Signed in Mecca on August 7, the new Joint Defence Agreement between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan has done more than create a new security bloc. It has cracked open a public rift between two of the Gulf’s most powerful states, pulling India and Israel into a dispute that ordinary citizens across the region are watching with growing unease.
The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, inked by Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, commits each signatory to treat an attack on any member as an attack on all. The architects of what some analysts have called an “Islamic Nato” have already signalled plans to expand the grouping, with Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Azerbaijan and Syria reportedly under consideration. For populations across those countries, the question of who protects whom, and under what terms, is not abstract.
The pact brings together three strategically significant powers: oil-rich Saudi Arabia, nuclear-armed Pakistan and Turkey, which hosts NATO’s second-largest military and maintains a rapidly expanding defence industry. Yet almost immediately, the agreement triggered a public row between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, two Gulf states that once presented a united front but have increasingly diverged in their strategic priorities.
Prominent Emirati voices questioned the logic of Saudi Arabia pursuing a new security arrangement outside the existing Gulf Cooperation Council, the six-nation bloc established in 1981 that already includes a Joint Defence Agreement treating attacks on any member as attacks on all. The GCC also maintains a Unified Military Command and coordinated defence mechanisms, created specifically to unify Gulf security policy after the Iran-Iraq war. For citizens of member states, the existence of two overlapping mutual-defence commitments raises practical questions about which framework governs in a crisis.
Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a Dubai-based political analyst and former adviser to UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, challenged the necessity of the Mecca pact in a series of posts on X. “Strengthening Gulf military and political cooperation and unifying the Gulf house is far more important,” Abdulla wrote, arguing that Riyadh should prioritise the existing Gulf framework rather than pursue arrangements involving powers from outside the region. He later broadened his critique: “He whose sect is more important than his homeland, there is no safety for him.”
The response from Riyadh was swift. Saudi Prince Abdulrahman bin Musaid defended the kingdom’s sovereign right to pursue its own strategic partnerships. “How can this conflict with unifying the Gulf house? Is it not the right of any state to make agreements with any state or states according to what it sees as achieving its interests?” Musaid wrote on X. Fahad al-Arabi al-Harthi, chairperson of the Riyadh-based Asbar Centre for Studies and Research, added that the Mecca agreement was designed for “building a collective capacity for deterrence and defence, and protecting security and stability in the face of any threat from any side.”
What changed the tone of the dispute was the Saudi side’s decision to turn the spotlight on the UAE’s own external partnerships. Abdulaziz al-Tuwaijri, former head of the Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, directly challenged the UAE’s defence ties with India and its cooperation with Israel, a country Saudi Arabia has yet to recognise. “Anyone who betrays and collaborates with the Zionists will never find security,” al-Tuwaijri wrote.
The UAE and India have maintained formal defence cooperation since a 2003 memorandum of understanding, expanded over the years to include joint exercises, defence exchanges and a Strategic Defence Partnership framework signed in January 2026 covering military technology, co-production, maritime security and counter-terrorism. The UAE’s relationship with Israel deepened after the 2020 Abraham Accords and was further cemented in April when Israel deployed an Iron Dome air defence battery and military personnel to the UAE following sustained Iranian drone and missile strikes, marking the first overseas deployment of that system.
Al-Tuwaijri questioned the apparent double standard directly. “As for the joint defence treaty between his country and India, and the multi-field cooperation with the Zionist entity, those are permissible in his view,” he wrote on X, addressing Abdulla’s criticism.
The public dispute reflects a broader divergence in foreign policy between the two Gulf powers. Saudi Arabia has drawn closer to Turkey and Pakistan. The UAE, by contrast, has deepened its security and strategic partnerships with Israel and India. The fault lines between them are particularly visible in Yemen, where Riyadh has backed the internationally recognised government while Abu Dhabi has supported the southern separatist STC.
For citizens across the Gulf and beyond, the stakes in this argument are concrete: which alliances protect them, which commitments overlap or contradict, and whether the region’s security architecture is becoming more coherent or more fractured. The Mecca pact appears to have crystallised tensions building for years. Whether the GCC can absorb that strain, or whether the divergence between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi deepens further, remains the open question.