Iranian former chief of the Revolutionary Guards Mohsen Rezaei talks to the media after registering his candidacy for the June presidential elections, at the Interior Ministry in the capital Tehran, on May 15, 2021.
ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images
Two days after the Mecca Pact’s signing, an Iranian lawmaker made explicit what diplomats had only implied: if Iran is attacked from any territory belonging to the three-country coalition, Tehran will respond without any consideration. The warning from Alireza Salimi — a member of Iran’s parliament presiding board — arrived as Iranian lawmakers were simultaneously advancing sweeping legislation to permanently assert sovereign control over Hormuz, including a ban on US and Israeli military asset transit through a waterway that carried roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supply before the 2026 war. The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed August 7 in Mecca by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, was not just a mutual defense pact. It was a written declaration — by three of Washington’s most significant partners — that US security guarantees had stopped being sufficient.
Why US Credibility Reached This Breaking Point
“Regional states have harbored growing doubts about the reliability of the US security partnership for more than a decade,” Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told Al Jazeera in the days after the signing. The 2026 Iran war — launched February 28 when the United States and Israel struck Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — sharply concentrated those doubts. “Both the decision to begin military operations against Iran and the subsequent conduct of the war and the on-off attempts to resolve it have only intensified those concerns and accelerated efforts to diversify security and defense relations,” Ulrichsen said.
The erosion has a specific anatomy. When Iranian missiles and drones began striking Saudi territory after February 28, Washington struggled to resupply Gulf air defense stockpiles, many of which had been directed to Israel. The Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed for months, costing Gulf economies dearly while the US worked to reopen it through a combination of airstrikes and naval blockade — a process that took until June 19, when an MOU was signed in Geneva, as TechTimes documented at the time. That same closure now threatens to be replicated in law. Iran’s parliament submitted its Hormuz control bill on July 13. By August 10, the Internal Affairs and Councils Committee had approved the first five articles, including provisions banning transit by vessels owned by the US, Israel, and other countries Iran labels “hostile.”
Sina Toossi, an analyst at the Center for International Policy, framed the Mecca Pact as the clearest geopolitical signal yet that the Iran war is reshaping the regional order itself. “Rather than relying primarily on Washington, Saudi Arabia appears to be broadening its security partnerships and laying the groundwork for more intra-regional security arrangements,” he told Al Jazeera. “That is arguably the most important takeaway.”
What the Pact Actually Commits Its Members To
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement establishes that an armed attack on any signatory shall be treated as an attack on all three — language drawn from UN Charter Article 51 on the right of collective self-defense. Analysts from the Middle East Council on Global Affairs note it is better understood as a framework for consultation and collective security than as a NATO-equivalent pact with automatic military triggers. Crucially, the Lowy Institute’s Saira Bano, writing from Thompson Rivers University, reported that the agreement also includes a permanent Saudi-based secretariat and a ministerial committee — institutional architecture that NATO itself did not possess fully formed at its founding in 1949.
The full treaty text has not been made public. What the three signatories bring — Turkey’s NATO-integrated military and Bayraktar drone industry, Saudi Arabia’s financial depth and geographic position at the Gulf’s chokepoints, Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent — has been extensively documented by TechTimes. What has been less examined is what the pact’s signing signals to Beijing.
Two Competing Architectures — and the Opening Beijing Didn’t Ask For
Here is the structural condition the Mecca Pact has created: two institutional frameworks are being built simultaneously in the Gulf, from opposite directions, each seeking to encode a different post-war reality into durable law.
The MJDA, with its secretariat and ministerial committee, is constructing an architecture for collective deterrence — one that makes the cost of attacking any of the three members less predictable and potentially higher. Iran’s Hormuz legislation is constructing a competing architecture: a domestic legal framework that seeks to permanently supersede the customary international law of transit passage, under which all ships — including warships — enjoy the right to traverse international straits continuously and without impediment. Iran has not ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and its parliament’s bill proceeds from Tehran’s longstanding position that it retains sovereign regulatory authority over the Strait — a position legal scholars broadly reject as contrary to customary international law.
Neither framework is operational today. Both are being built now. The US has not formally responded to either.
That silence is what China’s analysts are reading most carefully. In the days after the signing, Chinese state media and top scholars dissected the pact in unusual detail — the Foreign Ministry, conveniently on summer recess, said nothing. Li Shaoxian, head of the China-Arab States Research Institute at Ningxia University, described the pact as evidence of what he sees as the erosion of the US security umbrella in the Middle East. Yan Xuetong, Honorary Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University, posed the sharper question: “If the US military cannot even protect its own bases, how can it protect its partners?”
China’s strategic position does not require it to answer that question. Beijing has spent years building economic and diplomatic ties across the Gulf without offering military commitments — precisely because a more multipolar Gulf security environment, one where Riyadh, Ankara, and Islamabad are less exclusively tethered to Washington, creates room for deeper Chinese engagement without forcing Beijing to choose sides in a conflict it has no interest in joining. Pakistan’s contribution adds another dimension: Islamabad’s close defense ties with China mean, as Bano wrote, that its military contribution to the MJDA “cannot be separated entirely from Chinese weapons, technology and infrastructure.”
Iran’s Counter-Move: Threat, Legislation, and a Hardline Appointment
Iran’s response has operated simultaneously on three tracks. The dismissive track — Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei’s statement that Iran had no reason to fear the pact — was calibrated for international consumption. The legislative track has been substantive. Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee approved the Hormuz bill’s general outlines without opposition on August 10. Lawmaker Sodeif Badri told reporters the bill was designed to establish a “long-term legal framework for Iran’s management of Hormuz rather than relying on temporary policies” and that “the strait would not return to its pre-war conditions.” The third track arrived on August 9, when President Masoud Pezeshkian appointed Mohsen Rezaei — a veteran Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander and hardliner who has publicly threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if US pressure continues — as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, while Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei simultaneously appointed Rezaei as his representative on the same body. RFE/RL confirmed the appointment; IranWire profiled his career across four decades in Iran’s ruling establishment.
Reformist Iranian outlet Asr-e Iran warned that dismissing the agreement as political theater could prove costly if it gradually develops the military and security mechanisms capable of changing the regional balance. Iran’s Persian Gulf security analyst Kamran Karami, writing for Donya-e Eqtesad, was specific about where Tehran’s concern was focused: “For Iran, this development sends a clear message: Turkey is becoming one of the main poles of the Middle East’s new security architecture.”
Does This Pact Hedge Washington — or Begin to Replace It?
The three signatories have been careful to frame the Mecca Pact as supplementing, not supplanting, their existing US relationships. Turkey remains a NATO ally. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have longstanding bilateral security agreements with Washington. Ulrichsen noted that building new defense pacts is likely not intended “to replace or supplant the US, but to provide additional strategic and policy options.”
Yasmine Farouk of the International Crisis Group drew a more precise line. “There is no framework that can replace the United States,” she told Al Jazeera, adding that the pact’s value may lie in something closer to “normative deterrence” — changing what adversaries believe they can do without triggering a broader response — rather than in operationalized military commitments. Iran, she noted, has “emerged from the war hardened and more confident in its ability to use force to advance its goals.”
What the three signatories have concluded, taken together, is what the Lowy Institute’s Bano put plainly: “All three pact members retain longstanding ties with Washington, but are signaling that they no longer want their security to depend entirely on a single external guarantor.” Brett McGurk, a key architect of Middle East policy under President Biden, was blunter in a social media post: “It’s a fluid, tabula rasa era in the Middle East.”
The Trump administration had not issued a formal response to the Mecca Pact as of publication of this article.
Egypt’s Decision Will Define What Comes Next
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan stated publicly that the agreement “names no common threat and is not aimed at Iran or any other state,” and that Ankara hopes to expand it — with Egypt identified as the natural next candidate. Egypt’s decision will function as the clearest available barometer of whether the Mecca Pact becomes the nucleus of a broader autonomous security architecture or remains a tightly bounded trilateral arrangement.
Egypt’s calculation is neither simple nor fast. Cairo guards its strategic flexibility jealously, faces security pressures of its own across Libya, Sudan, Gaza, and the Red Sea, and has historically been reluctant to commit to frameworks that constrain its room to maneuver. A full-membership decision carries obligations Egypt’s military establishment would weigh carefully.
What Fararu, an Iranian outlet that has pushed back against the official line of dismissal, put succinctly captures why Egypt’s calculus will matter beyond Cairo: “If Tehran, or any other actor, knows that an attack on Saudi Arabia could trigger a response from Turkey and Pakistan as well, the cost-benefit calculation of an attack changes. In simple terms, the pact seeks to create a new equation: an attack on Saudi Arabia is no longer just an attack on Saudi Arabia.”
For Washington, the equation that now demands attention is not who else might join the pact. It is the gap — visible in writing, signed in Mecca’s holiest precincts — between the security architecture America promised its Gulf partners and the architecture those partners have decided to build for themselves.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat does the Mecca Pact actually commit Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan to do if one of them is attacked?
The agreement establishes that any armed attack against one signatory “shall be regarded as an attack against them all” — language drawn from Article 51 of the UN Charter on collective self-defense. However, the full treaty text has not been released publicly, and the agreement does not appear to specify automatic military obligations, required force commitments, or exact trigger conditions. Analysts broadly describe it as a framework for consultation, coordination, and deterrence rather than a NATO-equivalent pact with automatic military intervention. The agreement does include a permanent secretariat in Saudi Arabia and a ministerial committee — institutional steps toward operationalization — but the specific mechanisms for responding to an attack have not been publicly defined.
How does Iran’s Strait of Hormuz legislation actually threaten international shipping?
Iran’s parliament is advancing a bill titled “Strategic Action to Ensure the Sustainable Security of the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf” that would, if enacted, ban US and Israeli military asset transit through the Strait and impose fees on vessels from countries Iran considers “hostile.” International law — specifically the customary law of transit passage that governs international straits under UNCLOS — prohibits coastal states from charging fees for transit (Article 26) or suspending that right (Article 44), even in wartime. Iran has not ratified UNCLOS and disputes its applicability, but the prevailing view of international legal scholarship holds that transit passage is binding on Iran as customary international law regardless. If the bill becomes law, it sets up a direct legal confrontation between Iranian domestic legislation and international maritime law — and raises the prospect of Tehran attempting to institutionalize wartime Hormuz leverage as a permanent policy tool.
What specifically does China gain from the Mecca Pact — and what does it risk?
China gains primarily from the strategic environment the Mecca Pact signals: a Gulf where major US partners are diversifying away from exclusive dependence on Washington creates more space for Beijing to deepen economic and diplomatic ties without being forced to assume military responsibilities it has deliberately avoided. Pakistan’s contribution to the MJDA carries a specific Chinese dimension — Islamabad’s defense ties with Beijing are close enough that Pakistani military capability cannot be cleanly separated from Chinese-origin weapons, technology, and infrastructure. China risks, indirectly, any escalation involving the pact’s signatories that disrupts the energy flows and trade routes on which China’s economy depends — including the Strait of Hormuz, through which a substantial share of Chinese energy imports transits.
Why has the Trump administration not responded to the Mecca Pact?
As of publication, the Trump administration had not issued a formal response. Analysts generally interpret the absence not as approval but as a reflection of the administration’s broader challenge: the three signatories are US partners, not adversaries, and any response that framed the pact as a rebuke of American leadership would risk confirming exactly the credibility gap the pact signals. The more diplomatically viable position — engaging the pact and pressing for deconfliction procedures while maintaining existing bilateral security relationships — has been recommended by Lowy Institute analysts and others, but has not yet produced a visible public response from Washington.