.

A collective-defence agreement will test how much of that flexibility Ankara intends to keep.

Iran, meanwhile, has suffered serious setbacks across parts of its regional network. Some partners have lost military strength, while assumptions that once appeared durable have been overturned by events on the battlefield. Yet Tehran retains enough capability to impose serious costs if another regional confrontation develops.

The deeper change lies in Iran's strategic environment.

For decades, Tehran could exploit divisions among neighbouring powers and calculate their responses largely through separate relationships. Makkah introduces a possibility Iran cannot dismiss so easily: a crisis involving one state could begin drawing military responses from another.

Joint exercises would give that possibility substance. Operational coordination would take it much further because Iranian planners could no longer assume that a bilateral confrontation would remain bilateral.

Without such machinery, Makkah could remain an impressive political declaration.

The Institutional Test

The agreement should therefore be judged by what the governments build beneath its language. I will watch the military machinery, not the summit photographs.

Do Pakistani and Turkish officers begin planning jointly with Saudi commanders? A few ceremonial exercises would prove little. The important evidence would be realistic collective-defence training designed around a crisis in which one signatory expects military assistance from the others.

An even harder test concerns command.

Can a political decision taken in one capital produce coordinated military action across the partnership? If officers have no established procedures for doing that under pressure, the collective-defence clause remains stronger on paper than it would be on a battlefield.

The answer will tell us whether Iran faces a new regional security architecture.

It will also illuminate the argument raging inside Pakistan. A military relationship that gives Islamabad influence over regional security decisions looks very different from one in which Pakistani manpower simply fills somebody else's strategic requirements. Ceremonies can hide that distinction for years; a serious crisis could expose it within hours.

I remember how quickly such distant events once reached my banking desk in Karachi. Markets cared little about speeches during the Tanker War. A burning tanker near the Strait of Hormuz could alter insurance calculations and payment decisions thousands of kilometres away before politicians finished explaining what had happened.

Yesterday afternoon, I walked near Karachi's harbour and watched container ships ride low in the murky Arabian Sea. The smell of fuel hung in the damp air. Forty years ago, Gulf insecurity travelled from those distant waters into our banking system through delayed payments and nervous telex messages.

The signatures in Makkah may eventually travel just as far.

For now, the agreement leaves me with an uncomfortable question. Has Pakistan bought itself a seat at a new regional security table, or will the first serious crisis reveal that Islamabad supplied the soldiers without acquiring equal control over the decisions that send them into danger?