Islamabad, Pakistan — When Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan signed a mutual defence pact in Mecca 10 days ago, some geopolitical analysts saw the deal as a message to Washington — that several of the United States’ closest military allies and partners no longer trusted its security umbrella. On Sunday, US President Donald Trump made it clear that he didn’t mind the Middle East finding ways to defend itself. Deeply appreciate President Donald Trump’s kind words of support on the signing of the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement.
Together with the brotherly Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Turkiye, Pakistan will continue to play a constructive role in ensuring the defence of… pic.twitter.com/qdemVBYkLq — Shehbaz Sharif (@CMShehbaz) August 17, 2026 In many ways, Trump’s apparent happiness over US partners seeking other security arrangements beyond their traditional reliance on Washington is in keeping with his political posture: The US president has long accused allies of not spending enough on their own defence, and of stretching America’s resources in their service. But even as three close US allies build their own collective defence arrangement, one question hovers as an elephant in the room, say analysts: Can deals like the Mecca pact actually replace the reliance of countries like Pakistan, Turkiye and Saudi Arabia on the US? The timing of Trump’s statement is not incidental, say analysts.
The US president has spent much of the past year pushing allies to shoulder more of their own defence burden. At NATO’s summit in The Hague in June 2025, member states agreed to more than double their defence spending target, from 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 5 percent by 2035, after sustained pressure from Trump, who had questioned whether Washington should keep defending allies that fell short. On Sunday, before his post on the Mecca pact, Trump also announced he was “substantially” reducing joint military exercises with South Korea, citing cost and his “very good relationship” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, while criticising Seoul for not helping the US against Iran.
Betul Dogan-Akkas, assistant professor of international relations at Ankara University, argued that Turkiye’s role in the Mecca pact should be read against that broader backdrop. Mansoor Ahmed, an honorary lecturer at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, took a different view. Even so, Ahmed does not see the pact itself as a product of that retrenchment.
For Ankara, Dogan-Akkas said, the calculation is about status as much as security. Gokhan Ereli, an international relations expert and assistant professor at Istanbul’s Ibn Haldun University, sees Turkiye’s willingness to bind itself to two non-NATO partners in similar terms, but traces it to Ankara’s long-standing doubts about Washington. He called the pact “a hedge with Turkish characteristics”, adding that the posture is “not anti-American so much as post-dependent”.
The Mecca agreement states that an armed attack on one member “shall be regarded as an attack against them all”, language modelled on NATO’s Article 5. But Turkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said a state under attack would first have to request
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