Middle East Realignment?
Yossi Alpher — August 17, 2026
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. Turkiye, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia just signed the “Mecca Agreement” to form a security pact. Russian troops are returning to Syria. The Trump administration appears to be backing out of war with Iran over Hormuz and nuclear issues. What’s going on?
A. The best explanation for these parallel events that I can come up with references two key developments: the American (and Israeli) failure to achieve any of their war aims against Iran, and the American and Israeli elections.
The first of these developments is presumably understood by countries in the Middle East, from Iran to Saudi Arabia, as well as by Russia, as reflecting both poor US deterrent capability and poor warfighting skills. President Trump is already telling the American electorate to make do with higher oil prices. If the United States, preoccupied with China and saturated with empty Trump threats, cannot protect Riyadh and the region from Iran, then perhaps Tehran will be impressed by Riyadh’s new friends in Ankara and Islamabad, who after all are committed under the Mecca pact to come to its aid in the event it is attacked.
The second development, elections in both the US and Israel, is one of those phenomena peculiar to democracies: they do not want to deal with war during an election campaign. This may help explain the timing of the Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani pact, but implies that its impact may be of short duration.
Note that this rule applies to Israel’s other fronts besides Iran: under pressure from Trump, Israel is maintaining relative calm on both the Gaza and Lebanon fronts, too.
Q. Are Turkiye, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia a natural partnership?
A. The two non-Arab Sunni Muslim states, Turkiye and Pakistan, perhaps. But not Saudi Arabia, which has major differences with Turkiye — e.g., Ottoman-era legacies and the Khashoggi affair. Then too India, Pakistan’s traditional enemy, maintains close commercial and strategic ties with both the Saudis and Turks but also Iran.
Q. Israel once had a security pact with Turkiye…
A. And with Iran too. And herein lies additional food for thought regarding the fleeting and unstable nature of these sudden alliances. Back in the 1950s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s, Israel, Turkiye, and Iran banded together in the Trident alliance to collaborate against an Arab nationalist enemy led by Egypt’s Nasser and against Soviet penetration.
But collaboration was limited essentially to the intelligence level; Israel’s Turkish and Iranian ‘allies’ did not come to its aid during the 1967 and 1973 wars with the Arab world. And from the Israeli standpoint, the advent of peace with Egypt from 1977 meant that Trident — which after all was based on Arab hostility — rated far lower priority.
Q. Then there was CENTO, another defunct security pact…
A. CENTO, the Central Treaty Organization that existed between 1955 and 1979, comprised Turkiye, Iran, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and briefly Iraq. It was aimed against the USSR. Iran’s withdrawal after the 1979 Islamist takeover in Tehran triggered CENTO’s collapse. Turkiye and Pakistan did not get back together under a treaty banner until just recently, in Mecca.
Q. Should Israel be concerned about the new Turkish-Pakistani-Saudi alliance?
A. We have already noted Israel’s perceived need to avoid all-out war at election time. But this observation has to be qualified. First, because there are those in Israel’s ruling right-religious alliance who thrive politically on threats and threat scenarios. The new alliance is presented by them as a Turkish threat against Israel, perhaps via Syria. Yet in reality, Turkey with its Islamist leanings is hostile only at the declarative level, and Turkey and Israel continue to maintain diplomatic relations, even as they compete for strategic influence in the eastern Mediterranean.
(Indeed, here it is instructive to recall that, back in Trident days, Turkish and Israeli military leaders once briefly and abortively planned a joint offensive, from Syria’s north and south, against a hostile pro-Soviet Damascus regime.)
A second qualification to our election-time, no-war rule of thumb concerns speculation that a beleaguered PM Netanyahu, aware he is about to lose Israel’s October 27 elections and unable to face defeat, initiates a new or renewed military conflict to distract attention and perhaps provide an excuse to postpone elections. Here the Turkish-Saudi-Pakistani alliance might be cited by a distraught Netanyahu as one of a number of “looming” threats that somehow complement that posed by a resurgent Iran and even a resurgent Hamas in Gaza, when in fact it is nothing of the sort.
Q. Didn’t Israel have an opportunity to bring Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords alongside the UAE and Morocco? Could that have voided the new Mecca pact?
A. The Saudi condition for Abraham Accords-style normalization with Israel was progress toward a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. But even before the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, the Netanyahu government was consistently sabotaging any chance for such progress with the West Bank-based Palestine Liberation Organization. In this sense, Riyadh had nothing to lose vis-à-vis Israel by entering an “alliance" with Turkiye and Pakistan.
One way or another, Saudi Arabia is hardly perceived as an active enemy by Israel. Even Bibi’s spin-masters in Jerusalem who turn Turkiye into an imagined enemy don’t deal with Riyadh that way.
Q. The Mecca pact is a mutual-defense treaty…
A. So is the Arab League. But in general, these mutual defense obligations are not taken seriously by their signatories. Here, for example, we have Iran repeatedly attacking the Gulf principalities and even Jordan and Oman, yet no additional Arab country is invoking its Arab League obligations and coming to their aid. When Iran has attacked Saudi Arabia, Pakistan has not only not defended Riyadh but rather has devoted its energies to mediating a ceasefire in the Persian Gulf.
Will Turkiye defend Saudi Arabia against Yemeni Houthi attacks? Did it? Will it open the Houthi-blockaded Bab al-Mandab Strait by force? Don’t hold your breath.
Q. Bottom line?
A. Beyond all the bluster and high-sounding commitments from the Arab and Muslim worlds, the region used to be able to depend on the United States for strategic wisdom backed by military force. Today that appears no longer to be the case.
As for Israel, note that despite Netanyahu’s folly and strategic blunders, Jerusalem still has active peace treaties (Egypt, Jordan) and normalization and strategic cooperation arrangements (UAE, Morocco, Bahrain) in the Arab world. Turns out it takes more than a pompous but empty Turkiye-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia pact to dislodge these achievements.
Still, this is the place to remind ourselves that none of these very same achievements can rescue Israel from its “internal” dilemma: its emerging binational disaster with the Palestinians.
Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer.
