The Muslim NATO question by Mira Radulova

Three countries have signed what may eventually prove to be more consequential than the diplomatic language surrounding it suggests. Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have agreed that an armed attack on one of them will be regarded as an attack on all three, a formula deliberately reminiscent of NATO’s Article 5. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement is not NATO, and nobody should mistake a communiqué for an integrated military machine. But history has a habit of beginning with paperwork.

The interesting question is not whether this is an “Islamic NATO” today. It plainly is not. The interesting question is whether it could become one tomorrow. The ingredients are unusually potent. Turkey brings a substantial conventional military, a growing defence industry and increasingly sophisticated drones. Pakistan brings a large, battle-tested armed force and the world’s only Muslim nuclear arsenal. Saudi Arabia brings money, strategic geography and the ability to finance the machinery that ambitious alliances invariably require. Put together, they form something considerably more interesting than another ceremonial friendship among governments.

And the choice of Mecca was hardly accidental. The symbolism practically writes its own editorial. Yet the alliance also contains a magnificent complication: its members do not agree on everything. They have different relationships with Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Jerusalem. Their strategic priorities overlap without being identical. Turkey remains a NATO member. Pakistan has deep military ties with China. Saudi Arabia has spent decades relying on American security architecture while simultaneously attempting to diversify its strategic partnerships.

That is precisely why the pact matters. It is less the birth certificate of an Islamic NATO than a declaration that the old security order is no longer sufficiently reassuring. For years, Washington was the indispensable security broker of the Middle East. Now its partners are discovering the unpleasant truth of dependency: a security guarantee is only as convincing as the political will behind it. The result is not necessarily an anti-American revolt. It is something more practical and potentially more consequential: insurance.

And once countries start buying insurance, they tend to discover that collective insurance is cheaper. The obvious candidates for a wider arrangement are intriguing. Egypt has already been mentioned as a possible future participant. Indonesia and Malaysia would bring something entirely different: enormous populations, strategic maritime geography and substantial political weight in Southeast Asia. Add Egypt, perhaps Qatar or other Gulf states, and eventually Indonesia or Malaysia, and the three-country experiment begins looking less like an eccentric triangle and more like the skeleton of a wider security organisation.

But here lies the danger. An alliance built around shared Muslim identity could easily become a security organisation in which religion substitutes for strategy. That would be a mistake. The most durable alliance is not one in which everyone believes the same things; it is one in which everyone understands exactly what happens when somebody is attacked.

NATO survived because Article 5 acquired credibility through institutions, planning, interoperability and decades of military integration. Three governments signing a document is the beginning of that process, not its conclusion.

Still, beginnings matter. The Middle East has spent decades importing its security architecture from elsewhere. The Mecca pact suggests that some of its powers now want to manufacture their own.

If that ambition spreads, the next map of the Muslim world may be drawn less by borders, sectarian arguments or oil fields and more by mutual defence commitments. That would not yet be an Islamic NATO. But it would be the moment when someone finally started building one.