Mecca Defence Pact marks the start of a post-American Arab Gulf

Saudi figures put the number of Iranian missiles and drones fired towards the kingdom by late March at more than 700. Washington had launched the war alongside Israel a month earlier, yet Saudi air defences did most of the intercepting, and Riyadh spent the following months protecting its cities and oil infrastructure.

The American security guarantee in the Gulf broke when Saudi air defences took over, not when the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement was signed on 7 August by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan. The deal is often cited as evidence that the US-led order has ended, but in reality, it is paperwork that arrived four months late.

The retrenchment it supposedly announces has been underway since 2008. The financial crisis, the exhaustion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the turn towards competition with China pushed Washington away from occupation and towards sanctions, airpower and financial coercion. It is a model of regime management that imposes outcomes on other states while avoiding the cost of holding their territory.

The second pillar is burden-shifting, pressing partners to absorb the frontline costs of American strategy while Washington keeps the escalation umbrella. The Abraham Accords were its most over-engineered expression, trying to lock in regional enforcement through Israel that most Gulf states refused to join.

Set against that strategy, three states arming themselves while keeping their American relationships intact is not a rupture but a result. Turkey remains in NATO and continues to press for F-35s. Pakistan has spent this war as Washington’s channel to Tehran. And nine days before the ceremony in Mecca, Saudi Arabia flew joint strikes with US Central Command against Iran-aligned militias in Iraq.

A pact whose members are simultaneously fighting beside American forces, brokering for American diplomacy and shopping for American aircraft is not the end of an order; it is that order economising. In reality, it adds little to what the war had already shown. What matters is how it is being read in Tehran, and by whom.

The reading from Iran’s ruling bloc

The memorandum of understanding that preceded this summer’s fighting was engineered by Iran’s actual ruling class. This is the bloc organised around the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), the wider security establishment, the revolutionary-religious foundations (bonyads) that control much of the economy, and the Office of the Supreme Leader, which appoints their leadership and shields them from oversight.

Indeed, the bloc is not monolithic: a technocratic-economic wing holds that the Islamic Republic survives through economic recovery rather than ideological performance, while an ideological-maximalist wing, centred on the Paydari Front, regards engagement with Washington as futile.

The technocratic wing is in command, and its authority rests on institutions rather than personalities. When the truce collapsed on 8 July, it pushed Iran back into war rather than abandoning diplomacy, on the calculation that without control of Hormuz, Iran has nothing to sell when it returns to the table.

Its response to Mecca has been to shrink it. The IRGC-linked press warned negotiators against conceding anything, fearing a coalition that has not yet formed, because “the first defeat can occur not in war, but in the mind”. Other media outlets with similar political affiliations cited technical grounds: no joint command, no common fund, no automatic trigger.

The maximalists dissented, blaming President Masoud Pezeshkian for diplomacy too absorbed in Washington to see the pact coming, but they are weaker than their volume suggests.

More telling is what the security establishment was doing in the same days. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei appointed six senior commanders, installing Ahmad Vahidi as commander of the Revolutionary Guards and tasking the new chief of the Armed Forces General Staff with folding that body into the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, Iran’s wartime joint command. Days later, Mohsen Rezaei, who had run the Guards for 16 years, took over the Supreme National Security Council.

Some read this as the leadership clipping the technocratic wing; it overreads a single appointment, since Rezaei comes from the same establishment and the week’s direction was consolidation rather than redistribution.

The reshuffle shows a certain disposition. A bloc that folds its general staff into a wartime command does not see a defence pact among neighbours as its main problem. It has already adjusted to a region where Washington no longer guarantees outcomes. Its strategy was built for this reality.

A danger that needs no clause

On the narrow question, the bloc is likely correct. The collective defence article will not bring Turkish or Pakistani soldiers into a war with Iran. But the pact does not need to operate militarily to harm Iran. Here, composure becomes a risk.

The first exposure is political, and it builds over time. Iran’s neighbours are forming regional arrangements without it. Erdogan has said that Egypt could join. Each new member makes the next step easier and less costly to dismiss Iranian objections.

The second is economic, and no longer hypothetical. Twenty years of sanctions have produced an economy whose lifelines run overland and through re-export hubs, and the three that matter are Turkey, Pakistan and, above all, the United Arab Emirates.

On 18 August, after two Iranian ballistic missiles were fired towards its territory, Abu Dhabi suspended all trade and financial transactions with Iran until further notice. In one announcement, Iran lost its largest commercial partner in the Gulf and the principal channel through which the bloc has moved goods and money around sanctions for two decades.

This is the real risk. The pact is more dangerous than its text implies. The two overland routes Iran still has are controlled by states now tied to Riyadh by mutual defence obligations. They do not need to use force. Slower customs, tighter banking, or a closed border would do more harm than any defence clause. Iran cannot respond to a NATO member and a nuclear-armed neighbour as it does to American bases in the Gulf.

This is where the ruling bloc’s strategy is most exposed. Its wager is that Iran returns to negotiations holding Hormuz and converts that leverage into investment and sanctions relief. Ghalibaf has reiterated that the strait will remain closed until Washington lifts its blockade and releases Iran’s frozen assets. But Trump now says there are no talks under way, and everything meant to follow a deal requires neighbours willing to trade with Iran.

For now, downplaying the Mecca pact serves its purpose. It steadies Iran’s negotiators and protects the economic programme that underpins the bloc’s authority. But this is composure, not analysis. A bloc organised for war can judge military threats but is less able to see dangers that do not take military form. Iran is not being encircled. It is being excluded from the arrangements its neighbours are making, and its own actions are speeding up that process. If this continues, the reckoning will come not on the battlefield but in the accounts.

Kayhan Valadbaygi is a Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam and CEO of Middle East Risk & Reform Advisory.

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