Trump Endorses Mecca Pact as Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, and Pakistan Forge New Defense Alliance

When Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan signed a mutual defence pact in Mecca 10 days ago, some geopolitical analysts saw the deal as a message to Washington — that several of the United States’ closest military allies and partners no longer trusted its security umbrella. On Sunday, US President Donald Trump made it clear that he didn’t mind the Middle East finding ways to defend itself.

“Very happy to see that Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan have recently, and finally, signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It shows that the Middle East is coming together and how Countries will finally be able to defend themselves in a more meaningful way.”

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif thanked Trump within hours on Monday, crediting his “courageous and decisive leadership” with helping avert “a nuclear catastrophe in South Asia”. In many ways, Trump’s apparent happiness over US partners seeking other security arrangements beyond their traditional reliance on Washington is in keeping with his political posture: The US president has long accused allies of not spending enough on their own defence, and of stretching America’s resources in their service.

But even as three close US allies build their own collective defence arrangement, one question hovers as an elephant in the room, say analysts: Can deals like the Mecca pact actually replace the reliance of countries like Pakistan, Turkiye and Saudi Arabia on the US?

The timing of Trump’s statement is not incidental, say analysts. The US president has spent much of the past year pushing allies to shoulder more of their own defence burden.

At NATO’s summit in The Hague in June 2025, member states agreed to more than double their defence spending target, from 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 5 percent by 2035, after sustained pressure from Trump, who had questioned whether Washington should keep defending allies that fell short. On Sunday, before his post on the Mecca pact, Trump also announced he was “substantially” reducing joint military exercises with South Korea, citing cost and his “very good relationship” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, while criticising Seoul for not helping the US against Iran.

Betul Dogan-Akkas, assistant professor of international relations at Ankara University, argued that Turkiye’s role in the Mecca pact should be read against that broader backdrop. “It is obvious that the Arab Gulf states lost their deterrence since February 28, and they have to re-establish their deterrence without relying on the US,” she told Al Jazeera, referring to the date when the US and Israel launched their war on Iran, without consulting the US’s Gulf allies — who faced Iranian retaliation. “Erdogan signals to the world and to the Gulf that he can support a regional security complex, as the world’s hegemony is not doing its job properly.”

But not all analysts see Trump’s reaction as signalling a retreat from the region. “I don’t think the US is stepping back as such, but perhaps the limits of its military presence and its impact, as well as the associated liabilities, have been exposed quite significantly, compelling all regional actors to speed up their attempts to diversify their security linkages,” said Umer Karim, an associate fellow at the Riyadh-based King Faisal Center for Islamic Research and Studies, who specialises in Gulf and Pakistani affairs.

Mansoor Ahmed, an honorary lecturer at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, took a different view. “The Trump administration is following a graduated retrenchment as it seeks to rebuild the US military-industrial base, and is asking allies and partners to take greater responsibility for their own defence,” he told Al Jazeera.

For Ankara, Dogan-Akkas said, the calculation is about 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.

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. However, analysts point out that the commitments remain conditional, allowing each country to determine its own level of military assistance.