Trump hails Mecca pact: Can it replace the region’s US security umbrella?

Even so, Ahmed does not see the pact itself as a product of that retrenchment.

“While the Mecca pact inadvertently and indirectly helps US retrenchment, it was conceived and planned independently of any shifts in US policy or posture,” he said.

“It was a response to the loss of credibility of US will and capability to effectively defend the GCC countries during the US-Iran conflict,” Ahmed added, referring to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain.

More than security

For Ankara, Dogan-Akkas said, the calculation is concerning status as much as security.

“The main strategic gain for Turkiye is not to support its national security; its primary gain is to underline its role as a security provider, rather than a security consumer,” she said.

Gokhan Ereli, an international relations expert and assistant professor at Istanbul’s Ibn Haldun University, sees Turkiye’s willingness to bind itself to two non-NATO partners in similar terms, but traces it to Ankara’s long-standing doubts about Washington.

“Where the Gulf states fear that the American umbrella has holes, Ankara suspects the umbrella was never really held over it in the first place,” he told Al Jazeera.

He called the pact “a hedge with Turkish characteristics”, adding that the posture is “not anti-American so much as post-dependent”.

An untested promise

The Mecca agreement states that an armed attack on one member “shall be regarded as an attack against them all”, language modelled on NATO’s Article 5.

But Turkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said a state under attack would first have to request assistance and specify what kind of assist it wants — whether intelligence, logistics or troops.

Ahmed sees similar discretion built into the pact itself.

“Each country is likely to be sovereign in determining the timing, nature, extent and scope of the military assistance from the other two parties, or if any assistance is required in the first place,” he said.

Reza Khanzadeh, a Middle East analyst at George Mason University, points to precedent suggesting the clause is unlikely to drag its signatories automatically into each other’s wars.

The bilateral Saudi-Pakistan pact signed in September 2025 “did not result in a wider conflict” after Iran and then the Houthis attacked Saudi Arabia this year, he said.

Karim agrees that the commitments are conditional rather than fixed.

“This is an alignment that provides additional defence options and resources to every country but doesn’t really replace existing capabilities,” he said.

The practicality of those commitments, he explained, depends on the needs of the country under attack, with a hierarchy developing “in accordance with the needs, resources, platform availability and nature of the threat” that determines what each side can actually spare.

Still, Karim calls it a genuine institutional first, “a new thing in the region since the time of the Baghdad Pact or CENTO”.

The Baghdad Pact, renamed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in 1959, was a Cold War-era alliance linking Turkiye, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and the United Kingdom against Soviet expansion, with Washington backing it but never becoming a full member. It collapsed in 1979 after the Iranian revolution.