The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan, is formally framed as an open-architecture agreement. However, that openness has yet to translate into the integration of a regional country into its institutional framework. The real question worth asking is whether it can expand within the Gulf itself, and whether it will do so alongside the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) or in tension with it.

Saudi Arabia’s signature is currently the only Gulf signature on the agreement, and that fact deserves more weight than it usually gets. Riyadh is arguably the most influential GCC actor in many respects, including historically, militarily and financially. A framework anchored by the GCC’s central power, yet joined by no other Gulf state, is an unusual starting point for something billed as regionally open.

The foundations for further Gulf involvement in the institutional framework are not weak. Türkiye’s security relationships across the Gulf have deepened steadily, from Qatar’s embrace of Turkish military cooperation to growing coordination with Kuwait on maritime and energy-route security, as well as greater Emirati willingness to cooperate with Türkiye. Pakistan’s ties with the Gulf run just as deep, built on decades of military training partnerships and personnel exchanges. Both external partners already have working relationships with Gulf capitals independent of this pact. In principle, that gives Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad a solid foundation on which to build.

Even so, Qatar and Kuwait have limited their public responses to statements of welcome rather than accession talks, while the UAE has said nothing positive, essentially. For Doha and Kuwait City, the practical question is whether formal membership would add anything meaningful on top of the bilateral security arrangements they already maintain with each founding member individually.

If the added value is unclear, there is little incentive to take on a new institutional commitment. The UAE's caution runs deeper and traces to friction with Riyadh across a range of files, from Yemen to differing postures toward Israel and Iran, along with skepticism in Abu Dhabi toward a Saudi-led format built around non-Gulf external powers rather than the GCC's own machinery.

GCC question

This is where the Gulf’s own regional body becomes central to the analysis. The Mecca Pact does not present itself as a substitute for the GCC, and nothing in its structure suggests an intent to override it. There are significant differences within the GCC regarding regional politics. On Iran, the six members have never converged on a shared policy. The same fragmentation now extends to Israel and Palestine, where GCC members have taken visibly different positions rather than adopting a unified stance.

That gap is precisely what gives the Mecca Pact room to operate. Gulf states do not have to choose between the GCC and the Mecca Pact as rival poles, because the GCC has not delivered the kind of functional, binding security cooperation its charter promises. On paper, the GCC has a defense component, but in practice, it has struggled to translate that into deployable, credible collective action, particularly in hard security and defense coordination rather than economic or diplomatic matters. As part of a Gulf security framework, the Mecca Pact, built around a single anchor state in the Gulf and two capable external partners, offers something more concrete on that specific dimension, even if its own obligations remain deliberately loose.

Whether the pact and the GCC end up running hand in hand, or pulling Gulf states in different directions, depends on whether the GCC itself modernizes its own security cooperation in response. If the Council stays fragmented on the files that matter most, individual Gulf states have a practical incentive to hedge through a framework like Mecca without abandoning GCC membership.

In that scenario, growth inside the Gulf becomes less a matter of formal accession and more a slow layering of bilateral defense ties, Turkish and Pakistani, on top of an existing Saudi anchor, until the informal architecture starts to resemble a functioning Gulf wing of the pact well before any additional signature appears on the document itself.

Expansion beyond Gulf

Outside the Gulf proper, Egypt and Syria represent the two clearest cases of possible regional widening, though for very different reasons and on very different timelines.

Egypt is the more immediate candidate. Cairo's defense-industrial cooperation with Türkiye has grown into joint production arrangements worth hundreds of millions of dollars, its military and intelligence coordination with Saudi Arabia is a longstanding pillar of Arab regional security, and it shares direct operational stakes with the founding trio in the Red Sea corridor and in post-conflict stabilization for Gaza.

Syria sits much further down the timeline. Damascus faces institutional fragmentation and limited capacity to take on a formal collective-defense commitment, and its role for now is symbolic rather than operational, tied to the reconstruction process and to the growing positive footprint Türkiye and Qatar already have there. Neither case, however, is where the pact's real test lies. That test remains the Gulf itself.