When Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan signed their trilateral defence pact in Mecca on August 7, the accompanying joint statement shows something unusual for a security treaty. It grounds hard-power commitment in soft, civilisational language. The agreement is described as flowing from "the enduring bonds of brotherhood and Islamic solidarity" among the three states, signed at Al-Safa Palace in the holiest city in Islam. That combination, religious framing paired with an explicit disclaimer of religious exclusivity, is the real story here, and it's best understood through international relations (IR) theory rather than through the "new Muslim bloc" headlines which have become pervasive currently.

A classical realist reading entirely takes away the religious language. What binds this pact together is a conventional aggregation of capability. Saudi money, Turkish defence-industrial capacity (proven UAV and electronic warfare exports), and the Pakistani military workforce and nuclear-armed strategic depth are bound by a shared interest in deterrence amid the protracted regional geopolitical conflict. As such, "Islamic solidarity" appears just decorative language wrapped around an interest-based bargain that would exist under any label. That reading is incomplete. It can't explain why states bother with the wrapping at all, when a purely transactional communiqué would serve the same material purpose.

This is not wrong. However, it assumes that language holds little to no weight and that talk has no independent effect on how states relate to one another. Constructivist IR theory challenges this assumption. For Alexander Wendt, shared identity isn't a byproduct of alliance. It's a constitutive input. States don't just cooperate because interests align. It is the language of cooperation that actively builds the "we" that makes deeper cooperation possible. When the joint communiqué calls Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan "brothers" who are bound by faith, it does more than describe a treaty. It attempts to construct a security community rather than the standard defence pact it implies. That's a stronger form of glue than shared threat perception alone provides.

But constructing that shared "we" abroad only works if the story also sells at home, which means every joint statement is really being written for two audiences at once. Robert Putnam's two-level-games framework is useful to understand this. Every joint statement is written for two audiences at once, i.e., foreign counterparts and domestic constituencies. Framing religion earns favourable legitimacy back home. Erdo?an has a political base motivated by neo-Ottomanizeand pan-Islamists. The Islamic Republic is the constitutional name of Pakistan. The use of religious lexicon is a low-cost means of selling a major strategic commitment without commencing a harder debate on the specifics of military obligations. For the Saudi monarchy, this language is not merely ornamental. MBS’s regime draws part of its legitimacy from the King’s title as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, even as Vision 2030 steers the kingdom towards a more secular, diversified international identity. Forging a security agreement utilising that older, sacred language allows each leader to offer a hard bargain as continuity with a known civilisational story rather than as a risky new departure.

Jennifer Mitzen's ontological security argument contends that states desire more than just physical safety. The use of a religious-civilisational language allows the three nations to place the agreement within a narrative of solidarity between the Muslim world and the states themselves. Moreover, this terminology does not restrict the agreement to being intentionally anti-Iran or anti-Israel.

The framing of the phrase "Islamic solidarity" with "not aimed at any specific actor" is interesting here. This, implicitly, preserves deniability and flexibility in moments of crisis. And that’s a fair craft when practising diplomacy and alliance. That said, the Islamic framing of the pact is somewhat overstated. Saudi Arabia and Türkiye have both rejected the "Islamic NATO" label and have maintained that the agreement is not directed against any specific country.

The notion of Pakistan invoking the pact in response to an Indian counter-terror operation carries lesser significance. Both Saudi Arabia and Türkiye have substantial strategic and economic ties with India, and the political cost of materially backing Pakistan in an India-Pakistan conflict would be considerable. If the agreement affects India's strategic calculations, it is more because it introduces uncertainty than because it intervenes in a likely outcome. As far as Tehran is concerned, it is likely to view the official narrative of a "purely defensive, non-sectarian pact open to all" as an elaborate diplomatic cover. The geopolitical reality remains that the Mecca Agreement has potentially transformed a bilateral Gulf dispute into a pan-regional structural containment mechanism.

Mohammed Shoaib Raza is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for West Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Note: This article was originally published in The Week on 08 August 2026 and has been reproduced with the permission of the author. Web Link

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