Commentary Archive

Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and the emerging contest over Pakistan's regional military reach Pakistan's latest missile test may be telling us something about a confrontation that has yet to take shape. On 13 October, Pakistan successfully tested the Fatah-2 Extended Range ballistic missile, showcasing what its military describes as an improved ability to engage deep targets and overcome missile defences. The test arrives at a consequential moment. Saudi Arabia is facing increasingly serious attacks from Yemen's Houthis. The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye is moving towards implementation. Afghanistan remains an unresolved security challenge for Islamabad, while Iran's confrontation with the United States and Israel continues to unsettle the wider region. We suspect the timing of Pakistan's missile test has greater significance than the announcement itself suggests. Pakistan may be preparing to demonstrate that its expanding regional commitments are backed by credible conventional military force. India remains the established reference point for much of Pakistan's missile development, yet the present circumstances introduce another possible audience: the Houthis in Yemen and those supporting their military capabilities. The precise range of Fatah-2 ER has not been publicly established. It would therefore be premature to assign the weapon a particular target geography. Still, the military message of greater reach and improved strike capability is difficult to separate entirely from the deteriorating security environment. Our assessment is that Pakistan may be entering a contest in which its adversaries seek to contain its ability to operate beyond South Asia, while Islamabad attempts to demonstrate that its new defence commitments are credible. The consequences could extend well beyond Yemen. The first pressure point: Yemen The Houthis have developed into a formidable military actor whose missile and drone capabilities can impose costs on states possessing considerably larger conventional forces. Their recent attacks against Saudi Arabia, particularly the devastating strikes on Riyadh's international airport, illustrate how difficult it can be to defend extensive civilian and economic infrastructure against repeated long-range attacks. The Makkah Alliance changes the calculations surrounding this confrontation. Pakistan has historically maintained close defence relations with Saudi Arabia. Under the new agreement, however, an armed attack against one member is regarded as an attack against all three. For the Houthis, Pakistan's involvement could eventually become a military problem requiring a response. A senior Houthi official has already warned Pakistan and Türkiye against military intervention. At present, Islamabad maintains that its forces in Saudi Arabia will defend the kingdom and will not cross into Yemen to launch offensive operations. The durability of that boundary deserves attention. If Houthi attacks continue despite expanded defensive assistance, pressure could grow for Pakistan to contribute more substantial capabilities. A confrontation that begins with air defence, intelligence sharing and deterrence could gradually generate demands for a wider military role. We see a credible possibility that the Houthis, particularly if supplied with more advanced weapons and external intelligence support, could seek to impose costs directly on Pakistani interests. Initially, Pakistani military personnel or assets stationed in Saudi Arabia may be the more accessible targets. But a direct strike against Pakistan itself should no longer be excluded from strategic planning. Such an attack would represent a major escalation. It would require the necessary long-range capabilities, political authorization and willingness to accept Pakistani retaliation. The Houthis have demonstrated considerable missile reach, although that does not establish their present ability to hit targets across Pakistan reliably. The more important question may be whether a decision to target Pakistan becomes attractive if Islamabad is perceived as a principal military obstacle to Houthi objectives. An adversary seeking to restrict the Makkah Alliance's regional influence could find it advantageous to make Pakistan increasingly concerned about its own security. This would be an attempt to alter Islamabad's calculations without having to defeat its armed forces. The second pressure point: Afghanistan The next development could emerge much closer to Pakistan's borders. Relations between Islamabad and the Afghan Taliban remain strained over militant activity, cross-border violence and accusations that Afghan territory is being used to facilitate attacks inside Pakistan. The timing of any serious escalation along this frontier would matter considerably. Suppose Pakistan becomes increasingly committed to protecting Saudi Arabia, deploying additional resources and potentially responding to Houthi attacks. At the same time, violence increases along its western frontier. Islamabad would then face a difficult allocation of military resources. It would need to maintain readiness against India, protect its western border and honour its commitments to Saudi Arabia, while also considering the possibility of retaliation against Pakistani interests in the Arabian Sea. The pressure could intensify without Afghanistan formally entering a regional conflict. Militant groups could exploit an opportunity created by Pakistan's external commitments. Other actors might see advantage in maintaining pressure along the frontier. Deliberate coordination with Yemen or Iran is another possibility, although there is presently insufficient public evidence to establish such an arrangement. Our concern is that these pressures could become mutually reinforcing even without a centrally directed campaign. For Pakistan, the operational consequences might be similar: greater military commitments abroad accompanied by growing insecurity at home. This presents an especially difficult problem because India's position need not change dramatically for the eastern frontier to remain a major consideration. Pakistan cannot disregard its principal conventional rival simply because its attention is increasingly required elsewhere. The objective of a containment effort would be to keep Pakistan's military capacity committed to defending its immediate interests, limiting the forces and political attention available for operations farther away. The wider contest: Iran, India, the UAE and Russia We do not expect every country concerned about Pakistan's expanding regional role to pursue identical objectives. Yet their interests could overlap in ways that constrain Islamabad. Iran has reason to be concerned about the emergence of a powerful Saudi-Pakistani-Turkish defence arrangement, especially while its own security position remains uncertain. India may view a more influential Pakistan, supported by Saudi financial resources and Turkish defence cooperation, as an unwelcome development. The UAE has established interests across Yemen and the Horn of Africa, including important relationships around Somaliland and the port of Berbera. A stronger Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani presence in this geography could introduce additional competition. Russia maintains relationships with Iran and India, while pursuing its own regional interests. Moscow may prefer arrangements that preserve its diplomatic and strategic influence rather than allowing a new defence grouping to gain disproportionate regional importance. These considerations do not establish the existence of a coordinated bloc against Pakistan. They do suggest that Pakistan's efforts to operate beyond its immediate neighbourhood could encounter resistance from actors whose interests differ, but whose preferred outcomes sometimes overlap. This is particularly relevant around the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Aden and Bab al-Mandeb. Control over access, maritime security and military relationships near these waterways carries strategic value extending far beyond the states situated along their coastlines. A Makkah Alliance capable of sustaining meaningful operations across this geography would represent a significant development in regional defence cooperation. Other countries would be expected to evaluate how that development affects their own positions. Somalia: Pakistan's possible counter-move One development that may receive insufficient attention is Pakistan's defence cooperation with Somalia. During August, Pakistan and Somalia moved to strengthen military relations, including cooperation involving training, institutional support and capacity development. These contacts preceded the latest escalation in Yemen, so they cannot be confidently described as a direct reaction to October's events. Yet their potential future significance should not be underestimated. Somalia occupies a strategically important position along the western Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. Türkiye already possesses a substantial defence relationship with Somalia, including arrangements for developing its naval capabilities. Saudi Arabia signed a military-cooperation agreement with Mogadishu earlier this year. Pakistan's growing relationship could eventually complement these existing connections. Consider what this might permit over time. If the Makkah Alliance develops a coordinated maritime role, Somalia could become relevant to training, surveillance, logistics and maritime security cooperation. Such arrangements would depend on Somali consent, actual access rights and the willingness of all participating governments to commit resources. No public evidence presently establishes a Pakistani combat base in Somalia or a joint plan to confront the Houthis from Somali territory. But this is precisely why the relationship deserves monitoring. If Pakistan's adversaries seek to restrict its regional military options, Islamabad may try to expand those options through diplomatic and defence relationships on the opposite side of the Gulf of Aden. Somalia could become part of that response. The resulting competition might extend from the Saudi-Yemeni border into the Horn of Africa, drawing existing regional rivalries into a broader contest over maritime influence. In that scenario, Pakistan would face decisions about how much responsibility it is prepared to assume beyond its established defence commitments. Somalia might offer new opportunities, but a larger regional presence could also create additional liabilities. Iran: the unresolved question behind the coming instability Iran presents a different and potentially more consequential uncertainty. Since the war involving Iran, the United States and Israel began in February, disagreements within the Iranian leadership have become increasingly visible. President Masoud Pezeshkian and other political figures have demonstrated interest in diplomatic engagement. Elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have pursued a more confrontational approach, including attacks and threats affecting Gulf states and commercial shipping. Reports of serious disagreements over the authorization of maritime attacks raise questions about how consistently Tehran can translate diplomatic decisions into military conduct. The apparent contradiction became particularly interesting when Iranian diplomatic representatives expressed openness to eventual participation in the Makkah defence arrangement. Iran's ambassador to Bangladesh indicated in September that Tehran would be willing to join if invited, although the Iranian Foreign Ministry had previously denied receiving a formal invitation. At one level, this suggested that at least some Iranian diplomatic representatives could envisage a future security relationship with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye. At another level, the Revolutionary Guards continued military activities that made such cooperation increasingly difficult to imagine. The central problem is whether diplomatic undertakings by Tehran can reliably govern the conduct of those directing military operations and relationships with armed groups. Iranian attacks on Gulf infrastructure and commercial shipping have often placed substantial costs on neighbouring countries, some of which were not the principal parties that initiated the war against Iran. There may be a strategic calculation behind this conduct: pressure on regional economies and external partners can generate leverage without requiring a direct confrontation on every occasion with the United States or Israel. Internal disagreement may also be contributing to inconsistent decisions. Both explanations remain relevant, and neither excludes the other. For Pakistan, the danger lies in the uncertainty. An Iranian leadership genuinely seeking accommodation might eventually regard the Makkah Alliance as a useful regional security partner. More confrontational elements could perceive that same arrangement as a threat requiring containment. Pakistan and Türkiye could therefore find themselves dealing with competing approaches originating from within Iran itself. Until Tehran demonstrates that its diplomatic and military authorities can uphold a consistent course, regional governments will struggle to judge which Iranian commitments can be relied upon. This uncertainty could prevent emerging security arrangements from settling into durable relationships. The next six months: a contest of moves and counter-moves My central forecast is that Pakistan's immediate future may be determined by the interaction of several developments rather than a single decisive confrontation. The sequence I consider most concerning begins with continued Houthi pressure on Saudi Arabia, prompting a greater Pakistani defensive role. If that involvement grows, the Houthis could expand their threats against Pakistani military interests. In a more dangerous scenario, a direct attack on Pakistani territory could follow. Pakistan might then face intensified violence along its Afghan frontier, whether through opportunistic militant activity or more deliberate external encouragement. At the same time, Islamabad could seek to preserve its regional influence by deepening its defence relationships in Somalia and strengthening cooperation with Türkiye and Saudi Arabia. India, Iran, the UAE and Russia would each reassess their interests as the contest develops. Their responses might include military cooperation with regional partners, diplomatic pressure or efforts to restrict the growing influence of competing states. A significant escalation is possible, but it is not inevitable. Pakistan could maintain a defensive role that discourages direct retaliation. The Houthis could determine that attacking Pakistani forces would invite unacceptable costs. Iran might choose meaningful restraint, while diplomatic efforts could reduce pressure around Saudi Arabia and the maritime routes. These are serious alternatives to the more confrontational forecast. For now, the absence of a settled political arrangement and the frequency of military incidents make an extended period of uncertainty appear more likely than a rapid restoration of stability. The Middle East was already deeply affected by conflict before the latest war involving Iran. What appears to be changing is the extent to which previously separate confrontations are influencing decisions across South Asia, the Gulf and the Horn of Africa. For the Makkah Alliance, this could become its first major test of practical durability. Its members possess considerable military capabilities. Whether they can employ those capabilities while preserving their own national security priorities remains to be demonstrated. Pakistan, in particular, faces a difficult question. Can it help defend Saudi Arabia, preserve deterrence against India and manage its Afghan frontier while assuming a more influential military role across West Asia? The answer may determine how far the Makkah Alliance can develop beyond its original defence commitments. It may also determine whether Pakistan becomes a decisive contributor to a new regional security arrangement or finds its expanding responsibilities increasingly difficult to sustain. The next phase is unlikely to produce an immediate or decisive winner. My expectation is a prolonged contest in which military tests, limited deployments, threats of retaliation and new defence relationships alter the choices available to each participant. The developments that receive the least public attention today may prove particularly consequential in the months ahead. Evidence, assessment and what to watch This article is a strategic foresight assessment, not a claim that the scenarios described are established plans. The following review distinguishes verified developments from deductions and forecasts. Evidence cutoff: 14 October 2026. 1. Pakistan's Fatah-2 ER test Established: Pakistan announced a successful test on 13 October, describing enhanced long-range precision-strike capabilities. No precise range was disclosed. Assessment: The test may serve a broader deterrent purpose during the Yemen crisis, alongside Pakistan's established India-oriented defence planning. Unproven: That Yemen was the principal intended audience, or that Fatah-2 ER can independently strike targets thousands of kilometres away. Source: Pakistan's official Radio Pakistan announcement, 13 October 2026. 2. Pakistani participation and Houthi retaliation Established: The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement was signed on 7 August. Defence cooperation has subsequently moved towards implementation. Houthi officials have warned Pakistan and Türkiye against intervening. Pakistan's Foreign Office stated on 9 October that its forces would not cross into Yemen to conduct offensive operations. Assessment: Greater Pakistani military involvement could increase the risk of Houthi retaliation against Pakistani personnel or interests. Unproven: Any confirmed Houthi operational plan to attack mainland Pakistan. Sources: Pakistan's Foreign Ministry statement, 9 October Foreign Office briefing and reported Houthi warning. 3. Afghanistan as an additional pressure point Established: Pakistan continues to report serious cross-border militant threats and accuses groups operating from Afghanistan of conducting attacks. Afghan authorities reject Islamabad's accusations. Assessment: An escalation along the Afghan frontier could significantly restrict Pakistan's willingness to expand military commitments elsewhere. Unproven: Coordination between Afghan actors and the Houthis to constrain Pakistan. Source: Associated Press, 12 October 2026. 4. Pakistan's Somalia relationship Established: Pakistan and Somalia have expanded defence cooperation. Türkiye has an existing ten-year naval development framework with Somalia, while Saudi Arabia signed a separate military agreement with Mogadishu in February 2026. Assessment: These relationships could support future maritime cooperation involving Makkah Alliance members. Unproven: Pakistani basing rights, an operational trilateral deployment arrangement or a confirmed Somalia-based response to the Houthis. Sources: Pakistan-Somalia defence discussions, Somalia's official Türkiye defence framework and Saudi-Somali defence agreement. 5. Iran's internal disagreements Established: Iranian political leaders have publicly advocated diplomatic engagement while the IRGC has continued confrontational military activity. Reporting has documented serious disputes between political and military authorities. Iranian diplomatic representatives have also expressed conditional openness towards the Makkah arrangement. Assessment: Disagreements over the conduct of military operations may obstruct diplomatic settlements and generate contradictory Iranian responses to the alliance. Unproven: A unified Iranian decision to attack Pakistan or Türkiye, or a confirmed plan to use the Houthis against Pakistan. Sources: Reuters on Iran's leadership divisions, Reuters on renewed maritime pressure, 14 October and Iranian ambassador's comments on the Makkah arrangement. 6. The developments that would materially strengthen this forecast Confirmation of an expanded Pakistani military role, particularly offensive operations in Yemen. Houthi threats specifying Pakistani territory or deployed forces, followed by demonstrated hostile action. Sustained escalation along the Afghan frontier while Pakistan increases its regional deployments. New maritime-access or operational agreements involving Pakistan and Somalia. Evidence of coordinated military or diplomatic pressure against Pakistan by otherwise separate regional actors. Further divergence between Iranian diplomatic commitments and actions taken by its military authorities. New Makkah Alliance decisions clarifying the scope of collective military assistance and the authority governing deployments. Forecast status: The risk of multiple simultaneous pressures on Pakistan is supported by existing security developments. A coordinated regional effort to contain Pakistan, a Houthi strike on Pakistani territory, and Somalia becoming an operational counterweight remain speculative scenarios.

The fighting in Yemen is giving the Makkah Alliance its first operational test barely two months after Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye signed the agreement on 7 August 2026. On 5 October, the three governments agreed to move immediately on their collective-defence commitments and the rapid deployment of forces and capabilities to Saudi Arabia. What happens when this crisis ends may matter even more than what happens during it. A short summary of where each founder could come out of this Saudi Arabia could emerge with a functioning regional defence mechanism, stronger air and missile defence cooperation and greater freedom from relying on a single outside security provider. The danger is ending the war while leaving the Houthis capable of periodically holding Saudi airports, energy infrastructure and investment confidence at risk. Pakistan could establish itself as a serious Gulf security provider while opening further space for defence exports and Saudi investment. It also has the most difficult political balancing act because of Iran, the 2015 Yemen precedent and the absence of a comparable parliamentary vote this time. Türkiye has potentially the lowest-risk route. Air defence, ISR, electronic warfare, drones and technical support can deepen its influence and defence-industrial relationship with Riyadh without taking ownership of the Yemen war. Its problem begins if a long conflict makes that limited role impossible to maintain. If there is no clear outcome, the Alliance may actually become militarily more integrated, but at the cost of being increasingly identified with an open-ended Yemen confrontation and, potentially, an anti-Iran security bloc. Saudi Arabia has the most to gain, and the most to lose For Riyadh, a successful outcome does not necessarily require conquering Houthi-held northern Yemen. A much more realistic strategic outcome would be the restoration of reliable security around Bab el-Mandeb, the cessation of attacks on Saudi territory, and a political arrangement that makes renewed attacks significantly more costly. That would allow Saudi Arabia to finish the crisis with something it did not possess when the confrontation restarted: a functioning collective-defence mechanism involving two large regional militaries. Pakistan already had about 8,000 personnel stationed in Saudi Arabia under earlier arrangements when the Makkah agreement was signed. Türkiye is now discussing air defence, electronic warfare, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and other technical support. Hakan Fidan has simultaneously ruled out Turkish participation in offensive operations inside Yemen. If the fighting stops after those mechanisms have been established, Riyadh could retain much of the military cooperation after the immediate emergency disappears. Shared radar information, integrated air-defence planning, joint exercises, logistics arrangements, communications procedures and permanent liaison structures are considerably easier to build when three militaries have already had to work together under actual pressure. There is also a strong economic reason for Saudi Arabia to bring this conflict to a controlled end. Saudi aviation handled about 140.9 million passengers in 2025, while the national aviation strategy is targeting 330 million passengers by 2030. Yet on 8 October alone, more than 275 flights at Riyadh airport were cancelled, several international carriers suspended services, and a parked Saudia aircraft was badly damaged after the latest attack. That tells us something important about modern deterrence. The Houthis do not need to destroy Riyadh airport to impose a strategic cost. Repeated disruption can affect airlines, insurance, tourism, international business travel and perceptions of risk across an economy that is deliberately trying to make aviation, tourism, logistics and international investment central to its future. Saudi Arabia was already the world's eighth-largest military spender in 2025 at an estimated $83.2 billion, or roughly 6.5% of GDP according to SIPRI. Yet defence expenditure alone cannot eliminate the economic consequences of repeated low-cost missile and drone attacks. This may push Riyadh toward something more consequential after the war: a much deeper Saudi-Pakistani-Turkish air-defence industrial relationship. Cheap interceptors, counter-drone systems, electronic warfare and layered defence may become more valuable to Saudi Arabia than simply purchasing additional quantities of very expensive long-range interceptors. A PAC-3 interceptor costs roughly $4–5 million, and global Patriot inventories are already under pressure from several simultaneous conflicts. If the crisis produces joint production and shared technology rather than another cycle of emergency purchases, Saudi Arabia may emerge with a more sustainable defence model. The Saudi risk is equally clear. A ceasefire that stops the shooting but leaves the Houthis with an intact long-range strike capability may simply recreate the problem a few years later. Riyadh could then have spent heavily, re-entered Yemen and exposed its civilian infrastructure without permanently reducing the threat. Pakistan may discover that its biggest opportunity is not actually combat Pakistan has a different opportunity. It has spent decades maintaining military links with Saudi Arabia, but the present crisis could move Pakistan from being primarily a bilateral Saudi security partner into the role of a wider Gulf defence provider. That has economic consequences. Reuters reported in January that Pakistan was discussing weapons sales with 13 countries, with six to eight negotiations at an advanced stage. The JF-17, priced at roughly $30–40 million, has become central to Islamabad's effort to offer lower-cost military platforms to states that cannot or do not want to depend entirely on Western suppliers. Saudi Arabia was among the countries Reuters identified as having held discussions. A credible defensive performance in Saudi Arabia could strengthen that commercial proposition, particularly in air defence, drones, aircraft, training and military advisory services. Pakistan also has a very large civilian economic stake in Saudi stability. Saudi Arabia accounted for $7.09 billion, or 23.4%, of Pakistan's workers' remittances during July-March FY2026. In May alone, Pakistani workers in Saudi Arabia sent home more than $1 billion. So Islamabad's Saudi relationship is simultaneously military, financial and social. Yet Pakistan also carries political risks that Türkiye currently does not carry to the same degree. In April 2015, Pakistan's parliament voted against joining the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen. In 2026, Islamabad has agreed to additional deployments without another parliamentary vote. Reuters reported on 8 October that opposition figures are now calling for parliamentary scrutiny, while key details of troop numbers, command arrangements and costs remain undisclosed. Iran adds another constraint. Only weeks ago Pakistan was still delivering messages between Riyadh and Tehran and trying to preserve a mediating role. Reuters reported that Pakistani officials were concerned about moving from intermediary to participant, especially while Pakistan also faces security pressures along its western provinces and maintains forces opposite India. That creates an interesting possibility after the Yemen fighting stops. Pakistan may gain more strategically by helping negotiate the exit than it would by becoming deeply involved in offensive operations. A Pakistan that can credibly defend Saudi Arabia while still speaking to Tehran would possess a diplomatic role few countries have. A Pakistan identified directly with sustained attacks inside Yemen would have a much harder time occupying that space. Türkiye may have designed itself the most controlled position Türkiye's contribution deserves to be considered separately because Ankara is approaching the crisis differently. Fidan has now publicly defined Türkiye's boundary. Ankara is prepared to help defend Saudi Arabia, particularly through air defence, electronic warfare and technical capabilities, while Turkish forces will not be sent into another country to conduct offensive attacks. Parliament has also yet to complete ratification of the Makkah agreement. For Türkiye, this could produce significant gains with relatively limited direct exposure. Its defence industry exported around $10 billion in 2025, more than three times the 2021 level, and now supplies close to 40 countries. Reuters reported in June that Ankara wants to double defence exports again within two years. Saudi Arabia is already an important customer. The 2023 Bayraktar Akıncı agreement was described by Baykar at the time as the largest defence and aviation export contract in Turkish history and included industrial cooperation and localisation. A post-war relationship built around Saudi-Turkish counter-drone technology, sensors, electronic warfare, air defence and local production would therefore continue a relationship that already existed before the Makkah Alliance. Türkiye could also gain operational experience and interoperability with Pakistani and Saudi forces without assuming responsibility for Yemen's ground war. The risk appears if the conflict refuses to end. At some stage Ankara would face increasingly difficult questions about how far collective defence extends, what parliament has actually authorised and whether protecting Saudi Arabia requires actions outside Saudi territory. A limited parliamentary mandate could also create a practical imbalance inside the Alliance if Pakistan and Saudi Arabia carry substantially more direct military risk. That would not necessarily damage the pact, but it would force the founders to decide whether collective defence requires equal exposure or simply complementary contributions. And then there is the uncomfortable scenario where nobody really wins A prolonged war with no decisive outcome could produce the strangest result of all. It might strengthen the Makkah Alliance militarily while weakening the strategic position of its members. Repeated attacks would force the three militaries to cooperate more closely. Joint air-defence cells, intelligence sharing, aircraft identification, logistics, interceptor allocation, communications and command procedures would have to become routine rather than theoretical. In that sense, months of pressure could institutionalise the Alliance faster than years of peacetime meetings ever could. But the cost would rise continuously. For Saudi Arabia, the burden would increasingly move from the battlefield into aviation, investment, tourism and infrastructure. Saudi stocks have already recorded six consecutive weeks of losses amid the wider Gulf conflict, while companies in Riyadh have instructed employees to work remotely during attacks. For Pakistan, a temporary deployment could gradually become an open-ended overseas commitment. The 2015 parliamentary precedent would become harder to avoid, its relationship with Iran more difficult to manage, and existing military pressures at home would remain. For Türkiye, a prolonged conflict would steadily narrow the space between providing technical assistance and becoming operationally indispensable to Saudi defence. Ankara's carefully drawn defensive boundary would face repeated practical tests. There is also a wider institutional danger. If the first year of the Makkah Alliance becomes dominated entirely by Yemen and Iran, outside countries may begin to see the pact primarily through that conflict. That could matter later when the founders discuss expansion. A collective-defence organisation designed to address a range of threats is easier for additional states to consider than one perceived as requiring automatic participation in an unresolved Yemen-Iran confrontation. The post-war question may therefore be more important than the war itself There are several plausible endings. A negotiated ceasefire after Saudi-backed forces secure the Bab el-Mandeb approaches could leave the founders with an alliance that has been operationally tested without becoming responsible for governing Yemen. A frozen conflict could leave Saudi Arabia permanently strengthening its air defences while Pakistan and Türkiye maintain recurring deployments and support. A widening war involving verified Pakistani or Turkish offensive operations inside Yemen would produce a very different institution, one with considerably larger domestic, diplomatic and legal consequences. And a long stalemate could create something nobody originally planned: a permanent multinational air-defence mission protecting Saudi territory from an adversary that remains capable of periodically restarting the confrontation. The measure of success after Yemen will therefore extend well beyond territory captured or missiles intercepted. For Saudi Arabia, it will be whether the Kingdom becomes safer enough for its economic transformation to continue without permanent wartime conditions. For Pakistan, it will be whether it can become a credible regional security provider without sacrificing its diplomatic room with Iran or creating an open-ended military commitment that becomes difficult to defend domestically. For Türkiye, it will be whether defensive involvement translates into deeper political and industrial influence while the limits Fidan has publicly established remain intact. And for the Alliance itself, the real test will come when the immediate emergency passes. If Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye can convert wartime cooperation into permanent planning, interoperable defence and a credible mechanism for preventing the next crisis, Yemen may eventually be remembered as the event that forced a very young alliance to mature unusually quickly. If the fighting simply continues without a political end state, the opposite risk grows with every month. The Alliance could become highly experienced at managing a war that none of its founders can actually bring to an end.

Debate over reforming the UN Security Council usually returns to the same question: which countries should receive new permanent seats? India, Brazil, Germany and Japan have long argued for permanent membership. Africa is demanding permanent representation of its own. Arab states, the wider Islamic world, Latin America and other underrepresented constituencies have also questioned whether a Council designed around the balance of power in 1945 can continue to claim adequate global representation. There may be another way of approaching the problem. Instead of giving permanent membership to additional countries, what if the right to representation were permanent, while the country occupying the seat could change? This is no longer merely a theoretical idea. During the 2026 UN negotiations on Security Council reform, the co-chairs introduced a proposal for “fixed regional seats.” Under the proposal, seats would be allocated regionally, while individual states would occupy them for longer, renewable terms. The intention is to combine continuity with periodic accountability rather than creating another category of states holding the same privilege indefinitely. United Nations That changes the discussion considerably. The Security Council could recognise that Africa deserves continuing representation without deciding that one African country should possess that privilege forever. The same logic could eventually be considered for Latin America and the Caribbean, the Arab world or other constituencies whose representation remains limited. Africa is already pushing the debate in this direction, although its formal position goes further. The African Union continues to demand at least two permanent African seats with full privileges and five additional non-permanent seats. Its argument is difficult to dismiss: an entire continent of more than fifty states remains excluded from permanent membership while a large share of the Council's work concerns African conflicts and security issues. African Union The broader reform process is also beginning to recognise representation beyond conventional geographic categories. The UN's Pact for the Future committed states to making the Council more representative and explicitly advanced discussion around underrepresented regions and cross-regional groups. Arab states, OIC members and small island developing states have all featured in that debate. United Nations Why permanent national seats create another problem Giving more countries permanent seats would make the Council more representative in the short term. It could also freeze another moment in history. A country considered indispensable in 2026 may have a very different demographic, economic or military position in 2076. Governments change. Regional influence changes. Alliances change. New powers rise. Yet permanent membership, once granted, would be extraordinarily difficult to reconsider. That is one of the weaknesses of simply expanding the existing model. Reform intended to correct the geopolitical settlement of 1945 could produce another settlement that later generations inherit regardless of how the world changes. A permanent regional entitlement with rotating representation offers another possibility. The seat remains permanent but the occupant does not. A region might select one state for a longer term, perhaps four, six or eight years. That state could be eligible for renewal if the constituency wanted continuity, or another member could take its place. Representation becomes durable without ownership becoming permanent. There would also be an element of accountability that the current permanent category largely lacks. A state representing a wider constituency would know that its position could eventually be reviewed. Could BRICS, the SCO or the Makkah Alliance eventually have seats? This is where the idea becomes more complicated. Today's international order is increasingly organised through institutions that do not fit neatly into geography. BRICS stretches across continents. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation connects much of Eurasia. The GCC coordinates Gulf states. The OIC spans more than fifty countries. The European Union has developed extensive common foreign-policy machinery. The Makkah Alliance is beginning to organise collective defence among Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye. It is reasonable to ask whether institutions like these should eventually acquire a formal voice in global security governance. A permanent Security Council seat directly belonging to each organisation probably creates more problems than it solves. Membership overlaps immediately become difficult. China and Russia are already permanent Security Council members and also belong to BRICS and the SCO. Pakistan belongs to the SCO, OIC and Makkah Alliance. Saudi Arabia sits within the GCC, OIC and Makkah Alliance. Türkiye is simultaneously a NATO member, OIC member and Makkah Alliance founder. Which institution would represent them? And what happens when those institutions disagree? Giving every important grouping a separate seat could eventually produce more duplication than representation. There is a more workable role for them. Regional and cross-regional organisations could help form positions, nominate candidates, coordinate voting and decide which member should occupy a wider constituency seat. The organisation gains influence over representation without becoming a new sovereign member of the Security Council. For a young institution such as the Makkah Alliance, this distinction matters. It would make little sense today to argue that a newly created three-state defence arrangement deserves its own permanent UN seat. It is much easier to imagine such institutions gradually becoming part of the machinery through which states organise their positions on international security. If the Makkah Alliance eventually expands substantially, develops permanent institutions and represents a meaningful security constituency across several regions, its diplomatic weight would naturally increase. That still would not require its own chair at the Security Council. Influence and representation are not necessarily the same thing. There is also a constitutional obstacle The existing UN Charter is built around member states. Article 23 states that the Security Council consists of members of the United Nations, meaning sovereign states rather than organisations such as BRICS, the AU or NATO. Any deep reform of Council membership would therefore require changes to the Charter and approval under the UN's amendment procedures. A regional seat occupied by an elected state fits the existing logic much more comfortably than a seat occupied directly by an international organisation. This helps explain why the 2026 fixed-regional-seat proposal still envisages states occupying the seats in their national capacity, even though the seats themselves would be allocated regionally. United Nations The representation question may matter more than the country question For decades, Security Council reform has often sounded like a competition between national candidates. India versus Pakistan's objections. Brazil seeking Latin American representation. Germany and Japan seeking recognition of their economic and diplomatic weight. African states debating how permanent African representation should work. Those debates matter, but they can obscure a larger institutional question. Perhaps the world does not need to decide which additional countries deserve permanent privilege. Perhaps it needs to decide which parts of the international community should never again be excluded from representation. That produces a different model. Africa could possess permanent representation without permanently assigning Africa's voice to one country. Latin America and the Caribbean could receive continuing representation while allowing leadership to move among capable states. Arab or other cross-regional representation could be designed around agreed constituencies rather than another state receiving an irreversible status. Regional organisations could help select representatives and develop common positions. Emerging institutions such as BRICS, the SCO or, over time, the Makkah Alliance could influence that process without requiring separate permanent seats of their own. There would still be difficult questions about veto rights, eligibility, rotation periods and who qualifies to represent whom. Those questions are probably easier to revisit than permanent national privilege once it has been granted. The UN itself now speaks of a Security Council that needs to become more representative, democratic and accountable. United Nations A Council redesigned around permanent representation rather than permanent ownership would take that principle seriously. The question for the next phase of reform may therefore be less: Which country deserves the next permanent seat? And more: Who deserves permanent representation, and who should be trusted to occupy that seat on their behalf? That may produce a Security Council better suited to a world where power is increasingly exercised through regions, coalitions and institutions rather than by a small number of states acting alone.

The first serious crisis is beginning to reveal how the pact may work before its permanent institutions are fully mature. Existing bilateral defence channels can carry immediate functions while the trilateral framework provides political direction, common thresholds and a wider basis for collective deterrence. For much of the past week, the public debate around the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement has centred on a visible question. Will Pakistani or Turkish forces enter the conflict against the Houthis. That question is understandable, but it may also be increasingly incomplete. The most consequential developments are taking place below the threshold of a declared three-state military intervention. Pakistan has moved from describing operationalisation as being at an early stage in late August to stating on 17 September that it is committed to implementing the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement while declining to disclose when, where, how or what force might be used because those matters involve operational confidentiality. In the same briefing, Islamabad separately confirmed that its bilateral Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Saudi Arabia is already operational and that some force deployments exist under that relationship. Those statements do not establish that Pakistani forces have begun operations under the trilateral Makkah agreement. They reveal something that may prove more important over time. The founders do not need to wait for a fully developed trilateral military command before the alliance can acquire operational effect. The alliance already possesses bilateral inheritance The Makkah Agreement did not join three militaries with no prior relationship. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia entered the pact with decades of defence cooperation and a separate mutual-defence framework. Türkiye and Pakistan already possessed mature military and defence-industrial ties. Türkiye and Saudi Arabia had also expanded defence-industry cooperation before the August agreement. The founding declaration itself explicitly built the new pact upon longstanding strategic ties and defence cooperation among the three states. This creates an unusual starting point. A conventional alliance normally has to build common institutions before it can translate political commitments into military activity. The Makkah Alliance can potentially move in the opposite direction. Existing bilateral relationships can carry parts of the military burden while the Strategic Political and Defence Committee, Secretariat and future joint bodies gradually connect those activities at the trilateral level. Makkah Alliance can describe this as bilateral inheritance. It means the new institution inherits capabilities, relationships, agreements and military familiarity that already existed between its members. The task is therefore less about creating every capability from the beginning and more about determining which existing channels should become part of a common defence framework. The present Saudi crisis may be the first time that distinction matters operationally. Public language is moving closer to implementation wording used by Pakistani officials has changed materially during the past three weeks. On 27 August, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry described operationalisation of the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement as remaining at an early stage. After the inaugural committee meeting in Istanbul, the emphasis shifted toward institution-building, a Saudi-hosted Secretariat and sequential meetings among the three founders. By 16 September, Pakistan's military spokesman was describing the agreement as an instrument for collective deterrence and defence while stressing that it had no regional ambitions. Türkiye's foreign minister separately described attacks on Saudi Arabia as unacceptable and linked Turkish solidarity to the new defence agreement. A day later, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry was discussing implementation using operational vocabulary including force, objectives, modes and confidentiality. There is still no public evidence of a formal trilateral combat operation. There is also no published implementing instrument setting out exactly how the collective-defence obligation is activated. The significance lies in where the discussion has moved. Officials are increasingly addressing the form of implementation rather than only explaining the legal character of the pact. Scarce capabilities may matter more than visible force The Saudi military problem is also becoming more specific. Recent reporting indicates that Riyadh has sought air-defence assistance from several partners including Pakistan, Egypt, France and Britain as pressure on interceptor inventories grows. No country had publicly committed combat support at the time of that reporting. Separate reporting on 18 September describes a more complicated capability problem. Saudi Arabia retains considerable combat-air capacity, yet outside specialists cited by The National identified intelligence, satellite support and electronic collection as important requirements for generating stronger targeting information. Western personnel were reportedly discussing air-defence assistance inside Saudi Arabia while governments remained reluctant to enter the Yemen war directly. This points toward a form of collective defence that is easy to miss when attention is concentrated on combat deployments. An alliance can change a battlefield without placing another country's fighter aircraft over Yemen. Interceptor replenishment, radar integration, intelligence sharing, electronic surveillance, satellite access, logistics, maintenance, force protection and maritime-domain awareness can increase the defensive capacity of the attacked state while leaving national command intact. Makkah Alliance's existing Collective-Defence Escalation Ladder places many of these activities within Level 3 material support. The present evidence increasingly makes that level more relevant than it was when the model was first published. The strategic question is becoming one of capability substitution. When a founder begins exhausting a scarce military capability, can another founder replace, reinforce or extend that capability before the shortage becomes a strategic vulnerability. That is a considerably harder test of an alliance than issuing a statement of solidarity. A federated model may be forming Pakistan is simultaneously supporting Saudi security and using its relationship with Iran in efforts to restrain further Houthi attacks. Financial Times reporting on 18 September said Pakistani military leadership had pressed Iranian officials over the threat to Saudi Arabia while maintaining the possibility that Islamabad could be required to defend the Kingdom if formally requested. Türkiye brings a different set of relationships, military capabilities and industrial assets. Saudi Arabia remains the state directly managing the current theatre. Each founder therefore approaches the same crisis from a different position, and uniform action would waste much of that advantage. A more plausible early model is distributed responsibility. Saudi Arabia retains the primary territorial-defence role. Pakistan can contribute through established military channels, deterrent weight and diplomatic access that Riyadh does not possess in the same form. Türkiye can contribute through political backing, military interoperability and its defence-industrial base. The trilateral institution can connect those contributions without requiring each state to perform the same task. Makkah Alliance can describe this emerging possibility as federated activation. The term is analytical and does not appear in the published agreement. It describes an alliance in which members retain national command and use different existing channels to deliver different parts of a shared defence requirement. The central measure becomes the combined effect rather than identical participation. The absence of a joint war does not imply institutional inactivity Saudi Arabia's confrontation with the Houthis has intensified sharply. The Houthis have expanded their control along Yemen's Red Sea coast, Saudi territory has faced missile and drone attacks, and Saudi authorities say an attempted drone attack toward Makkah was intercepted. The Houthis deny that they targeted the holy city. Fighting inside Yemen has also displaced more than 100,000 people in recent weeks. At the same time, direct outside military intervention remains limited. The United States has declined a larger role against the Houthis and European governments appear reluctant to commit significant forces. This combination creates a revealing environment for the Makkah Alliance. The founders are being tested during a period when traditional external security providers are constrained, politically cautious or occupied elsewhere. The need for regional capacity is rising before the new trilateral institution has completed its own development, and that timing may accelerate institutional decisions that would otherwise have taken years. The first enduring products of the alliance could therefore emerge from present operational shortages. Air and missile defence coordination, intelligence exchange, common logistics, interceptor procurement, maritime surveillance and joint contingency planning all address requirements already visible in the current crisis. These are also areas that correspond closely with the Common Operational Requirements identified by Makkah Alliance across the three founders. The next test is whether temporary cooperation becomes repeatable There is a large difference between assistance provided during one emergency and an alliance acquiring permanent military utility. The founders have already created the Strategic Political and Defence Committee and agreed to establish a Secretariat in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan's Foreign Ministry says additional meetings will take place sequentially in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye to deepen the mechanisms created under the agreement. Those meetings now have a live operational case from which to work. Which intelligence can be shared rapidly, which air-defence assets can be moved, how interceptor shortages are replenished, how national command remains intact during collective support, how a request for assistance is transmitted, how maritime threats at Bab el-Mandeb are connected to attacks on Saudi territory, and how political consultation proceeds when one founder has diplomatic access to an actor another founder is confronting were previously institutional questions. The Saudi crisis is turning them into practical ones. The future value of the Makkah Alliance may therefore be decided well before anyone sees a common military formation carrying an alliance insignia. Its first durable achievement could be three states learning how to make their existing capabilities function as parts of a shared defence effort. Makkah Alliance assessment The available public evidence supports an assessment that the agreement is moving beyond its initial declaratory phase and toward practical implementation discussions. It does not establish that Türkiye or Pakistan have begun combat operations under the trilateral pact. The more consequential development is the interaction between the new trilateral institution and the founders' existing bilateral defence relationships. If those inherited relationships begin supplying intelligence, air defence, logistics, diplomacy and other specialised functions under common political direction, the Makkah Alliance could develop without first building a centralised military command. That would give the agreement a distinctive operating model, with collective defence delivered through distributed national capabilities, connected by a common political framework and activated according to the requirement of the crisis. The first serious test of the Makkah Alliance may therefore be producing something more consequential than a decision over whether three states enter the same war. It may be revealing how the alliance intends to function.

Why the real significance of the Makkah Alliance may lie in what Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye build between crises The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement is easiest to understand through its most dramatic commitment. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye have agreed that an armed attack against one of them will be regarded as an attack against all three. That sentence gives the pact its political weight and explains why every new regional crisis immediately produces the same question about whether the Alliance has been activated. Less than a month after the agreement was signed in Makkah on 7 August, the three founders had already moved into an institutional phase. Their foreign ministers, defence ministers and senior military leadership met through the Strategic Political and Defence Committee. They agreed to establish a permanent Secretariat in Saudi Arabia, allocated the first three-year Secretary-General term to Pakistan, and set out further work on joint activities, defence-industry cooperation, technology development and production. These are not the features of a treaty that matters only when somebody is attacked. They are the beginnings of a structure intended to function between crises. The long-term importance of the Makkah Alliance may depend less on whether three militaries appear on the same battlefield and more on whether three national security systems gradually learn to work through institutions of their own. If political consultation begins feeding into military planning, if military requirements begin shaping common industrial programmes, and if those programmes create shared logistics, training and procurement, then the Alliance will have moved beyond mutual defence in a much more consequential way. The agreement is only the visible edge The founding commitment is clear enough. The public record establishes collective defence and a wider mandate for defence cooperation. What it does not provide is a complete operational manual explaining how every future crisis must be handled. The signed instrument has not been published in full, and the founders have not disclosed a single automatic formula that converts an attack into a predetermined military response. That uncertainty is sometimes treated as evidence that the agreement lacks substance. It is more useful to ask what the founders are doing with the space beneath the treaty language. The 31 August meeting offers an early answer. The founders did not limit their first institutional gathering to reaffirming that they would defend one another. They moved into administration, military coordination and industrial cooperation. The Secretariat gives the relationship a permanent centre. The Strategic Political and Defence Committee brings political, diplomatic and military leadership into the same framework. The industrial mandate creates a route through which cooperation can eventually become embedded in equipment, production and supply chains. A permanent alliance is not created by signing a document once. It is created when governments no longer need to invent a new method of working together every time something happens. The region already had many of the pieces Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye bring very different kinds of power into the same arrangement. Saudi Arabia brings financial capacity, energy weight, institutional hosting power and geography spanning the Gulf and Red Sea. Türkiye brings a large conventional military, NATO experience and a defence-industrial sector that has become increasingly capable of producing sophisticated systems domestically. Pakistan brings military scale, operational experience, South Asian strategic depth and an independent nuclear deterrent. These differences are often presented as if they automatically produce a formidable combined bloc. They do not. Capabilities that exist in three countries remain three separate sets of capabilities until institutions begin connecting them. Saudi money does not automatically finance Turkish or Pakistani defence programmes. Turkish technology does not automatically solve Saudi or Pakistani operational requirements. Pakistani military experience does not automatically become available to the other two founders during a crisis. Each connection requires political agreement, legal arrangements, procurement decisions, training, logistics and often years of institutional work. This also means that Pakistan's nuclear status should be treated with care. The presence of a nuclear-armed founder materially changes the strategic profile of the grouping, but the published record does not establish an automatic Pakistani nuclear guarantee to Saudi Arabia or Türkiye. The significance of Pakistan's deterrent should not be confused with treaty provisions that have never been made public. Makkah Alliance already treats that distinction as an evidentiary requirement rather than a matter of speculation. Economic integration has always had a security problem There is a larger reason this matters. A region can deepen trade, build ports, finance infrastructure, expand industrial investment and connect energy networks without becoming strategically autonomous. Economic integration creates assets. It does not automatically create the capacity to protect them. Ports depend on secure sea lanes. Pipelines depend on protected infrastructure. Investment depends on political stability. Supply chains depend on predictable access. Industrial projects depend on technology, logistics and communications that remain usable during crises. Once enough economic activity becomes interconnected, security stops being a separate subject. It becomes part of the infrastructure that allows everything else to function. The current Gulf and Red Sea crisis demonstrates the problem in unusually direct terms. Pressure around the Strait of Hormuz, attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure and Houthi advances along Yemen's Red Sea coast have placed several parts of the same economic system under stress at once. Saudi Arabia's energy security cannot be separated neatly from maritime security, air defence, critical infrastructure protection and regional diplomacy. Recent events have made that connection much harder to ignore. This is where the Makkah Alliance may eventually acquire a significance wider than its collective-defence clause. If the founders begin coordinating intelligence, maritime awareness, air and missile defence, logistics, military mobility and defence production, they are not merely preparing to honour a treaty during wartime. They are building some of the capabilities required to protect economic and strategic systems that increasingly cross national boundaries. The deeper question is whether the three states can gradually make themselves more capable of organising security together before any of those extreme tests arrives. Aligning Regional Ownership and Strategic Unity The founders themselves have used the language of regional ownership. That phrase should be taken seriously, but not stretched beyond what the evidence can bear. Regional ownership does not mean the disappearance of the United States, China, NATO or any other external relationship. Türkiye remains a NATO member. Saudi Arabia continues to maintain extensive defence relationships beyond the Makkah Alliance. Pakistan has developed a deliberately broad set of strategic partnerships and is unlikely to replace them with a single new alignment. Nothing in the published record suggests that the founders intend to build an isolated bloc. The more meaningful form of regional ownership is the ability to organise more of their own security before somebody else has to organise it for them. A state with only one credible route to military assistance has little room to manoeuvre. A state that can draw upon several relationships, including a regional framework in which it has institutional ownership, has more choices. Those choices translate into bargaining power even when the state continues working closely with outside powers. The significance of the Makkah Alliance should therefore not be measured by asking whether it replaces the existing security order. That is an unnecessarily absolute standard. A more useful question is whether it gives its members capabilities and options they previously lacked. Defence industry is where intent begins to acquire weight The decision to pursue defence-industry cooperation, joint technology development and production may prove to be one of the most important choices made during the Alliance's first month. The reason has little to do with symbolism. Industrial cooperation changes the physical structure of a relationship. A political declaration can be revised by another government. A jointly developed military system is much harder to unwind. Once countries begin financing, developing or producing the same capability, they create a chain of commitments that extends well beyond the original agreement. Factories are involved. Engineers become involved. Procurement budgets are committed. Personnel require training. Spare parts have to be produced. Equipment needs maintenance. Software needs updating. Ammunition and components have to remain available years after the first contract is signed. This is why the first genuinely trilateral defence programme will tell us more about the depth of the Alliance than another declaration of solidarity. The specific platform matters less initially than the arrangement behind it. A missile system, drone, naval platform, sensor, air-defence component or electronic-warfare programme could all become important. What we should be looking for is whether the project actually integrates contributions from the three founders and whether it exists because the Makkah framework made that integration possible. A programme in which Saudi capital finances development, Turkish or Pakistani industry provides technology and production, and all three militaries shape requirements would represent a different category of cooperation from three states simply buying equipment from one another. The current crisis is testing the plumbing as much as the promise The confrontation involving Saudi Arabia and the Houthis has understandably become the first public test of the collective-defence commitment. It is also an imperfect test if it is reduced to one question about whether Pakistani or Turkish forces enter Yemen. Pakistan said on 10 September that no military response under the pact was being discussed at that stage. Islamabad has simultaneously condemned attacks on Saudi Arabia and remained engaged in efforts to contain the wider regional escalation. The Alliance can become more active without moving immediately into direct collective warfare. Intelligence, surveillance, air and missile defence, maritime coordination, logistics, technical support and military planning all sit between political backing and combat intervention. Some forms of assistance can be highly consequential while remaining almost invisible to the wider public. We should watch whether the founders begin using the institutions they have created. We should watch whether consultation becomes quicker, whether operational information is shared, whether Saudi requirements are discussed collectively and whether any assistance begins moving through a recognisably trilateral channel rather than through relationships that existed before 7 August. That would tell us something important even if not a single Pakistani or Turkish aircraft conducts a strike inside Yemen. An alliance without a permanent enemy has a different problem to solve Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye have been careful not to define the agreement publicly around one named adversary. The published framework is defensive. Its stated purpose revolves around deterrence, sovereignty and collective defence rather than a declaration that the Alliance exists to confront Iran, Israel, India or any other specific state. This ambiguity frustrates anyone looking for a simple explanation of the pact. It may also give the arrangement room to develop. An alliance built around one permanent enemy inherits the future of that rivalry. If relations change, if the threat disappears or if members begin assessing that threat differently, the institution can lose the logic that originally held it together. The Makkah Alliance faces almost the reverse problem. Its founders already have very different threat environments. Pakistan's core security calculations are shaped by South Asia and its western frontier. Saudi Arabia's immediate environment includes the Gulf, Yemen, the Red Sea and the protection of energy infrastructure. Türkiye operates across another set of theatres involving Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea and NATO. What it does need is enough agreement about responsibility that a serious threat to one founder is understood by the others as requiring more than rhetorical sympathy. Saudi Arabia may interpret meaningful assistance differently from Pakistan. Türkiye may have a different threshold again. One government may expect intelligence and air defence in circumstances where another assumes consultation is sufficient. A future crisis could expose those differences quickly. It may be a gap between what one founder expects and what another believes it has promised. Expansion will reveal whether the founders have discipline A fourth or fifth member would increase the Alliance's apparent weight, widen its geography and reinforce the idea that the pact is developing beyond its founding core. The Makkah Alliance website already tracks different levels of interest and strategic proximity across the wider OIC space, while distinguishing formal government review from looser political discussion and relationships that fall well short of accession. A defence alliance does not simply acquire the armed forces of a new member. It acquires part of that state's strategic environment as well. New members bring borders, rivalries, domestic politics, constitutional restrictions and existing defence commitments. Their disputes do not remain neatly outside the institution after accession. They become part of the calculations that every existing member must now make. This is why enlargement should follow institutional development rather than substitute for it. The founding three need to know what their own commitment means before they multiply the number of governments interpreting it. They need a workable consultation mechanism before admitting states with additional crises to consult about. They need some understanding of assistance before extending that obligation across a much larger geography. The important measurement is not how quickly the map fills with new members. It is whether each additional member leaves the institution more capable than it was before. The evidence will be mundane before it becomes dramatic There is a tendency in geopolitical analysis to move too quickly from an interesting development to a sweeping conclusion. A new agreement becomes evidence of a new order. A diplomatic meeting becomes evidence of a permanent realignment. Every subsequent event is then interpreted through the same theory until the theory becomes impossible to disprove. If the Alliance is developing into a meaningful regional security layer, the evidence should accumulate in ways that can be observed. The Secretariat should begin carrying real administrative work between meetings. The Strategic Political and Defence Committee should establish a regular rhythm rather than appearing only during exceptional moments. Military exercises should begin translating political intent into practical familiarity. Intelligence and early-warning arrangements should deepen. Logistics should become easier. Communications and procedures should become more compatible. None of these developments would prove the existence of a new regional order on its own. Together they would show that the Alliance is acquiring institutional depth. The opposite evidence matters just as much. If the Secretariat remains largely ceremonial, if meetings fade after the first burst of political attention, if industrial cooperation remains almost entirely bilateral, and if serious crises continue to be handled outside the Alliance, then the larger interpretation should be revised. A new regional order is too large a claim but a new regional capacity is not There is a compelling story available in which the post-1990 international order retreats, American primacy declines and regional powers begin taking responsibility for a security environment previously organised largely from outside. Parts of that story may prove correct over time. The Makkah Alliance does not yet prove it. Saudi Arabia remains deeply connected to Western defence systems. Türkiye remains anchored in NATO even as it pursues an increasingly independent regional policy. Pakistan continues to balance relationships across several strategic directions. External powers retain enormous military, economic and diplomatic influence across the region. The stronger argument does not require any of those facts to disappear. Regional capacity can increase inside the existing international system. This kind of change is less dramatic than the arrival of a completely new order. It may also be much more realistic. Power shifts when states gain choices that were previously unavailable to them. Institutions matter because they turn those choices from occasional political opportunities into repeatable capabilities. If the Makkah Alliance succeeds, its most important contribution may be exactly that. The next year will tell us far more than the first month The first weeks of the Makkah Alliance have established intent. They have not yet established endurance. The next phase will be more revealing because the work becomes harder from here. The first Secretary-General will have to give the Secretariat purpose beyond its existence on paper. Future committee meetings will have to demonstrate that the founders can sustain a political and military rhythm once the novelty of the agreement fades. Joint activities will need to move from general language into exercises, training or practical coordination. Defence industry will provide an even harder measure. The first truly trilateral project would show that the three states are prepared to place money, technology and long-term military requirements inside the same arrangement. Crises will test another part of the system. They will show whether consultation is faster because the Alliance exists, whether assistance is easier to organise and whether the founders are gradually developing a shared understanding of what their collective-defence commitment requires. The Makkah Alliance does not yet constitute a regional security architecture. It would be premature to describe it that way. What now exists is more precise and, at this stage, more interesting. Three states with different security environments, different strategic relationships and different forms of national power have created a permanent framework through which those differences can begin to be connected. They have moved beyond the founding declaration into administration, political-military coordination and an explicit programme of industrial and technological cooperation. They have also chosen to describe part of that process through the language of regional ownership. If the founders use that time to build institutions, common capabilities, industrial relationships and habits of coordination that continue from one crisis to the next, then the Alliance will have done something more consequential than create another defence pact. It will have begun filling one of the most persistent gaps in regional power. Not a new order declared in advance, but the security capacity from which a more regionally organised order could eventually become possible.

Why the absence of Pakistani and Turkish forces in Yemen does not show that the Makkah Alliance has failed The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement is barely a month old, yet some commentary is already calling it a failure because Pakistan and Türkiye have not joined Saudi operations against the Houthis. That conclusion applies the wrong test to collective defence. Alliances are judged by what happens when obligations are invoked and assistance is required, not by whether every member immediately enters every military campaign of another member. The wrong test of alliance credibility The present argument against the Makkah Alliance usually begins from a visible absence. Saudi Arabia has been attacked by the Houthis and has carried out military action in Yemen. Pakistani and Turkish forces are not visibly conducting those operations. From that absence, critics infer that the collective-defence promise has already failed. The inference does not follow. The founding statement of 7 August 2026 says that an armed attack against one of the three states is to be regarded as an attack against all and describes the agreement as a means of strengthening collective deterrence and defence cooperation. Pakistan has separately stressed that the pact is defensive in nature and is directed at external aggression. Neither statement publishes a rule requiring all three militaries to enter combat immediately after every qualifying attack. The distinction is practical as much as legal. Collective defence creates an obligation to treat the security of the attacked member as a common concern. It does not erase national command, political judgement, geography or proportionality. Consultation may be enough at one stage. Intelligence, air defence or logistics may be required at another. Direct combat belongs at a much higher threshold. The first Strategic Political and Defence Committee meeting on 31 August reinforces this reading. The three governments committed themselves to further institutionalisation, stronger defence capability and greater cohesion among their armed forces, while also explicitly supporting de-escalation, restraint and peaceful resolution of crises. Those are the actions of states building a collective-defence mechanism, not states announcing an automatic war plan. Collective defence is a sequence of decisions Public discussion often treats an alliance as a binary arrangement: either a partner is fighting beside you or it has abandoned you. Mature defence relationships do not work that way. Between neutrality and direct intervention lies a large field of meaningful assistance, including diplomatic backing, intelligence exchange, surveillance, air and missile defence, logistics, weapons, maintenance, access, force protection, readiness measures and contingency planning. Makkah Alliance sets out this continuum in its five-level framework, The Makkah Alliance Escalation Ladder. The model moves from national containment to consultation and backing, then to material support, collective coercive posture and, only at the highest threshold, direct collective intervention. The full framework can be read here: Read The Makkah Alliance Escalation Ladder. The value of the ladder is that it separates activation from intervention. A pact can matter before allied aircraft appear over a battlefield. Political consultation can change an adversary’s expectations. Intelligence can improve warning. Air defence can reduce damage. Logistics can extend endurance. Force readiness can deter another attack. Direct intervention is therefore one possible outcome of collective defence, rather than the only evidence that collective defence exists. Defending Saudi Arabia is not the same decision as joining the war in Yemen The current Saudi-Houthi crisis exposes a second distinction that is being lost in much of the commentary. Defence of Saudi territory and participation in Saudi operations inside Yemen are related questions, but they are not identical questions. Pakistan could support the defence of Saudi territory through intelligence, air and missile defence, logistics or technical assistance without taking part in retaliatory strikes inside Yemen. Türkiye could make a similar distinction. Reuters reported on 9 September that Pakistani sources were describing any possible military role as defensive and confined to Saudi territory, while no decision had been made for Pakistan to participate in retaliatory strikes inside Yemen. On 10 September, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said that no military response under the pact was presently being discussed while reaffirming the country’s commitment to act under the agreement when required. Those facts do not show that the pact is inert. They show that the founders are distinguishing between the protection of a member and entry into an external theatre. That distinction is likely to matter far beyond the current crisis. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye each have their own neighbours, military relationships and regional interests. A durable collective-defence pact needs to protect members in serious circumstances without automatically converting every external operation of one founder into a war for the other two. The absence of Pakistani or Turkish aircraft over Yemen therefore proves only that direct collective intervention has not been chosen. It does not prove that Saudi Arabia requested such intervention, that the treaty required it, or that the partners would refuse a different form of assistance if the threat to Saudi territory became more severe. NATO is useful precisely because it disproves the binary test NATO provides a useful comparison when used carefully. Article 5 creates an obligation to assist an attacked ally, yet NATO’s own explanation is explicit that assistance may or may not involve armed force. Each ally determines the action it considers necessary in consultation with the others. Even NATO, with more than seven decades of institutions, planning procedures and military integration, does not operate on the principle that every member must automatically join every war involving another member. The 2026 Iran war illustrates the broader point about alliance behaviour, although it was not an Article 5 case. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said in March that NATO as an alliance would not join the U.S.-Israeli military campaign, while individual allies could provide enabling support. President Donald Trump later criticised NATO allies for refusing to join military operations and for resisting his calls to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. Several European governments openly declined direct participation while the fighting continued. That disagreement did not, by itself, extinguish NATO or prove that its collective-defence commitment had ceased to exist. It showed that alliance membership does not remove national judgement over whether and how to participate in a member’s external military campaign. The comparison matters because the Makkah Alliance is being judged by a harsher standard barely five weeks after signing than analysts normally apply to a defence alliance created in 1949. The stronger NATO comparison is therefore institutional rather than rhetorical. Alliances can remain credible while members contribute differently, decline particular operations, or reserve direct combat for circumstances that meet a higher threshold. Credibility is tested when a qualifying defence obligation is clearly engaged and meaningful assistance is requested, not whenever one member chooses to use force beyond its own territory. What would actually count as failure Calling the pact a failure requires a test that distinguishes routine alliance behaviour from a genuine refusal to honour collective defence. The matrix below sets out that distinction. The colour coding is intentionally simple: green describes behaviour consistent with an alliance functioning below direct intervention, amber marks a real credibility test, and red identifies circumstances in which a failure claim would become well founded. Strategic ambiguity currently serves all three founders The absence of a published formula specifying exactly when Pakistan or Türkiye would intervene is often treated as evidence of weakness. At this stage, some ambiguity serves the interests of all three founders. Saudi Arabia benefits because an adversary cannot know precisely which additional action would bring Pakistani or Turkish assistance into play. Pakistan and Türkiye benefit because they can make the guarantee credible without pre-committing themselves publicly to every possible Saudi response. This ambiguity also gives the founders time to build procedures beneath the political promise. The pact was signed on 7 August. Its first Strategic Political and Defence Committee meeting took place on 31 August. A permanent Secretariat in Saudi Arabia is still being established. Defence-industry cooperation, joint technology development, production and greater military cohesion have been agreed, but a mature body of operational precedent does not yet exist. Expecting a newly created three-state pact to behave as though it already possesses decades of integrated planning is unrealistic. The serious question is whether ambiguity gradually becomes usable procedure: how assistance is requested, which bodies assess the threat, how national forces are coordinated, what territorial limits apply and what forms of support are considered proportionate at each stage. The founders also have reason not to publish every threshold. Deterrence can be weakened when an adversary knows the exact point below which no escalation will occur. A degree of uncertainty preserves room for diplomacy while increasing the risk faced by anyone considering repeated attacks on a member. Where the current Saudi case stands As of 11 September 2026, the public evidence supports a lower-level activation rather than a conclusion of failure. Pakistan has condemned the attacks on Saudi Arabia, linked continued aggression to the collective-defence commitment, engaged Iran diplomatically and reaffirmed support for Saudi sovereignty and territorial integrity. Pakistan has also said that no military response is currently under discussion. There is no confirmed public evidence that Pakistani or Turkish forces have entered combat on Saudi Arabia’s behalf. Makkah Alliance therefore continues to assess the case at Level 2, Consultation and Backing. A move toward Level 3 would require confirmed operational support such as intelligence, air defence, logistics or other material assistance. Level 4 would become more plausible with visible force-readiness measures, deployments or military preparations linked to the Saudi crisis. Level 5 would require direct Pakistani or Turkish combat participation. Judge the pact when the obligation is actually tested The Makkah Alliance should eventually be judged rigorously. A collective-defence commitment has value only if members can rely on meaningful assistance when a serious qualifying attack occurs. If Saudi Arabia were to face sustained aggression, formally invoke the agreement, request reasonable defensive support and receive a refusal from Pakistan or Türkiye, the credibility of the pact would deserve serious scrutiny. That is not the situation established by the public record today. What we are seeing is a new alliance working through its first crisis while its institutions are still being formed. The founders are consulting, drawing territorial boundaries around possible assistance, using diplomacy and preserving the option of escalation if conditions worsen. None of that requires Pakistani or Turkish forces to appear immediately in Yemen. The idea that an alliance succeeds only when every member enters combat treats collective defence as a zero-sum choice between war and abandonment. Defence relationships are more durable precisely because they allow different forms of assistance, different thresholds and national discretion over how obligations are fulfilled. NATO has operated on that basis for decades. There is no serious reason to demand a more mechanical standard from the Makkah Alliance after little more than a month. The real test will come when the requirements of collective defence are clearly invoked. Until then, the relevant evidence lies in consultation, assistance, readiness, requests and institutional behaviour. Claims of failure based solely on the absence of Pakistani or Turkish aircraft over Yemen mistake the most escalatory possible outcome for the entire purpose of the pact. Full analysis, documentary record and interactive assessments are maintained at makkahalliance.com. Sources and full documentary record available in the website edition.

How collective defence can move from political obligation to direct military intervention The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement was signed by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye in Makkah on 7 August 2026. Its defining provision is clear: an armed attack against any one of the three states is to be regarded as an attack against them all. The same founding statement describes the pact as an instrument for collective deterrence and broader defence cooperation. That commitment is consequential, but it does not answer the operational question that follows every collective-defence clause. Once an attack has occurred, what exactly must the other two founders do, and how quickly must they do it? The published record does not prescribe a single military response for every incident. It leaves room for political consultation, intelligence cooperation, material assistance, force preparation and, at the highest threshold, direct military intervention. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan drew a comparison with NATO’s Article 5 when the agreement was announced, but his explanation of the mechanics was more useful than the analogy. He described an attacked member requesting assistance and the partners deciding the degree and form of support, which could range from intelligence and logistics to military units. Pakistan has separately described the agreement as purely defensive, consistent with Article 51 of the UN Charter, and supplementary to rather than a replacement for existing bilateral and multilateral commitments. Makkah Alliance therefore uses an escalation ladder to assess how the pact is likely to operate in practice. The ladder does not claim to reproduce undisclosed treaty text or secret military procedures. It is an analytical framework built from the published agreement, official explanations and the institutional arrangements that have subsequently entered the public record. 1. What the published record establishes The first step is to separate what the founders have actually published from what remains to be learned through practice. This distinction matters because public debate has often moved faster than the available evidence, particularly on questions of automatic military intervention, joint command and enlargement. The first meeting of the Strategic Political & Defence Committee on 31 August 2026 materially advanced the institutional side of the pact. Ministers of foreign affairs and defence, together with chiefs of defence or general staff, met in Istanbul and agreed to further institutionalise cooperation, establish the Secretariat in Saudi Arabia and strengthen defence capability through joint activity, defence-industry cooperation and technology development. The agreement has therefore moved beyond a political signing ceremony, while its detailed military procedures remain only partly visible. 2. Why an escalation ladder is necessary Collective defence is often discussed as though it produces a binary choice between doing nothing and going to war. That is a poor guide to how alliances usually function. States possess many tools between diplomatic solidarity and direct combat, and those tools can materially change the security position of an attacked member without requiring every ally to enter the same theatre. The severity of the attack also matters. An isolated drone strike that is intercepted with limited damage cannot reasonably be treated in the same manner as a sustained campaign that disables energy infrastructure, overwhelms air defence or threatens the functioning of the state. A useful framework therefore has to distinguish the obligation created by the pact from the level of response required by the circumstances. The Makkah Alliance ladder has five levels. Movement between them should be read as an assessment of observable behaviour, not as an automatic legal formula. A case can remain at one level for an extended period, move upward gradually, or fall back if diplomacy succeeds and the immediate threat recedes. 3. The five response levels Level 1 — National containment At the first level, the affected founder remains capable of containing the incident through its own institutions and armed forces. Other members may be informed and may exchange intelligence, but the event has not yet generated the degree of political or military coordination that would make it a collective operational concern. This level is necessary for the credibility of the pact because a collective-defence agreement cannot sensibly convert every border incident, intercepted drone or limited maritime confrontation into a three-state crisis. National containment preserves room for proportionality and allows the founders to distinguish routine security pressure from events that threaten the wider alliance. The threshold is therefore not whether an attack has technically occurred. The more useful question is whether the attack has begun to impose costs or risks that justify formal collective involvement. Level 2 — Consultation & backing At Level 2, the incident becomes a recognised Alliance concern. Political backing is explicit, ministers and senior military officials consult, intelligence liaison becomes more relevant and contingency discussions can begin. Diplomatic engagement may also be used to restrain the attacker or prevent a wider confrontation. The affected founder still carries the principal military burden. This is what separates Level 2 from material support. Consultation can be intensive and strategically important without producing a visible transfer of military capability. Level 2 should not be dismissed as symbolic. Once the founders begin discussing what they will do if attacks continue, they are already shaping the adversary’s expectations. The value lies partly in uncertainty: the attacker has to consider whether another strike will move the alliance toward intelligence assistance, air defence, deployments or direct intervention. Level 3 — Material support Level 3 begins when political backing is converted into operationally useful assistance. The affected founder may still conduct the fighting itself, but the other members begin contributing capabilities that alter its defensive capacity, endurance or freedom of action. Material support can take many forms. Intelligence and surveillance can improve warning and targeting. Air- and missile-defence assistance can reduce vulnerability to repeated strikes. Logistics, transport, maintenance and technical support can keep national forces operating at a higher tempo. Weapons and ammunition can replenish stocks. Financial or energy support can increase the attacked state’s ability to sustain a prolonged crisis. This level is especially important because allied military value is not measured only by whether partner aircraft or troops enter combat. Support behind the front can release national forces for other missions, strengthen resilience and reduce the pressure that might otherwise force the affected member to escalate more quickly. Level 4 — Collective coercive posture Level 4 is reached when the founders begin preparing visibly for the possibility of collective military action. The objective can still be deterrence, but warnings now carry greater weight because they are accompanied by force readiness, deployments, contingency planning or other measures that make intervention plausible. A Level 4 response could include partner forces moving closer to the affected theatre, air-defence or naval assets being placed on heightened readiness, military warnings becoming explicit, or political and economic pressure being coordinated with visible preparations for combat. The central feature is that the alliance is no longer merely supporting the affected member; it is demonstrating that continued aggression could widen the conflict. The distinction between Levels 3 and 4 is therefore one of posture. Material support helps the attacked state fight or defend itself. Collective coercive posture tells the adversary that the partners themselves may soon become combatants. Level 5 — Direct collective intervention Level 5 is the highest threshold. Partner forces enter the conflict directly in defence of the attacked member. Depending on the circumstances, this could involve air operations, naval action, direct missile-defence engagements, ground forces or other forms of combat undertaken by one or both partner states. Nothing in the published record supports treating Level 5 as the automatic consequence of every qualifying attack. Direct intervention represents the point at which political obligation has travelled through consultation, support and military preparation into combat. It should therefore be expected only when the severity of the threat, the failure of lower-level measures or the strategic stakes make direct involvement acceptable to the participating governments. This is also where national political control matters most. The founders have created a collective-defence obligation, but no published institution currently appears to possess independent authority to deploy Pakistani, Saudi or Turkish national forces without the decision of their governments. 4. What moves a crisis up the ladder The ladder is not mechanical. The same type of attack can produce different responses depending on the affected founder, the scale of damage, the duration of the campaign and the wider strategic environment. Makkah Alliance therefore weighs several variables together rather than treating any one factor as decisive. The interaction between these variables is more important than any single trigger. A limited strike against a highly resilient target may remain at Level 1 or Level 2. Repeated attacks that degrade essential state functions could move the same founder much higher even if each individual strike appears modest when viewed in isolation. 5. The thresholds will differ by founder The attack-on-one clause is common to all three founders, but the operational threshold for assistance cannot be identical. Each state enters the pact with a different military position, geography and set of external obligations. The ladder therefore has to be applied to the circumstances of the affected founder rather than treated as a uniform numerical formula. For Saudi Arabia, the most plausible early Alliance contribution is likely to be defensive depth rather than replacement of Saudi combat power. Intelligence, surveillance, logistics, air and missile defence, technical assistance and force protection could be useful long before Riyadh requires Pakistani or Turkish forces to conduct offensive operations. Türkiye’s threshold is likely to be shaped by its strong national military capacity and by the fact that the Makkah Agreement does not replace its existing commitments. Limited border incidents or regional confrontations therefore need not become Alliance crises. The pact becomes more consequential when an external threat can no longer be contained through national means and existing arrangements. Pakistan requires particular caution because public discussion can easily slide from collective defence into assumptions about a nuclear guarantee. The published Makkah Agreement establishes no automatic nuclear umbrella for Saudi Arabia or Türkiye. A more defensible reading is that the pact gives Pakistan additional conventional and diplomatic support options before any crisis approaches the most dangerous parts of Pakistan’s own national deterrence posture. 6. Territorial defence and operations beyond member territory One of the most important questions concerns geography. Collective defence of a member’s recognised territory is conceptually different from joining that member’s military operations beyond its borders. The distinction may become central to how the Makkah Agreement develops. Consider Saudi Arabia. Intelligence about incoming missiles, support for Saudi air defence, protection of critical infrastructure or logistics inside the Kingdom sit naturally within the logic of collective defence. Participation in retaliatory strikes inside Yemen is a different decision. It may be militarily related to the same crisis, but it involves a separate question about whether the partners are defending a member or joining an external campaign. A territorial distinction would give the pact considerable flexibility. It would allow meaningful collective protection without automatically transferring every external military operation of one founder into a three-state commitment. It would also make the pact easier to sustain politically because governments could honour the core guarantee while retaining discretion over expeditionary combat. Future practice will show whether this distinction becomes a durable working rule. If official statements repeatedly separate defence of member territory from operations outside it, the geographic boundary may eventually become one of the alliance’s most important unwritten precedents. 7. Proxy warfare creates an attribution problem The agreement was written in the language of armed attack, but regional conflict frequently arrives through militias, armed movements and other non-state actors. This creates a harder problem than conventional state-on-state aggression because the immediate attacker and the state accused of enabling it may not be treated as the same actor. The first question is factual: who carried out the attack? The second concerns support: who financed, armed, trained or supplied the attacker? The third is more consequential: was another state directing, coordinating or otherwise exercising sufficient control over the operation for responsibility to be attributed more broadly? The language used by the founders can therefore reveal movement on the ladder before military deployments occur. Asking another state to exercise influence over an armed group is materially different from publicly holding that state responsible for the attacks. The latter would widen the crisis from a proxy problem into a potential inter-state confrontation and could alter the level of collective response required. For Makkah Alliance analysis, attribution should therefore be treated as its own escalatory variable. A non-state attack can activate consultation and defensive support without automatically producing a decision to confront the state believed to be supporting the attacker. 8. Who decides when the pact moves from obligation to action The attack-on-one commitment is politically clear. The decision-making machinery beneath it is still developing. This is one of the most consequential gaps in the public record because a collective-defence obligation cannot implement itself. Three elements are currently published. First, the founding governments retain treaty-level political authority. Second, the Strategic Political & Defence Committee brings together foreign ministers, defence ministers and senior military leadership. Third, a permanent Secretariat is being established in Saudi Arabia, initially under a Pakistani Secretary-General. Makkah Alliance assesses that deeper institutional machinery is likely to be required if the pact is to operate repeatedly under pressure. Permanent military direction, joint operational planning, intelligence coordination, logistics, interoperability and defence-industry delivery all become more important once the agreement moves from consultation into sustained defence activity. These functions are analytically plausible, but they should not be presented as published institutions until the founders formally establish them. Until more of this machinery is publicly established, national command remains the safest assumption. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye can coordinate closely while still retaining sovereign control over their own forces. Collective defence therefore does not require identical participation: one founder may provide intelligence, another logistics, another combat power, and all three can still be contributing to the same defensive outcome. 9. Why the NATO comparison should be used carefully The comparison with NATO is useful at the level of principle because both arrangements contain an attack-on-one commitment. It becomes less useful when it is used to imply institutional equivalence. NATO has decades of developed command arrangements, standing military structures, planning procedures, interoperability standards and accumulated precedent. The Makkah Agreement is a new three-state pact whose institutions are still being formed. The founders themselves have emphasised regional ownership, defensive purpose and the continued validity of their other bilateral and multilateral commitments. The better approach is therefore to examine what the Makkah Agreement actually publishes and what its members actually do, rather than importing assumptions from another alliance. This is especially important when judging a crisis. An Article 5-style principle can coexist with a response that begins with consultation, assistance and deterrence. The existence of a collective obligation does not by itself tell us whether the appropriate response is intelligence sharing, air defence, force deployment or direct combat. 10. Deterrence can work below direct intervention Direct intervention is the most visible form of collective defence, but it may not be the most frequently used. Levels 2, 3 and 4 can alter an adversary’s calculations without the alliance ever reaching Level 5. An attacker considering another strike has to assess whether political consultation will produce better intelligence for the defender, whether additional air-defence capability will arrive, whether partner forces will move closer, whether economic pressure will increase and whether one more attack could trigger direct intervention. The uncertainty surrounding the next level is itself part of deterrence. This gives the ladder a practical purpose. The effectiveness of the pact should not be measured solely by whether Pakistani, Saudi or Turkish forces eventually fight together. A more meaningful measure is whether collective backing raises the cost of continued aggression enough to prevent the crisis from reaching that point. 11. How to read the ladder The ladder should be read as a disciplined assessment tool rather than a claim of hidden treaty knowledge. It asks what behaviour is observable, what support is confirmed, what institutions are active and what additional evidence would be required before a case is moved higher. Three cautions follow. First, the levels are not necessarily linear; a severe surprise attack could move a case rapidly upward. Second, a crisis can involve elements of two adjacent levels at the same time, particularly during transitions from consultation to material support. Third, public information may lag behind private military activity, so assessments should be revised when reliable evidence changes. The aim is therefore not to predict every decision in advance. It is to prevent political rhetoric, anonymous reporting or dramatic headlines from being mistaken for confirmed alliance action. Current test — Saudi Arabia and Yemen, 10 September 2026 The current Saudi-Houthi escalation is the first serious opportunity to compare the framework with actual behaviour. Houthi forces have struck Saudi cities, an airbase and energy infrastructure, while Saudi and Saudi-backed forces have intensified military activity against Houthi positions in Yemen. The confrontation is occurring alongside a wider regional crisis involving Iran, the United States and pressure on Gulf and Red Sea shipping. Pakistan has taken a visible diplomatic role. Reuters reported on 9 September that Islamabad conveyed a Saudi warning to Tehran to use its influence to restrain the Houthis. Pakistani, Saudi and Turkish military representatives were also reported to have coordinated in Riyadh. Sources cited by Reuters said any Pakistani military role would be defensive and confined to Saudi territory, while no decision had been made for Pakistan to join retaliatory strikes inside Yemen. On 10 September, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry gave the clearest official indication of the current threshold. It said that no military response under the Makkah pact was presently being discussed, while reaffirming Pakistan’s commitment to act under the agreement when required. The ministry also described the pact as defensive and said expansion was not currently anticipated. Taken together, the public evidence points to a pact that is politically active but has not crossed into confirmed material military support or direct intervention. Makkah Alliance therefore assesses the Saudi case at Level 2 as of 10 September 2026. What would move the current case to Level 3 The most credible signs of Level 3 would be confirmed operational support rather than another statement of solidarity. Intelligence sharing tied directly to the Saudi theatre, Pakistani or Turkish air-defence assistance, military logistics, technical teams, weapons, sustained surveillance or other support that materially strengthens Saudi defensive capacity would justify moving the assessment upward. The territorial issue would matter here. Support delivered inside Saudi Arabia for the defence of Saudi territory could constitute meaningful activation of the pact without Pakistani or Turkish forces entering Yemen. This is one reason the absence of cross-border combat should not be treated as evidence that the agreement is irrelevant. What would move the current case to Level 4 Level 4 would require a visible change in collective posture. Partner forces being placed on heightened readiness for the Saudi crisis, deployments explicitly linked to the attacks, public military warnings backed by prepared forces, or confirmed joint operational planning for direct assistance would indicate that the founders are preparing for the possibility of entering the conflict themselves. The severity of Houthi attacks would also matter. Sustained strikes that significantly degrade Saudi energy infrastructure, major airbases, population-centre defence, desalination or other essential state functions would increase the likelihood that consultation and material support were judged insufficient. What would move the current case to Level 5 Level 5 would require direct combat by Pakistani or Turkish forces in defence of Saudi Arabia. That could include direct air operations, naval combat, ground action or other military engagement in which partner forces themselves become combatants. No such evidence is currently public. Reports or commentary that describe Saudi retaliatory targets in Yemen as automatically becoming 'Makkah Alliance targets' move beyond what has been established. A Saudi operation, a partner-supported Saudi operation and a formally collective operation are not the same thing. Who authorises, plans and executes an operation will matter as much as the target being struck. The current expansion statement Pakistan’s statement that expansion is not currently anticipated also deserves careful interpretation. Earlier post-signing language had left the agreement open to other regional states willing to accept its principles, and Egypt publicly examined legal and constitutional questions surrounding possible accession. The latest wording therefore appears to narrow the near-term timetable. It does not necessarily settle the long-term question. The founders now have a strong reason to consolidate the three-state core, clarify operational procedures and establish precedent before accepting additional collective-defence obligations. Future enlargement should therefore be assessed separately from immediate accession. What this first test may establish The first crisis is already beginning to narrow several areas that were uncertain when the agreement was signed. Political consultation can become intensive without immediate war. Defence of member territory may be treated differently from participation in operations beyond that territory. National governments remain central to decisions on the use of force. Proxy attacks create a separate problem of attribution. Material support, rather than direct intervention, may prove to be the most important middle ground. These conclusions are provisional because the institutions are young and the present crisis is still developing. Yet this is precisely why the current period matters. Early decisions will create precedent, and repeated precedent will gradually give practical meaning to the attack-on-one commitment. The central question surrounding the Makkah Agreement is therefore no longer whether the pact is real. The better question is how the founders convert a collective obligation into proportionate action while preserving national command, political discretion and room for de-escalation. The escalation ladder provides a way to observe that process without confusing every attack with an automatic three-state war. Sources and published record Makkah Al-Mukarramah Summit for Joint Defence — Pakistan Press Information Department, 7 August 2026 Pakistan Foreign Ministry press briefing, 12 August 2026 Pakistan clarification on the defensive character of the pact, 10 August 2026 Strategic Political and Defence Committee Joint Statement, 31 August 2026 Reuters — Türkiye, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia defence pact and Article 5 comparison, 8 August 2026 Reuters — Pakistan warns Iran to rein in Houthis as Riyadh strikes back, 9 September 2026 Reuters — Pakistan says no military response discussed under Mecca pact, 10 September 2026

Saudi Arabia and Yemen are now giving the Makkah Alliance its first serious test. Attacks on Saudi territory have moved the pact from treaty language into decisions about consultation, support, attribution and the limits of collective defence. Our present reading remains Level 2, consultation and backing. Political support and military consultation are visible. There is still no confirmed public evidence that Pakistani or Turkish forces have entered combat on Saudi Arabia’s behalf. The next move matters more than another declaration of solidarity. Level 3 would begin to appear through intelligence sharing, logistics, surveillance, air and missile defence, weapons support or other operational assistance. Saudi Arabia already has considerable capability to conduct strikes inside Yemen. The more useful contribution from Pakistan and Türkiye may therefore come behind the front line, strengthening Saudi defensive depth and releasing Saudi capacity for operations it can already conduct itself. A territorial boundary is also beginning to take shape. Defence of Saudi territory appears capable of falling within collective obligations, while participation in operations inside Yemen would require a separate decision. If the founders continue to behave this way, that distinction could become one of the first working rules of the alliance. Another unresolved issue concerns attribution. Houthi forces are the immediate attacker, while Iran’s relationship with the group introduces a harder question about when responsibility could extend beyond the armed group itself. Pakistan’s decision to warn Tehran while continuing diplomatic engagement suggests that threshold has not yet been crossed publicly. The language used by the founders will matter if the attacks continue. There is also an institutional question that may soon become unavoidable. The founders have political and defence coordination mechanisms, but the public record still leaves major operational questions unanswered. Who authorises a collective operation? Who plans it? Which forces remain under national command? What would distinguish Saudi action from an operation undertaken in the name of the Makkah Alliance? How these questions are answered will matter beyond Yemen. Prospective members will be watching what membership actually requires. A pact that provides meaningful collective protection while preserving national discretion over military operations outside member territory may prove easier for other states to join. A pact whose obligations remain unclear will create a very different accession calculation. The current crisis may therefore define much more than the response to the Houthis. It may begin establishing how the Makkah Alliance works in practice. The interactive Makkah Alliance website allows users to examine Saudi Arabia’s founder profile, the wider OIC accession field, country relationships, barriers to accession, collective-defence responses and the developing institutional framework. makkahalliance.com #MakkahAlliance #SaudiArabia #Pakistan #Türkiye #Yemen