The post-American Middle East is beginning to take shape

Senior Fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.

The mutual defence agreement signed in Mecca yesterday between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkiye shows that it will not. It brings together the three most powerful and influential countries of the Sunni Muslim world. An armed attack against one will now be regarded as an attack against all three. This is the institutional beginning of a new regional security architecture.

The US-Iran war accelerated a transformation already under way. Iranian retaliatory strikes exposed the vulnerability of the US basing structure in the Gulf and forced the repositioning of substantial combat forces. Several American bases will eventually close, as they have lost strategic utility. Washington will increasingly struggle to justify the resources required to sustain the overstretched posture of an earlier era.

America is not disappearing from the Middle East. Its intelligence relationships, military power, technology and economic influence will remain formidable. But the war exposed the limits of American dominance. Regional states are now bound to organise their own security.

The military logic of the new pact is compelling. Pakistan possesses the Muslim world’s most powerful army and its only nuclear arsenal. Turkiye possesses its second-most powerful army, NATO experience, substantial naval power and a sophisticated defence industry. Both maintain large air forces, although significant portions of their combat-air inventories are ageing.

Saudi Arabia provides the complementary capability. The Royal Saudi Air Force has become the Muslim world’s most powerful air force, centred on one of the world’s largest concentrations of advanced 4.5-generation combat aircraft and sophisticated intelligence, command-and-control, air-defence and precision-strike capabilities.

Pakistan’s involvement in providing regional security is already tangible. Pakistani forces are deployed alongside Saudi forces and have participated in the kingdom’s defence. Pakistani capabilities are integrated into Saudi-led structures, while Islamabad has warned Tehran against coordinated attacks on Saudi Arabia’s principal strategic infrastructure. Turkiye is joining an established Saudi-Pakistani strategic relationship.

The next logical step is the rest of the Gulf. Nabeel Alhamar, media adviser to Bahrain’s monarch, has advocated moving beyond the Gulf Cooperation Council towards a Gulf Union in which Bahrain’s future defence becomes increasingly integrated with Saudi Arabia’s. Similar arguments for stronger collective security have emerged in Kuwait and Qatar.

The rest of the Gulf states should also join to maintain their security. Without the American military umbrella of the previous regional order, none can individually generate the military mass required to secure themselves against a major regional power.

The logical response is deeper Gulf integration around Saudi Arabia. No state should be compelled to join. But those remaining outside should not have any illusions about their relative military weight. Remaining outside the principal regional defence architecture risks strategic isolation.

A wider Arab and Muslim circle can develop by choice. Major states such as Egypt, Algeria, Malaysia and Indonesia could participate where their interests converge without assuming identical defence obligations.

The maritime component demonstrates how this architecture can function. The Saudi-led maritime coalition already includes Pakistan and Turkiye, alongside 11 other states. It will safeguard the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb, Strait of Hormuz, Arabian Sea and the Gulf coast to protect the commercial and energy routes passing through them.

Saudi geography makes Riyadh its natural anchor. The kingdom is the only major regional state whose vital interests directly encompass both the Strait of Hormuz system and Bab al-Mandeb. It connects the Gulf and Red Sea security theatres physically, economically and militarily.

The economic stakes reinforce that geography. Saudi Arabia is by far the largest Arab and Middle Eastern economy, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, OPEC’s leader and the holder of the world’s greatest spare production capacity. Its petroleum infrastructure is not merely a national asset. Its continued operation is fundamental to the global economy.

For that reason, Saudi Arabia was always the principal regional prize. Iran cannot consolidate an order built around its power and armed non-state actors while an economically stronger and increasingly militarily powerful Saudi Arabia remains at the centre of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Diminishing Saudi power has therefore been central to Tehran’s regional strategy.

That is why Riyadh has faced Iranian strikes on three fronts: Iran directly to the east, Iranian-aligned Iraqi Shia militias to the northeast, and the Houthis in Yemen to the southwest. Direct Iranian attacks triggered Saudi retaliation and eventually subsided. The Iraqi and Yemeni fronts remain active.

The result of this aggression has been the opposite of that intended. Pressure on the kingdom has accelerated military partnerships around it. What Iran intended to constrain Saudi power is helping create an architecture capable of negating it.

None of this makes the emerging pact anti-Shia. It must never become one. Iran is a regional power whose legitimate security interests must ultimately be accommodated. What cannot continue is Tehran’s reliance on armed non-state organisations to exert military pressure on neighbouring sovereign states.

Iran has repeatedly failed to understand the limits of that model and, increasingly, its own power. Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq have already brought themselves into confrontation with Saudi Arabia and its partners and have paid dearly for it. In Yemen, the Saudi-led Joint Forces Command is consolidating Yemeni and allied forces for a campaign intended to degrade and ultimately neutralise Houthi military capabilities, removing their ability to threaten Saudi territory, maritime security and neighbouring states.

Saudi-led coalition structures across these theatres now encompass more than 650,000 personnel. They are not a single army. They represent substantial indigenous military power organised around a common regional security purpose. All that, along with the maritime coalition and the new pact, should signal to Iran that it needs to reconsider its aggressive approach to regional geopolitics.

The same should apply to Israel. Israeli adventurism will not be treated differently. The strike on Qatar on September 9 demonstrated what happens when military superiority becomes confused with unlimited strategic licence. Attacking a Gulf state is unacceptable regardless of who conducts it.

Israel has legitimate security requirements, but it does not possess an unrestricted military veto over the region. The emerging architecture will establish strategic boundaries for Tehran and its proxies as well as for Israel. A new balance of regional power will force restraint on both.

Sceptics will dismiss the Mecca agreement as symbolism. But Pakistani forces are already involved, the Saudi-led maritime coalition has been created, Saudi-led military structures in Yemen are operating, and the Gulf is debating deeper integration. The agreement gives political form to an architecture already being built.

This is the beginning of the post-American Middle East – not a region without the US, but one no longer dependent upon American power to organise its security. Participation remains a sovereign choice, but geography and power are not.

And the centre of gravity of the order now emerging is Saudi Arabia.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.