On 7 August 2026, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed the Mecca Joint Deterrence Agreement (MJDA). This formal trilateralisation of a new security architecture builds directly on the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA) signed between Riyadh and Islamabad on 17 September 2025.
What began as a bilateral pact has expanded into a trilateral deal that declares that an armed attack on any one of the three states will be treated as an attack on all three. The Saudi-Pakistan agreement is a formalisation of nearly five decades of quiet Saudi-Pakistani security cooperation that started in the 1970s and has quickly expanded into a trilateral with overtures of becoming an Islamic NATO.
