Pakistan–Saudi Arabia–Türkiye Ink ‘Makkah Trilateral Defence Accord’ With Mutual-Defense Clause

Muslim-world security blocs have been tried before—from the 1955 Baghdad Pact (later CENTO) to the short-lived 1969 Islamic Military Cooperation Council—each premised on collective defence yet hampered by divergent strategic aims. This 2026 Makkah Accord echoes those efforts but emerges amid two longer arcs: (1) the gradual retrenchment of the U.S. security umbrella in West and South Asia since the 2011 draw-down in Iraq/Afghanistan, and (2) Türkiye’s and Saudi Arabia’s search for non-Western defence partners as their indigenous arms industries mature. Whether the pact endures depends on whether shared threat perceptions (Iran? non-state actors?) outweigh the three capitals’ often-competing regional agendas. On a century scale, if it catalyses real economic integration—something earlier Islamic alliances failed to deliver—it could mark an embryonic shift toward a multipolar Muslim security architecture; if not, it may be remembered alongside CENTO’s 1979 collapse as another well-intentioned but transient alignment propelled more by symbolism than hard power calculus.