Global Hotspots: The Mecca Pact and a New Saudi-Türkiye-Pakistan Bloc

In this week’s episode, Shahad Turkistani, Analyst at New Lines Institute, returns to break down the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, the trilateral pact signed by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan on 7 August, which commits all three to treat an armed attack on any one of them as an attack on all.

Additionally, this week, Milos Maggiore and Andrew Loftesnes discuss developments in the Middle East, where Houthi attacks in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait killed at least six people and disrupted international shipping, while Iranian officials stated that negotiations with the U.S. are at a deadlock.

In the Indo-Pacific, China conducted a joint naval patrol with an Indonesian warship off Taiwan’s east coast, while Russian President Vladimir Putin visited a disputed island with Japan. In the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that North Korea would be sending additional troops and weapons to the conflict while Putin threatened to respond in kind to recent European seizures of Russian shadow fleet vessels. In the Americas, a Canadian petition to expel U.S. ambassador Pete Hoekstra is set to be discussed in the House of Commons, while U.S. judges have found the Trump administration to be using an unlawful interpretation of the law to justify its mass detention policy.

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Marxist Arrow by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Photo: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (L), Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (C), and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif (R) sign a trilateral defense agreement in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on August 7, 2026. (Photo by Turkish Presidency / Murat Cetinmuhurdar / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)