Amid the animated Indian commentary on the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed on August 7 by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, it is worth recalling a remark made 70 years ago by Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. As Pakistan’s prime minister during the Suez crisis of 1956, Suhrawardy was under intense domestic pressure to abandon the Baghdad Pact — a regional security arrangement backed by Britain and the US — and rally behind Egypt’s Nasser. Suhrawardy dismissed Arab and Muslim solidarity in a phrase that has outlived him: “Zero plus zero plus zero still amounts to zero.”
The United Arab Republic, the Egypt-Syria federation founded in 1958 as pan-Arabism’s consummation, dissolved in 1961. The Baghdad Pact lost Iraq in 1959, became the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO), and expired in 1979. Its developmental twin, the Regional Cooperation for Development — launched in 1964 by Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, the region’s three non-Arab Muslim states — became the Economic Cooperation Organisation in 1985 and has achieved little. The Gulf Cooperation Council, founded in 1981 in the shadow of the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, could not stop three members blockading a fourth in 2017. Today the GCC is deeply divided on its approach to war and peace in Iran. The Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation are forums for declarations, not instruments of action. National interest has consistently defeated supranational identity, ethnic or religious.
The coalitions that worked were the ones Washington built. American military power, not Arab solidarity, reversed Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait in 1991. American-led air and missile defence coordination has repeatedly intercepted Iranian salvos. Six months into the latest hostilities with Iran, the coalition Riyadh has assembled to protect Red Sea shipping — thirteen countries and counting — leans on the US Central Command. The accord is therefore not evidence of Islamic security self-reliance but a hedge against American unreliability. The Saudis have watched Washington squander political capital through Donald Trump’s erratic policies. They recognise the need to demonstrate, if not develop, other options, however weak.
Pakistan’s security cooperation with Saudi Arabia is long-standing; Rawalpindi has provided training, advice and regime protection over the decades. But when Riyadh went to war in Yemen in 2015 and sought Pakistani troops, Islamabad’s parliament voted unanimously for neutrality. Since the September 2025 defence pact, Houthi missiles and drones have struck Saudi Arabia regularly. There is no sign of the Pakistan Army entering that fight; nor has Riyadh joined Rawalpindi’s fight with Taliban-led Afghanistan.
Riyadh’s Turkish turn is the more significant implication of the Mecca Accord. Only a few years ago, Recep Tayyip Erdogan was campaigning to make Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a pariah over the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi. That campaign was inseparable from Ankara’s patronage of the Muslim Brotherhood, which several Sunni regimes, including the Saudis, Emiratis and Egyptians, regard as an existential threat.
Erdogan aspires to a leadership of the Islamic world the Saudis consider theirs by custody of the holy places. And the House of Saud, which fought its way out of Ottoman suzerainty, is in no hurry to fold itself into Erdogan’s imperial ambitions. Riyadh and Ankara have sought to patch up their differences over the last few years, but it would be bold to claim the Mecca Accord dissolves the structural contradictions between them. As a signal to Tehran and Washington, the Mecca Accord might mean something; but it is not a break in the evolution of the regional security order.
The deeper story is one of enduring Arab weakness and the rise of three non-Arab powers: Israel, Turkey and Iran. Pakistan is not among them. In the 1950s, Pakistan enjoyed real standing in the Middle East, a strong Anglo-American connection, an army of imperial pedigree and commanding geography at the edge of the Persian Gulf. A Pakistan less consumed by India and more attentive to its economy might have realised the full possibilities of being a security actor in the Middle East. But its reliance on regular Saudi bailouts has made Rawalpindi a retainer and a condottiere rather than a partner.
What about Delhi? Undivided India was the sheet anchor of Persian Gulf security. After 1947, Delhi simply walked away, and for decades treated renunciation as a virtue. The Gulf states, weak on their own, have had no choice but to seek external partners; independent India has remained the big tree that gives no shade. As a result, Delhi became a passive bystander in the Middle East.
The past cannot be undone. What of the present? There is no escaping the essence of Suhrawardy’s arithmetic: Regional capabilities have grown over the decades, but so has the complexity of the problems. Regional cooperation remains less than credible, and American salience is not about to disappear.
Instead of wringing its hands over the Mecca Accord, Delhi should expand its own military engagement. Vulnerable states across the Middle East are eager to diversify their defence partnerships and have long looked to a reluctant India. India’s military diplomacy in the region has gained some recent traction. But to be a credible security actor, Delhi needs to build the capabilities to project military power into the Middle East, in tandem with deeper political and security partnerships there.
The writer is a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express. He is a distinguished professor at the Motwani Jadeja Institute of American Studies, Jindal Global University and the Korea Foundation Chair on Asian Geopolitics at the Council on Strategic and Defence Studies, Delhi
