An attack on any one of them is now an attack on all three
Mohammed bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Shehbaz Sharif signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement on 7 August, extending to Turkey the mutual defence commitment Riyadh and Islamabad struck in September 2025.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a joint defence agreement in Mecca on 7 August, with Mohammed bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Shehbaz Sharif putting their names to it. The central clause leaves little room for interpretation: an armed attack on any one of the three is to be treated as an attack on all three.
This did not come out of nowhere. Riyadh and Islamabad had already agreed an equivalent bilateral commitment in September 2025, and what Mecca does is stretch that umbrella to cover Ankara. The timing is not accidental either. It was signed with the war with Iran that began in February still unresolved, the Strait of Hormuz still closed, and Saudi fighting against the Houthis grinding on in neighbouring Yemen.
What each side brings
The three bring different things, which is exactly why the arrangement appeals to all of them. Saudi Arabia brings capital. Pakistan brings manpower and the only nuclear arsenal held by a Muslim-majority state. Turkey brings a defence industry that has grown fast and now exports drones and armoured vehicles across much of the world.
Keep the scale of it in proportion, though. A mutual defence pact is not an integrated alliance in the NATO sense, with a command structure, joint planning and assigned forces. It is a political commitment that still has to be turned into protocols, exercises and rules for when it is triggered, and the Atlantic Council reads the deal as an inflection point in an increasingly multipolar regional order — which is not the same as saying it already works.
For Europe, and for Portugal, the useful takeaway is that the Gulf is building security architecture that runs through neither Washington nor Brussels. That changes prices: on energy routes that depend on a waterway that remains shut, and on the defence contracts Ankara has been quietly winning across the global south.
Image: ARABCREATOR7 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
