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Every alliance contains a struggle over who gets to decide what the alliance is for. The unusual thing about the Mecca Alliance, formally known as the “Mecca Joint Defence Agreement,” is that all three of its members appear to believe they possess something that should give them that privilege: Saudi Arabia has the capital, Turkey has the defense industrial base, and Pakistan has the manpower and nuclear arsenal. Each can therefore imagine itself as the patron and the other two as clients. None of them, however, holds enough leverage to make that hierarchy stick.
That unresolved competition for patronage may prove to be the alliance’s defining feature. Its members have capabilities that are highly complementary but difficult to substitute for one another, leaving them mutually dependent without producing a clear leader. The alliance may be able to finance weapons, build systems, train forces, and improve interoperability, while leaving its members unable to agree on which conflicts warrant a collective military response.
As such, the Mecca Alliance should be treated as a flexible arrangement in which members cooperate where their interests overlap while retaining the ability to stay out of one another’s wars, rather than some sort of Middle Eastern NATO. Egypt, my own country, is the clearest test of whether this alliance can expand without resolving its underlying problem of authority. Cairo may be willing to cooperate, but its longstanding reluctance to place Egyptian forces under another state’s direction suggests that accession would add another claimant who ought to be the patron.
The “all-patrons, all-clients paradox” — a concept I introduce here — becomes apparent when alliance members’ different capabilities stop reinforcing a single patron’s ability to set the alliance’s goals and instead give each member a basis for claiming patronage and seeking to determine how the alliance should proceed.
The first patron, Saudi Arabia, has the capability to finance more than equipment. Its discretion to adjust the alliance’s financial allocations can exert pressure and provide indirect incentives to other members, as well as determine which capabilities become available, which joint projects expand, and which deployments can be sustained. This leverage is already visible with Pakistan. After the signing of a 2025 bilateral defense pact, Saudi Arabia reportedly conditioned major investments on Pakistani economic reforms. In April 2026, Riyadh withdrew financing for a $1.5 billion Sudan arms deal, prompting Islamabad to freeze the agreement and seek its termination.
The second patron is Turkey, which possesses significant military capabilities resulting from its industrial boom, exemplified by the Bayraktar drones and its ongoing projects to produce fifth-generation fighter jets. This technological advantage — particularly in industries highly sought after by countries in the region — gives Turkey a sense of entitlement, bolstered by its ideological legacy and Ottoman history in Islamic and Arab countries. From the Turkish perspective, this advantage justifies its position as the leading force in the alliance and provides a means for Turkey to exert control over its clients. The Mecca Agreement has now placed unmanned and autonomous systems, electronic warfare, AI, and joint production among its priorities. Ankara also presents itself as an architect of the alliance. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan described the agreement as the beginning of a new security and cooperation architecture in the region and said the three founding states should establish its principles, standards, and long-term structure before others join.
The struggle over who will be patron and who will be client has already emerged inside the Turkish parliament. Turhan Çömez, deputy chair of the İYİ Party parliamentary group, asked whether an Iranian or Houthi attack on Saudi Arabia would drag Turkey into war. Murat Emir, deputy chair of the Republican People’s Party parliamentary group, argued that the agreement would do little beyond securing Saudi money and could turn Turkey into a paid guard for the other states. Turkish opponents argue that the same Saudi financing Riyadh sees as giving it a claim to leadership could instead make Turkey, despite its military and industrial superiority, a client of Saudi Arabia.
The third and final patron, Pakistan — a country poised to become increasingly important to Saudi military doctrine and intelligence cooperation with Turkey — has the largest military force of the three nations, with 660,000 troops compared with Turkey’s 481,000 and Saudi Arabia’s 247,000. This larger force gives Pakistan greater manpower to sustain long-term operations, something Saudi Arabia may need if it leads a ground war in Yemen in the coming months or years. This strength, however, pales in comparison to Pakistan’s nuclear and ballistic capabilities, which have attracted the interest of both Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
This technology could become important to any long-term nuclear military ambitions in Saudi Arabia or Turkey. All this power allows Pakistan, even amid its economic weaknesses, to view itself as a regional power. Pakistan acted accordingly during the current Iran war. Despite signing a mutual defense agreement with Saudi Arabia before the conflict, Pakistan refused to let its ally draw it into the war. Instead, it played a significant diplomatic role and avoided direct offensive involvement that could have pulled it into the conflict. This was not unprecedented. In 2015, when Saudi Arabia requested Pakistani troops, aircraft, and warships for its campaign in Yemen, Pakistan refused to join the war while drawing a clear distinction between fighting inside Yemen and defending Saudi territory or the holy sites against attack. The limits of outside control over Pakistan’s contribution are already visible in the bilateral pact that preceded the Mecca Alliance: A senior Saudi official described it as encompassing all military means, while Pakistan’s defense minister later said nuclear weapons were “not on the radar.”
This fragmentation, or these disparate capabilities that complement each other — despite some describing them as sufficient for success and claiming the alliance will be integrated — is precisely why no one party truly owns the alliance. The efforts of each state to become the patron are precisely what prevent any one of them from becoming one.
Complementarity may distribute tasks among the three states without settling who has authority. They may agree on what each contributes while continuing to disagree on what the alliance is for, when it should act, and which of their separate wars deserve the others’ capabilities.
Egypt’s potential entry into the Mecca Alliance would strengthen the alliance but further complicate its existing dilemma. Few countries in the region have hedged as consistently as Egypt. Cairo has resisted and continues to resist repeated efforts by its partners to draw it into commitments on terms set by others, whether American efforts to enlist it in the coalition protecting Red Sea shipping and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, Saudi demands for deeper ground involvement in Yemen, or pressure created by the United Arab Emirates’ sharply different position in Sudan. Most attempts to draw Egypt more deeply into regional conflicts have failed, and Egypt has often helped prevent those conflicts from expanding into more dangerous and protracted wars. This approach will inevitably affect the alliance’s ability to reach unified decisions when its members approach the same crises from different perspectives.
Egypt’s claim to becoming a fourth patron rests on elements that the three founding members do not possess in the same combination. Its military geography has placed it at the center of the region’s major conventional wars, while its armed forces have direct experience fighting Israel, one of the Middle East’s dominant military powers. Egypt’s advantage is therefore not superiority in any single category — especially when Turkey and Pakistan also possess large militaries — but the combination of strategic geography, a large conventional military, one of the world’s oldest military establishments, and accumulated experience in regional warfare. Egypt also stands apart in having translated the leverage created by war with Israel into a lasting sovereignty settlement that restored Sinai. The continuing strategic value of that settlement is visible in the attention Israel still gives to Egyptian deployments in Sinai and the security arrangements governing them.
Despite its good relationship with Saudi Arabia, Egypt has resisted Riyadh’s efforts since 2015 to establish a Saudi-led Arab military coalition. Egyptian diplomats said in 2019 that Cairo had opposed those efforts, while separate reporting on the proposed Arab NATO indicated that the Egyptian military also opposed placing its forces under another Arab command. That record is consistent with a broader tendency in Egyptian military doctrine: caution toward arrangements in which decision-making authority, the limits of intervention, and shared objectives remain unclear.
The Turkish foreign minister said that Egypt could join the Mecca Alliance once outstanding technical issues are resolved. Fidan’s invitation also comes despite unresolved strategic differences. During his August visit to Egypt, he criticized regional security alignments involving Greece and Cyprus that he viewed as directed against Turkey, while Cairo reaffirmed its own coordination with both countries in El Alamein less than a month later. If Egypt joins, the same record suggests that it will seek a role as the fourth patron rather than become another member’s client. This insistence on a larger role is not driven by a desire for leadership for its own sake or a monopoly on decision-making, but rather by a commitment to preserving enough decision-making authority to avoid being drawn into conflict — a cornerstone of Egypt’s strategic patience.
That caution is now partly explicit rather than inferred: On Aug. 14, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty said Cairo was studying the pact “very seriously,” but that its defense commitments require constitutional, legal, and technical review before any decision.
Entrapment is an old problem that does not fully fit with this new type of alliance, in which capabilities are distributed more evenly but in different forms. The gaps that can allow the patron to determine the direction of the alliance or the war have not disappeared. Rather, no single state possesses all of them. Each country instead relies on its own area of superiority and its own claim to leadership, struggling to make the others accept its leadership. This ultimately weakens the alliance’s ability to act effectively, limits its goals, and confines it to a form of interoperability.
Doga Eralp argues in War on the Rocks that the pact’s credibility will depend on deeper operational integration and stronger mechanisms for command and coordination. Interoperability is probably the part most likely to improve with time because it accumulates through training and repeated cooperation, but the U.S.-Gulf experience shows that even clients operating inside a far more mature military architecture can still limit the use of shared capabilities when their national objectives and threat perceptions differ from those of the patron. The Mecca case is harder. Years of bilateral cooperation should allow the three states to act together first in relatively easier missions such as defending Saudi Arabia from Houthi attacks. However, Pakistan and Turkey have already responded differently even to this case. Even success in one such mission would show only that they can cooperate selectively, not that three states that each see themselves as patrons have settled on who can turn the next war into a collective one.
To find a path out of this paradox, the alliance needs to change the distribution of capabilities within the alliance itself. The three capabilities are complementary but not substitutable. Saudi financing can buy Turkish systems but cannot reproduce the industrial base and accumulated production expertise behind them. Turkish industry cannot substitute for Pakistan’s manpower and nuclear capabilities. Pakistan’s military weight cannot replicate Saudi financial capacity. Joint exercises, a functioning secretariat, and even genuine crises may therefore make these capabilities more interoperable without concentrating them in one member’s hands or creating the material asymmetry necessary for one member to dominate the other two. NATO began from a different structure: The United States already concentrated the broad military, economic, industrial, and strategic capabilities on which the other members depended, so institutionalization consolidated an existing hierarchy rather than creating one.
The description of the Mecca Alliance as an “Islamic NATO” has become increasingly common, and many have tried to define the alliance’s shared goal as being directed against Iran’s aggression and its nuclear program. However, these descriptions present two problems. First, NATO is a traditional alliance with a patron and clients — the United States and European countries. It also has a consolidated hierarchy, an integrated command structure, and a broadly recognized common adversary in Russia. According to reports, Russia continues to test Article 5 through hybrid operations to gauge the alliance’s willingness to engage. Thus, even with extensive interoperability and support from its European allies, the war in Ukraine has not become a NATO war. The allies share many of its burdens without sharing Ukraine’s decision to fight it. The Mecca Alliance, by contrast, has no comparable hierarchy, integrated command structure, or agreed-upon common enemy.
This pattern is not unique to NATO. After the November 2015 Paris attacks, France invoked Article 42.7, the European Union’s mutual defense clause, for the first time. The other member states unanimously accepted its invocation, but this did not produce a unified European war. Each state determined the form and limits of its own contribution because the provision required direct country-to-country assistance rather than action through a centralized European command. France therefore succeeded in transforming its war into a shared obligation, but not into a shared war. The precedent is important for the Mecca Alliance because it shows that even the formal activation of a mutual defense clause may distribute the burden of war without transferring the decision to fight.
The second problem is the assumption that the Iranian nuclear program is a common concern for the Mecca Alliance. Officials from the Turkish Ministry of Defense stated that the Mecca Agreement did not define any country as a common enemy or adversary. Ministry spokesperson Zeki Aktürk then abruptly shifted, without preamble or question, to describing Israel’s rejection of the 15-point Gaza plan as further evidence of Israel’s regional expansionist policies. He called on the international community to take a firmer stance against its attacks in Gaza and Lebanon. That emphasis persisted at the alliance’s first committee meeting on Aug. 31, when the Turkish foreign minister called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a threat to global security and said the international system should act against the “Netanyahu threat.”
In contrast, Iran was not designated as an enemy of the alliance in any statement by any member state. Israel has not become the alliance’s official common enemy. Even so, the attempt to define Iran as its common target becomes less convincing. Turkey’s characterization of the regional threat did not begin with the Iranian nuclear program, a clear indication of its priorities, but rather with an Israeli military doctrine whose geographical and political boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred and unsettling for the countries of the region.
Before asking more of this alliance, its members should first understand what it can realistically do. Its structural problems may limit its role for years, but acknowledging those problems is the only way to improve the alliance and push it toward the tasks the Middle East needs most.
The Turkish Defense Ministry’s disclosed military mechanisms indicate that the alliance will be most effective in areas that do not require agreement on a common enemy. The three countries intend to establish high-level political and military mechanisms, conduct joint exercises across land, sea, air, air defense, and unmanned systems fields, and deepen cooperation in electronic warfare, AI, logistics, technology transfer, and joint production. They can therefore train forces, link systems, exchange intelligence, and manufacture weapons without deciding in advance which of their separate conflicts should become a joint war.
Even the collective defense commitment does not require a predetermined response. The Turkish foreign minister stated that the attacked member would first request assistance and specify what it needed. The members would then consult to determine the degree and form of support, which could range from intelligence and logistics to ammunition or the deployment of military units. Considering an attack on one member as an attack on all therefore does not mean that the resulting war belongs to all. The agreement establishes an obligation to consider support while allowing each member to determine the limits of its participation.
This ambiguity appeared two days after the signing, when the Houthis announced that they had attacked Saudi Aramco’s Jazan refinery with a drone. Neither Turkey nor Pakistan declared that the attack required a collective military response. The first attack therefore did not test whether the members recognized a shared obligation. It tested whether any one of them possessed the authority to define the response of the other two. None did.
It is premature to consider this a failure of institutions that have yet to become operational, but the incident revealed the question left to consultation: whether acknowledging an attack as an alliance matter also requires participation in the war that follows. The alliance may achieve interoperability and a measure of collective deterrence while allowing smaller coalitions to emerge during particular crises, strengthening each country’s ability to wage its own wars without creating a force capable of fighting a single war together.
It is not in anyone’s interest to burden this alliance with other objectives. It will not achieve what the Trump administration desires in terms of regional countries assuming responsibility for certain hostile states or armed groups. Nor will it become an “Islamic NATO” capable of agreeing on a common goal or waging unified wars. Expecting it to perform these functions may create a security vacuum, while treating it as a threatening Islamic alliance could allow certain countries to use it as a bogeyman to justify their open-ended preemptive doctrine. The alliance should also not be assumed to serve Chinese interests merely because it provides its members with a degree of independence outside the American umbrella. Washington should understand its capabilities and limitations and benefit from its potential without exaggerating its functions or treating it as a worrying alliance.
Nor should Washington expect the alliance to direct its combined capabilities against Iran while its members believe that weakening Iran could further expand Israel’s freedom to use force across the region. If the United States wants these countries to assume responsibility for some regional threats, it should reduce their fear that doing so will replace one threat with an Israeli military superiority that has no clear geographical or political limits.
The absence of a single patron protects each member from being easily drawn into the wars of the others, but it also prevents any state from transforming its own war into a joint war. Three patrons may finance, manufacture, train, and deter together, but they cannot easily make any one of their separate wars belong to all three.
Ahmed Saber Abbas is an Egyptian strategic analyst who serves as a contributing analyst and Middle East consultant at New Lines Institute. His work centers on alliance politics and Middle East security, with a focus on escalation dynamics and regional security architecture. He is a contributor to international affairs platforms including War on the Rocks and the Royal United Services Institute. His analysis draws on ongoing engagement with political, parliamentary, and diplomatic circles across the Middle East. He holds an M.A. degree in international relations from Peking University.
Image: Midjourney
