Leon J. Halac is a political analyst, accountant and businessman. He is also a great-grandfather, Argentinian, and Zionist who has been publishing opinion pieces in Iton Gadol and AJN since 2025.
On Friday, August 7, at Al-Safa Palace in Mecca, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed the "Mecca Joint Defense Agreement." The official statement, released by the Saudi Press Agency and reproduced without variation by Okaz and the rest of the Kingdom's press, is brief but unambiguous: any armed attack against any one of the three countries will be regarded as an attack against all three, and the pact aims to "develop all aspects of defense cooperation" among them.
On the surface, it is a defensive treaty like any other. A Turkish official, cited by Reuters, insisted the agreement is " purely defensive" and "not directed against any specific party," leaving it even open to accession by other regional states. But surfaces rarely exhaust the meaning of these Instruments, and this case demonstrates that with particular clarity.
The Contradiction No One States
Saudi Arabia has just sealed a formal defense alliance with two states - Turkey and Pakistan - whose position on Jerusalem and Palestinian Arab statehood is, in both cases, irreconcilable with the normalization framework Washington has spent half a decade building under the name of the Abraham Accords.
-Turkey has deepened its diplomatic hostility toward Israel under Erdoğan.
-Pakistan has never recognized the State of Israel, and its commitment to the Palestinian Arab cause - including East Jerusalem as its capital - is one of the few consensus positions spanning Islamabad's entire political spectrum.
And yet this happens even as Washington continues pressing, with ups and downs, for Riyadh to complete the "grand prize" of Middle East diplomacy: Saudi-Israeli normalization. The sequence of the past nine months is telling:
In November 2025, Trump announced the United States would sell F-35s to Saudi Arabia without conditioning the sale on peace with Israel, rebuffing Israeli hopes of using the jets as leverage. Eight months later, in July 2026, the president did introduce that condition - but on a different object: the newly signed civilian nuclear energy agreement, which, according to his own announcement, "is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords." The condition caught even the U.S. Department of Energy off guard, which had closed the deal a day earlier without mentioning it.
Riyadh did not budge. The Saudi position, as U.S. officials acknowledge, remains what it has been since 2023: first a verifiable path to Palestinian Arab statehood, then normalization. No incentive offered so far - not the civilian nuclear deal, not the F-35s, not AI cooperation - has altered that sequence.
Deterrence Without a Declaration
What the Mecca summit reveals is not that Saudi Arabia has "chosen sides" against Washington or Israel. It is something more precise and, for anyone following these processes closely, more unsettling:
Riyadh has found a way to build real security architecture - with a NATO military power and with the only nuclear state in the Muslim world - without ever having to formally declare that it is abandoning the normalization track Washington offers. There is no rupture, no announcement, not even a denial. Only accumulating facts on the ground.
It is the same mechanism I have described elsewhere under the name "jurispolítica": a political decision adopted outside any declared normative framework, which nonetheless acquires, act by act, the authority of a Consolidated fact. Here it is not a matter of an international resolution clothed in historical authority, but of a regional security architecture built pact by pact - the bilateral agreement with Pakistan in September 2025, now the trilateral one with Turkey - until the question of whether Saudi Arabia "is" or "is not" within the Abraham orbit becomes, in practice, irrelevant next to the question of with whom Riyadh has already signed papers.
Doha, the Eve Before
Sequence matters. One day before the signing in Mecca, on August 6, eight foreign ministries - Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, and Indonesia - issued a joint statement from Doha condemning what they called "grave violations" by Israel in Gaza, focused on attacks against healthcare infrastructure and civilian casualties. It is nearly the same cast that, 24 hours later, would partly reconvene to sign the defense pact: Riyadh, Ankara, and Islamabad take center stage in both acts.
What is interesting is not the condemnation itself - predictable given the state of the conflict - but the rhetorical wrapping the signatories chose. The statement did not stand against Trump's peace plan; it stood inside it. The eight signatories invoked Washington's own "Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict" as the standard Israel was allegedly violating, warning that the violations threatened implementation of the plan's second phase. This is not a break with the American diplomatic architecture - it is an appropriation of it.
The Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani bloc does not turn its back on Trump's framework; it uses that framework as a yardstick to measure Israel, while building, on a separate track - Mecca, twenty-four hours later - a security structure that does not depend on that framework's success. It is the same dual logic described above, now applied to the declaratory arena: operating within Washington's language while simultaneously constructing, in parallel, an architecture that does not need it.
Washington, Caught Between Two Doctrines That Stopped Being Compatible
The most significant fact, however, is not what Saudi Arabia is doing, but what Washington is not doing. No U.S. official publicly objected to the Mecca pact, despite it binding Turkey - a country with which Washington has constant friction over its regional policy - into a mutual defense commitment with a Gulf partner. The silence contrasts with the sensitivity the White House did show months earlier, when the possibility of selling F-35s to Turkey itself was floated, a sale Israel opposed outright.
The most plausible explanation is not indifference, but an unresolved tension between two doctrines that competed for priority within the Trump administration through 2026: containment of Iran at nearly any regional diplomatic cost, and expansion of the Abraham Accords as the central legacy of its foreign policy. When both doctrines require the cooperation of the same actors - actors whose interests do not always align with one another - Washington ends up, in effect, tacitly endorsing by omission a realignment that, on paper, contradicts its own stated objective.
The Status Quo Is Not Neutral
One can argue - and I do - that the Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani position builds a de facto architecture hostile to recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel. That hostility does not rest on an unbroken historical continuity - Jewish sovereignty over the city was severed by force after the Bar Kokhba revolt, when Hadrian expelled the Jewish population and renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and the province of Judea Syria Palaestina in the year 135 - but on the historical, religious, and political bond that that very rupture failed to erase.
But even those who prefer not to take sides in that dispute should recognize an empirical fact: the current status quo is not a static balance between two projects competing on equal footing. It is terrain where one side - the one building defense pacts, summits, and dated, signed communiqués - advances through facts, while the other keeps betting that the promise of F-35s and nuclear reactors will be enough to reverse a sequence that, so far, has shown no sign of yielding.