Something broke in Mecca, and Washington seems not yet to have noticed.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan ratified a trilateral defense treaty providing that an armed attack upon any one of them shall be treated as an attack upon all three, with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signing in person, describing the instrument in the emollient vocabulary of collective deterrence and leaving the door open to Egypt, which is widely expected to walk through it.
It is worth pausing over what has actually been constructed, because the ordinary language of alliance obscures it. A defensive pact is defensive only insofar as its members share a common definition of aggression. Where they do not, the pact becomes an engine for converting one member’s chosen quarrel into the collective obligation of the rest, and there is no ambiguity whatsoever about how the partners in this arrangement define aggression where Israel is concerned.
One day after the signing, Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Asif, appeared on television to explain the architecture, pronouncing Israel a genocidal and cancerous state, and summoning Muslim countries to stand against it until its European Jews burn in hell. Erdoğan has spent years describing Israeli self-defense as genocide and has openly speculated about Turkish military entry into the theater.
The occasions upon which such a mutual defense clause might be invoked are neither remote nor hypothetical, and none of them requires anyone to imagine an Israeli attack upon Saudi Arabia.
Turkey is consolidating its existing military presence in northern Syria while pursuing an expanded military relationship with the post-government of longtime Syrian President Bashar Assad, including reported plans to establish or utilize military facilities deeper inside Syria. Israeli aircraft have already struck Syrian airbases that Ankara was surveying for its own use, which is exactly the class of incident a mutual defense clause exists to convert into a general obligation.
Hamas maintains a political presence in Istanbul, and Israel demonstrated at Doha in September of last year that it will strike Hamas leadership on the soil of a friendly Muslim state, so that the identical operation conducted in Turkey would fall squarely within the treaty.
Should Egypt accede, as it is expected to do, every friction involving drug and arms smuggling along the Sinai frontier acquires a formal Saudi, Turkish and Pakistani interest. The question is therefore not whether such an occasion will arise, but which will arrive first and which government will elect to call it an attack.
Every soldier understands that the surest defense is a well-timed offense, and a coalition assembled on a hair trigger by parties who regard Israel’s existence as a primordial aggression amounts to a pre-authorization drafted in advance and awaiting only its pretext.
The full flavor of the absurdity emerges only against what preceded it.
On May 3, when U.S. President Donald Trump announced “Operation Project Freedom” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz that Iran had closed by force, Riyadh informed Washington within hours that American aircraft would neither fly from Prince Sultan Air Base nor cross Saudi airspace. Forty-three American warplanes sat immobilized on a Saudi runway until the White House threatened to withhold Patriot and THAAD interceptors, which, at that same moment, were intercepting Iranian missiles above Saudi oil terminals. Three months later, the Saudis swore mutual defense to Ankara and Islamabad.
The policy consequence follows so directly that stating it feels superfluous, and yet it must be stated because the administration appears to be proceeding as though nothing had occurred. The Saudi F-35 option must be withdrawn—and withdrawn now, rather than held in reserve as leverage.
The Turkish half of the transaction is more troubling still. Turkey was expelled from the program in 2019 for purchasing Russian air defenses, and yet on the seventh of July, standing beside Erdoğan in Ankara, the president announced that the CAATSA sanctions imposed in 2020 would be lifted and indicated that Turkish readmission was a decision he intended shortly to make, with The New York Times reporting that he is committed in principle to an arrangement.
One month later, Erdoğan flew to Mecca ... and swore mutual defense to Riyadh and Islamabad.
Washington should therefore stop negotiating for a signature and start attending to the alignment that signature was meant to certify.
Against that background, Washington is still contemplating the delivery of its most advanced aircraft to two of the three signatories of a treaty whose junior partner summons the Muslim world against Israel and to one signatory that still holds the S-400 batteries which occasioned its expulsion in the first place—batteries whose radar exists for the express purpose of detecting the very aircraft in question. Whatever case existed for that reconciliation on the sixth of July did not survive the signing at Mecca.
The Section 123 Agreement now before Congress, which would establish a multibillion-dollar nuclear industry on Saudi soil, must likewise be withdrawn since no serious government transfers enrichment-adjacent infrastructure to a state that has just contracted a mutual defense obligation with a nuclear power whose defense minister calls for a united and genocidal Muslim military front aimed at Israel. None of this constitutes punishment or bargaining. It is the minimum precaution any competent state takes when a client reorganizes its strategic alignment with neither notice nor consideration of American interests.
Which brings us to the question the administration has not asked. Suppose the pressure works. Suppose Riyadh, confronted with the loss of the aircraft and the reactors, agrees at last to sign the Abraham Accords, and suppose the ceremony is held on the South Lawn with the customary photographs. What would that signature actually be worth?
The 2020 accords are a framework of recognition and commerce containing no mutual defense clause, no article requiring any signatory to lift a finger on behalf of another and no mechanism of enforcement beyond goodwill. The Mecca pact contains an unambiguous obligation to treat an attack upon one as an attack upon all. On the day the two documents point in opposite directions—and that day will come—no one need wonder which will govern. A treaty with teeth supersedes a treaty with sentiments, and Riyadh would ceremoniously sign the accords in Washington knowing precisely that.
There is a further bizarre insolence in the Saudi position that deserves to be named.
The kingdom continues to insist that normalization awaits a clear and irreversible path to Palestinian statehood. Which is to say Israel must purchase a Saudi signature by conferring sovereignty upon the losing side of a war, in the very territory from which the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, were launched and in Judea and Samaria besides, granting its perpetrators the ridgeline above the coastal plain from which they would look down upon Ben-Gurion International Airport and the corridor holding most of Israel’s population and nearly all of its economy.
The kingdom, of all governments, might have been expected to hesitate before making that particular demand. When Iraqi President Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait in 1990 and massed his divisions on the Saudi frontier, PLO chief Yasser Arafat embraced him, and Palestinians in Kuwait and in Judea, Samaria and Gaza jubilantly celebrated the man whose tanks were pointed at Riyadh. The Gulf states understood the lesson immediately, expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Kuwait and severing the funding that had sustained the PLO for a generation. Saudi Arabia now proposes that Israel accept as a permanent neighbor the political heirs of that constituency, on the strength of a Saudi promise.
No one should require much imagination to see what would follow. A Palestinian state would apply for membership in the Mecca pact within the hour and be admitted, and Israel would find that the price of Saudi normalization was the creation of a new signatory to the alliance drawn up against it. The demand is not merely extortionate. It is the mechanism by which the extortion completes itself.
Washington should therefore stop negotiating for a signature and start attending to the alignment that signature was meant to certify. The aircraft come off the table—in Riyadh and Ankara alike—and so do the reactors. The American force posture in the Gulf, already reported to be under reconsideration, should shift toward allies who did not spend the spring grounding American pilots and the summer swearing oaths that will eventually be activated against Israel.
And the president who came into office promising to end the era in which allies extracted while America absorbed should recognize that he is being asked to arm and nuclearize a state that has just written its true loyalties into a treaty that runs counter to stated U.S. regional interests, in public, before the cameras, at Mecca.
That this requires explaining is the most remarkable fact of all.
