On August 7, the leaders of Pakistan, Türkiye, and Saudi Arabia met signed a trilateral joint defense agreement in Mecca. The accord, known as the Mecca Joint Deterrence Agreement or what some have dubbed “Islamic NATO,” stipulates that an armed attack against any member would be regarded as an attack on all.
That has already proved an empty promise as Ansarallah attacks on Saudia Arabia have gone unanswered—aside from meetings in Jeddah aimed at establishing an international coalition to protect Red Sea shipping (sounds a lot like NATO!).
On Thursday, Türkiye’s Defense Ministry announced that the three countries will hold joint exercises and deepen defense industry cooperation under the pact. Why? Officials from the three signatory countries went to great lengths to ensure that the agreement is directed against no one in particular.
Some analysts argue that the agreement is meant to counter Israel, but these states are all aligned with the US-Israel to various extents. And let’s note how this pact did not come about in response to years of genocide in Palestinian, the Zionist terror in the West Bank, nor the destruction of Lebanon. It came once Iran took the upper hand in the region. Trump welcomed the defense pact on Sunday, and Zionists in general seem none too concerned about Islamic NATO.
As we’ve documented frequently, Turkish public opinion might overwhelmingly be opposed to Israel, but the Turkish elite are captive to Israel’s benefactors in the West, and Türkiye literally helps fuel Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and other violence in the region.
Signatories to the deterrence agreement have signaled that it is partially the result of America’s frayed security umbrella, but let’s examine how much separation there will really be between America and this new alliance.
First, the Obvious. Türkiye Is a Member of the Non-Islamic NATO.
It was little more than a month ago that Ankara hosted the NATO summit and Turkish National Defence Minister Yasar Guler, as just one example, stressed that Türkiye supports a stronger European contribution to NATO while maintaining what he described as the indispensable transatlantic bond with the US. And despite claims that Islamic NATO wants the region’s security agreements decided without outside actors, Turkey continues to host American nuclear weapons at Incirlik Air Base, and Kürecik base hosts a US AN/TPY‑2 X‑band radar, established for NATO in 2012 as forward‑based early‑warning sensor against ballistic missiles, especially from Iran.
Evidence Iran and Its Allies Are the Targets
Talk of this alliance accelerated at meetings on the sidelines of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, held from 17–19 April in Turkiye. It was then presented as part of an effort at lowering tensions and sold that states in the region (i.e., not the US) should be responsible for defending West Asia. Defending from what exactly if not the US?
Well, Türkiye and its new alliance friends have repeatedly condemned Iran for its attacks in the region, raising more objections to a country defending itself than they have for genocide and illegal wars of aggression. That’s a bit of a red flag.
Türkiye, along with Pakistan, tried to cosplay as a peacemaker, but it had funny ideas on how to get there. Here was the view of conflict resolution unveiled by Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan ahead of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum meetings that reportedly helped give rise to Islamic NATO:
“A new leadership structure may reshape Iran’s decision-making and create an opportunity to stop the war,” [Fidan] told a live broadcast on TRT Haber news channel. “The new leadership in Iran may show greater flexibility at this stage…This could be a window of opportunity, if used wisely.”
So the goal in Ankara is the capitulation of the Iran government—the same as in Tel Aviv and Washington. Most importantly, that’s what the so-called hardliners in Iran think about the alliance, and we should note that these hardliners have largely been correct in their assessments of the US-Israel and the ruse of talks to end the conflict. From Hamidreza Azizi:
The most alarmed reading comes from commentators closer to the hardline faction, who reject the idea that the three signatories are primarily concerned with Israel. For Saudi Arabia, they argue, Yemen and, by extension, Iran constitute a far more immediate threat than Israel. For Türkiye, friction with Israel remains a longer-term and less urgent matter. Pakistan perceives little threat from Israel at all, given its nuclear status, its distance from the theater Israel has defined as its sphere of operations, and Islamabad’s traditional rivalry with India. From this perspective, the agreement is aimed most immediately at Yemen and the Houthis, while also serving as a warning to Iran.
Those advancing this view point instead to developments on the ground. Turkish drones have reportedly been used against the Houthis, while both Ankara and Islamabad have condemned Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and aligned themselves with Riyadh. Pakistan has deployed forces to the Kingdom and issued warnings to the Houthis, and some Iranian observers raise the prospect of direct Pakistani involvement, including ground operations in Yemen. They extend the argument to Iraq. Saudi Arabia has already acted alongside the United States against Iran-aligned PMF factions, American pressure on Baghdad to disarm those factions has intensified, and Türkiye maintains a substantial presence of its own in the country. Coordinated pressure, or coordinated incentives, directed at the Iraqi government could serve as a counterweight to Iranian influence there.
Geography reinforces that concern. Türkiye sits to Iran’s northwest, Saudi Arabia to its southwest, and Pakistan to its southeast. For analysts inclined to this reading, effective implementation of the agreement could deepen Iran’s geopolitical isolation and expose it to pressure from several directions at once. The same commentators have also used the agreement to reopen a domestic debate over Tehran’s reliance on Pakistan as a channel to Washington. They have long argued that Islamabad has vested interests in its cooperation with the United States and functions in practice as an instrument of American regional policy. They now present the Mecca agreement as confirmation of that view.
Economic Ties That Bind
Some have commented on how Türkiye’s simultaneous membership in a defense pact with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and NATO could mean that the latter gets involved in any conflict involving the former. More than that is the connection between defense industries and finance.
While Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are each tied to the West in various ways and extents, I’m going to focus on Türkiye here since that is the country where I lived and worked in the past.
And it’s where the effort to jumpstart Turkey’s struggling economy has been wed to Ankara’s long held goal to develop its indigenous defense industry. The plan largely revolves around efforts to attract more investment from the West to help the economy and increase Türkiye’s power stature. Despite ongoing friction on the surface between Turkiye and the West in recent years, underneath the hood Ankara was already solidly back in the fold back in 2023. Following the toughest reelection fight of Erdogan’s political career, he appointed neoliberal champion Mehmet Simsek to Minister of Treasury and Finance. Simsek immediately began jacking up rates and renewing efforts to attract western capital into Türkiye. Some insight from Turkish political economist Umit Akcay:
Between 2021 and 2023, Ankara pursued a unorthodox monetary experiment that cut interest rates despite soaring inflation and was backed by parts of business groups. The policy bought short-term growth and helped the government win elections. But like Argentina, Türkiye’s experiment collapsed under the weight of inflation and depleted reserves. Since 2023, Ankara has returned to orthodoxy under Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek.
Both Argentina and Türkiye show how class coalitions can briefly expand policy space, but without structural transformation these tactical gains evaporate. In both cases, dependency on volatile capital flows and the dollar system has forced governments back into orthodoxy and deeper external subordination.
That subordination extends to the geopolitical realm where Türkiye has pulled back considerably from the independent path it was forging and gone groveling back to the World Economic Forum kingmakers.
The number one goal of the government became attracting foreign investment (Together, the US and Europe account for roughly 82 percent of foreign direct investment in Türkiye; Saudia Arabia might augment this through the Mecca agreement, but it will not replace it). That has meant two things:
Ankara has pursued a strategy of making Türkiye indispensable militarily to US-NATO, which also dovetails with Türkiye’s long held goal of building out its defense industry and transforming from an importer to an exporter. And the US, eager to reestablish control over NATO’s wayward son, Erdogan, has been able to take advantage of this.
NATO 3.0, as it’s called, tightens the embrace of Türkiye, perhaps most importantly on the economic front.
There was already the joint venture between Turkish drone maker Baykar and Italian defense contractor Leonardo (which by the way supplies the Israeli genocide machine, meaning Erdogan’s own family is now benefitting from the slaughter; something to keep in mind when the next war of words erupts between Ankara and Tel Aviv). and other Turkish involvement in the NATO defense sector, but it is now set to grow exponentially.
Türkiye is included in 3 of the 4 high-visibility projects NATO unveiled at its July summit in Ankara. Those are Ground-Based Precision Strike Capabilities, Generic NATO Indirect Fire Round, and Airbus A400M Multinational Fleet. Türkiye is also one of 12 members of the Critical Raw Materials for Defence program, which aims to ramp up supplies of 12 key defense materials. The alliance also made a five-year $40 billion commitment for drone defense capabilities, which will likely bode well for Turkish companies Baykar and Turkish Aerospace Industries, both drone leaders among the NATO countries.
There are still issues to be worked out between Washington and Ankara. Chief among them is the offloading of the Russian S-400 air defense system Türkiye purchased in 2019. That resulted in US sanctions and expulsion from the F-35 program, decisions that cannot be revoked until the S-400 is no longer in Turkish possession. While progress there remains slow and complicated, following the Ankara summit the US did approve more than $700 million worth of General Electric F110 engines to Türkiye, which are to help with its domestically developed KAAN fighter jet program.
Türkiye is slowly, despite opposition from Greece, and at least publicly, Israel, becoming one of NATO’s key suppliers. Whether it’s up to the task is another question, but Rich Outzen, a retired US Army officer and nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Türkiye Program, told Al-Monitor that Europeans under relentless pressure from Washington to spend more basically have no choice but to turn Türkiye:
Outzen said the summit’s progress across multiple defense initiatives could ultimately help unlock broader Turkish defense exports to Europe and deepen strategic cooperation between Ankara and its European NATO partners, building on already close ties with countries such as Italy, Spain and the UK.
Ultimately, he said, “Trump may serve as an excellent salesman for Turkish defense industries both by praising them and loosening US restrictions to the extent that he can, but also by ruffling European feathers to the point that they seek alternative sources of supply.”
Iran Blockade
Let’s move from one economic focus to another. While Islamic NATO’s joint defense agreement may have already been exposed as a paper tiger, the concern in Tehran is more that the alliance could pose economic challenges. From Hamidreza Azizi:
Some Iranian analysts have noted that the geography of the three signatories opens the possibility of a land dimension alongside the naval blockade already imposed by the United States. Overland routes through Pakistan and Türkiye carry significant volumes of Iranian trade, and their importance has grown as the traditional UAE channel became more complicated following the war. Ankara and Islamabad would face no requirement to fight Iran in order to support Riyadh. Restricting Iranian commerce or closing borders would suffice. The asymmetry compounds the problem: Iran’s capacity for military retaliation against Türkiye and Pakistan is far more constrained than against the Gulf states, given Turkish membership in NATO and Pakistani nuclear capabilities. Deterrence, in this formulation, works through economic exposure rather than through mutual defense clauses, and it operates exactly where Iran has the least capacity to respond in kind.
For Türkiye at least, what the Mecca agreement signifies is not a break from the Washington-led security architecture in the Middle East, but Ankara having to climb down from the fence and place one foot squarely in the ring. What form is the increased involvement most likely to take?
While there is little concern that Türkiye and Pakistan would attack Iran in response to Iranian strikes on Saudi Arabia, there are other issues to worry officials in Tehran. Again from Azizi:
Some Iranian analysts have noted that the geography of the three signatories opens the possibility of a land dimension alongside the naval blockade already imposed by the United States. Overland routes through Pakistan and Türkiye carry significant volumes of Iranian trade, and their importance has grown as the traditional UAE channel became more complicated following the war. Ankara and Islamabad would face no requirement to fight Iran in order to support Riyadh. Restricting Iranian commerce or closing borders would suffice. The asymmetry compounds the problem: Iran’s capacity for military retaliation against Türkiye and Pakistan is far more constrained than against the Gulf states, given Turkish membership in NATO and Pakistani nuclear capabilities. Deterrence, in this formulation, works through economic exposure rather than through mutual defense clauses, and it operates exactly where Iran has the least capacity to respond in kind.
One quibble: I’m not sure NATO causes the consternation in Tehran that these analysts think it does. Iran is already successfully taking on the backbone of that alliance. And it’s the rest of NATO that is turning to Türkiye for military industrial help.
At the same time, a key tenant of Islamic NATO is that Pakistan brings the nukes, Saudi Arabia puts up the dough, and Türkiye provides the defense industry muscle. That means Türkiye is now being asked to play a crucial military industrial role for not just NATO but Islamic NATO as well.
Can it possibly deliver? We’ll deal with the details of that question on Wednesday.
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