The Mecca defence pact reveals a strategic divergence that could reshape the Gulf. Riyadh is building security partnerships beyond the Arab world, while Abu Dhabi is pursuing a different model of regional power.
The Ally Left Outside
The agreement is significant in its own right. It also shows how regional states are moving away from militarily depending on the US. But the alliance’s composition is arguably more revealing than its provisions. Saudi Arabia has chosen to deepen its security relationship with two major Muslim powers outside the Gulf while leaving all other Gulf Arab states—including the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain—outside the new arrangement.
The absence of the UAE is particularly striking. For much of the past decade, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were widely regarded as the two principal pillars of the emerging Gulf order. Their governments coordinated closely on regional security, worked together in Yemen for some time, and shared an increasingly assertive approach to regional politics (e.g. they boycotted Qatar together). Yet the two countries have since developed increasingly divergent interests. As reports highlight, their relationship has evolved from close partnership towards rivalry, with disagreements extending from oil policy to geopolitical influence. The divergence became especially visible in Yemen. Saudi Arabia and the UAE backed different local actors and developed increasingly incompatible visions for the country’s political future. The confrontation over Yemen in late 2025 and early 2026 represented the most serious rupture between the two countries in decades.
The disagreements have not been confined to Yemen. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have also pursued increasingly independent approaches to oil policy, Iran, and regional influence. The UAE’s decision to leave OPEC was particularly consequential because it removed an important institutional mechanism through which Saudi Arabia had exercised influence over Gulf oil policy. None of this means that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have become enemies publicly. Their economies remain deeply interconnected, and both governments have strong incentives to prevent their rivalry from becoming an outright rupture. But the Mecca pact suggests that their strategic divergence is now beginning to have an institutional expression. That is what makes the UAE’s exclusion so important. This exclusion is already showing its impact on trade and economics too. Saudi Arabia has tightened scrutiny of financial transfers to the UAE, a move that Saudi authorities framed in regulatory terms, but which took place against the backdrop of growing bilateral tensions.
Riyadh Looks Beyond the Gulf
The most consequential aspect of the pact may therefore be geographical. Saudi Arabia is building a security partnership that reaches beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Pakistan and Türkiye are not merely additional allies. They offer Riyadh capabilities and strategic relationships that cannot be generated through the Gulf Cooperation Council alone. Pakistan brings a large and experienced military, decades of defence cooperation with Saudi Arabia, and a strategic relationship that has historically included the presence of Pakistani military personnel in the Kingdom. Türkiye brings one of the region’s most capable conventional militaries, a rapidly expanding defence industry, and NATO membership.
The three countries have also signalled an ambition to deepen cooperation beyond the symbolic declaration of mutual defence. Türkiye has said that the pact will involve political and military coordination, joint exercises across land, sea, air and cyber domains, and cooperation in areas including unmanned systems, electronic warfare, and artificial intelligence. Ankara has also indicated that the arrangement could eventually expand, with Egypt mentioned as a potential participant. This makes the pact more than another bilateral defence agreement dressed up as Islamic solidarity. It potentially represents the beginnings of a different conception of Saudi security.
For decades, the dominant model of Gulf security rested on three pillars: American military power, the GCC, and Saudi leadership. Riyadh’s new arrangement does not replace that architecture. The Pakistani government has explicitly described the agreement as defensive and not directed against any particular country. But it does give Saudi Arabia something increasingly important: strategic depth beyond the Gulf.
That matters at a time when confidence in the durability of the traditional regional security order has weakened. The United States remains the region’s most powerful external actor, but Gulf states have spent years diversifying their strategic partnerships in response to uncertainty over Washington’s long-term commitments. The result is not the disappearance of American influence but the emergence of greater regional hedging. Saudi Arabia is now hedging in its own distinctive way even if it comes at the expense of the progressive weakening of the older Gulf order.
The UAE, by contrast, has pursued a different strategy. Abu Dhabi has sought to maximize its autonomy through a dense network of economic, technological, diplomatic, and security relationships extending well beyond the Gulf. Its partnerships with India, Israel, the United States, and other powers reflect a strategy of diversification rather than dependence on any single regional bloc. The difference is therefore not simply about which countries Riyadh and Abu Dhabi prefer. It is about how each sees power in the emerging Middle East.
Two Gulf Powers, Two Futures
The significance of the Mecca pact will ultimately depend less on the document itself than on what follows from it. If the agreement remains a limited trilateral defence arrangement, the UAE’s exclusion may prove little more than a reflection of existing political differences. But if Riyadh gradually expands the partnership—particularly by bringing in Egypt or other states—it could become the nucleus of a broader Saudi-led security network. That possibility should concern Abu Dhabi more than the pact’s immediate military provisions.
The UAE has spent the past decade establishing itself as an autonomous regional power rather than simply the junior partner of Saudi Arabia. It has developed military capabilities, commercial networks, and diplomatic relationships that allow it to operate independently across the Middle East, the Red Sea, and beyond. Saudi Arabia’s response now appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Rather than accepting a Gulf order in which Abu Dhabi is an indispensable partner, Riyadh is building alternative networks through which it can exercise leadership without the UAE.
If this process continues, the Gulf’s central rivalry may no longer be between Saudi Arabia and Iran, or between the Gulf states and external powers. It may increasingly be a contest over which model of regional power will shape the post-American Middle East: Abu Dhabi’s networked autonomy or Riyadh’s emerging system of strategic depth. The UAE’s absence from Mecca may therefore prove less important as a sign of what Saudi Arabia has rejected than as an indication of what the Kingdom intends to build next.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs
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