Ambiguity by design: What the Makkah pact really signals

By Dr. Ansar Jamil 

When Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement on 7 August, the instinct across newsrooms was to reach for a label. “Islamic NATO,” some called it. 

Others insisted it was aimed at no one in particular. Both readings miss the point. The pact’s strength lies precisely in its refusal to be pinned down. 

The text is thin, the commitments are unspecified, and the question everyone wants answered — would Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent extend to Riyadh, would Turkish or Pakistani forces actually fight — is left hanging.

That is not a flaw. It is the design. Ambiguity, here, is the strategy, because ambiguity is what breeds deterrence. An adversary that cannot be certain what a pact obliges its members to do must plan against the worst case. A commitment spelled out in detail can be war-gamed, hedged, and discounted. A commitment left open cannot.

I do not believe this agreement will be operationalised militarily any time soon. It reads, to me, as a tacit understanding rather than a combat alliance — a formalisation and scaling-up of relationships that already existed. 

Pakistan draws finance from Saudi Arabia and defence technology from Turkiye; both flows predate the pact. 

What Makkah pact does is enlarge their capacity and scale, and wrap them in a declaratory commitment whose deterrent value is greatest so long as it is never tested. 

The relevant precedent is Pakistan’s own restraint: it did not send combat troops into the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and even under last September’s bilateral pact it did not respond to Houthi strikes on the kingdom. That should not be read as a weakness. It is evidence that Islamabad has enlarged its capacity to hedge — to defend the Harmain, Islam’s two holiest sites, without being dragged into every cross-border offensive launched from Saudi soil.

To understand why three Muslim powers reached for deliberate ambiguity now, it helps to read the moment on two levels.

Global level: A guarantor under strain

The United States is overstretched and tired. It is entangled in two draining theatres — the war in Ukraine and a war on Iran that began in February and has dragged on far longer than Washington wanted, curdling into a dual blockade of the Gulf with no clean exit. 

Each month it grinds on, American deterrence looks less like a wall and more like a bluff being slowly called.

The credibility damage is not abstract. When Israel struck Hamas figures in Doha last year and Washington did nothing to restrain its ally, Gulf capitals drew the obvious lesson: the American security umbrella has holes, and they had better find their own cover. 

The Gulf’s turn toward diversifying its guarantors — toward Islamabad, toward Ankara, toward an implicit Beijing — flows directly from that realisation.

Look, too, at Trump’s visit to Beijing in May. 

He arrived soft on Taiwan, unwilling to commit to arms sales, content for the island to “stay the way it is” — a posture even American analysts read as a win for China. 

And there was the inversion at the heart of it: China presenting itself as the custodian of the UN and the rules-based order, while the very powers that built that order seem intent on dismantling it, and the states that once suffered under it now scramble to salvage it. 

When the architect walks away from the building, its former tenants start reinforcing the walls themselves.

Add Israel’s collapsing standing across much of the world, and the picture is of a superpower that will have to rebalance who it leans on in the region. 

The Makkah pact is what that rebalancing looks like from the other side.

Regional level: Pakistan comes of age

The regional story is, above all, a story about Pakistan.

Its brief conflict with India in May was a hinge. 

Islamabad emerged from it looking like a serious, mature military actor rather than a perpetual crisis state — and it emerged with something else made visible: that Beijing would stand with it. 

Whoever fights Pakistan, the May episode suggested, is also, in some measure, fighting China. That recalculation has quietly shifted how Washington weighs an India-centric approach to the region.

Then Pakistan did something harder still. Even as it fought on its eastern border, it played mediator on its western one, hosting the US–Iran talks in Islamabad. 

To straddle war and peacemaking at once — grit in one hand, diplomacy in the other — is the mark of a state that has learned to operate in the grey zone rather than merely survive it. 

That same maturity is what lets it sign a grand collective-defence declaration and, simultaneously, keep its actual commitments studiously undefined.

The regional dividends compound. The real reason Riyadh has stepped back from normalising with Israel has a lot to do with Gaza: the genocide there, and the rogue conduct that has defined Israel’s regional posture ever since, have stripped away whatever space the Abraham Accords framework once offered. 

No Saudi leadership can extend recognition while those images remain fresh and a Palestinian state recedes further from reach — and a kingdom that cannot lean on an Israel-centric, American-brokered order has every incentive to build security arrangements of its own. 

Turkiye brings a fast-maturing defence industry — and its own sharpening hostility with Israel over Syria, which gives Ankara its own reasons to want strategic depth. And crucially, none of this could have happened without at least a tacit nod from Washington, which has been openly demanding that its wealthiest allies carry more of their own weight. 

The US might perceive that a pact which lets the Gulf self-insure while presumably keeping Iran in check is not a defeat for American interests. In a narrow sense, it is exactly the burden-sharing Washington keeps asking for.

Other angle: an Iran that comes out ahead

Now imagine the war ends with Iran essentially intact. 

Sanctions lifted, negotiations reopened, and control of Hormuz effectively back in Tehran’s hands, jointly managed with Oman. In that scenario — which the current Iran–Oman–US track is edging toward — Iran emerges not chastened but emboldened. Its resilience, already formidable, only multiplies. 

A chokehold on Hormuz is, in leverage terms, as good as a weapon of last resort.

Outwardly, Iran is not threatening its neighbours over the pact; it has offered a measured, even positive response. 

But the pact is also, quietly, a message to Tehran: should you come out of this conflict with more teeth, here is a standing counterweight. It is deterrent signalling aimed at a future Iran, not just the present one. On the other hand, a pragmatic Iran could benefit from this pact by mending relations with Saudi Arabia, consequently strengthening the emerging regional security and stability matrix.

Pressure on India — and its limits

For New Delhi, a coordinated Pakistan–Turkiye–Saudi bloc raises the prospect of diplomatic, trade and connectivity pressure. 

But the pressure has ceilings. Riyadh and Ankara are unlikely to involve themselves substantively in a South Asian quarrel; the constant in India’s calculations remains China. 

Pakistan, for its part, can turn its army’s two-front preoccupation into an asset — a reason to stay out of entanglements beyond its neighbourhood. 

And on the one question that could fracture the whole arrangement — a direct Saudi–Iran confrontation — Pakistan is in no position to take sides, and knows it.

It is tempting to read Makkah pact as the first brick of a broader Muslim unity. Ideally, it may prove to be exactly that. But ideally is the operative word. 

For now this is a scaffolding of ambiguity — a pact whose genius is that it deters without committing, signals without spending, and unites three powers around a promise none of them may ever have to keep.

For now.

– Dr Ansar Jamil is Head of the Department of International Studies at the Centre for International Peace and Stability (CIPS), NUST, Islamabad, where he specialises in Defence and Strategic Studies. He holds a PhD in Defence and Strategic Studies from Quaid-i-Azam University and previously taught at the National Defence University. His research focuses on South and Central Asian Security, Comparative Strategic Cultures, Deterrence and evolving International Security paradigms.