How a pragmatic axis could reshape the Middle East

How a pragmatic axis could reshape the Middle East Nearly three years after the 7 October Hamas attack shattered the illusion of a manageable status quo - one serving US-Israeli interests, while harming Palestinian rights - and midway through President Donald Trump’s second term, the Middle East no longer maps neatly onto the two axes that have defined it for decades. The region’s fault line long ran between Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” - comprising Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi armed groups, and a battered but defiant Syria under the Assad regime - and the Israeli-inspired “Pax Americana”: an informal architecture of deterrence, normalisation, and military primacy that Washington and Tel Aviv sought to impose through the Abraham Accords, blatant double standards, international law violations and overwhelming force. Today, a third pole could be emerging: an increasingly institutionalised “Sunni axis” anchored in Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad - with Doha, Cairo, and to a lesser extent Abu Dhabi at its edges. Until a few days ago, this was not a formal alliance, with no charter or official name. But if seriously pursued, this grouping may reshape the region’s power balance more durably than either of the aforementioned blocs. On 7 August, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey took the first step towards institutionalising this informal understanding through the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, which contemplates a Nato-style collective security guarantee. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters There is a view that suggests the events of 7 October 2023, and the wars that followed, simultaneously discredited both the Pax Americana and Axis of Resistance narratives. Multiple shocks Iran and its allies, the argument goes, have proved capable of inflicting shock and sustaining asymmetric pressure, but at a high cost. Hezbollah’s command structure was decapitated, its arsenal degraded by Israeli operations that culminated in a fragile ceasefire; the Assad regime, Iran’s forward operating base in the Levant for half a century, finally collapsed; and the military wing of Hamas in Gaza was crushed in a war that killed tens of thousands of people and left the enclave in ruins, while devastating Israel’s global image. Pax Americana proved illusory as a stabilising framework. Washington’s strategy under Trump has been transactional rather than architectural: pressuring Hamas and Israel into a ceasefire, standing up a “Board of Peace” for Gaza’s reconstruction, and leaning hard on Gulf capitals to expand the Abraham Accords - even floating the idea that Iran itself may eventually join. Israel has not achieved its much-touted war goals in Gaza, Lebanon or Iran. On the latter, the US is erratically alternating between promises of dialogue and threats of force, without an evident strategy, nor apparently any clear idea of its own military capabilities. As an organising concept, it represents something genuinely new: not the victory of one axis over another, but the emergence of a third way Meanwhile, Israel’s own conduct - including the September 2025 strike on Doha targeting Hamas leadership on Qatari soil - did something Washington never intended: it convinced Gulf states that American security guarantees might not extend to them when Israel decides its threat perception requires action inside their territory. When a Nato-aligned state hosting the region’s largest regional military base can be struck without consequence, deterrence built on Washington’s word alone becomes a joke. It is out of these multiple shocks - not out of shared ideology, since Ankara’s political Islam, Riyadh’s post-Vision-2030 authoritarian pragmatism, and Islamabad’s garrison-state realism have little in common - that an emerging bloc draws its coherence. The core is a 2025 Saudi-Pakistani mutual defence pact, signed in the aftermath of the Doha strike, which effectively places Islamabad’s nuclear and missile capabilities under an informal umbrella available to Riyadh. Turkey, which owns Nato’s second-largest army and a defence industrial base that already supplies drones and now naval and land systems across the region, has slowly moved towards joining this framework. Geopolitical evolution Egypt, controlling the Suez Canal and holding the Arab world’s largest standing army, and Qatar, offering financial firepower and unmatched mediation channels to Hamas, Washington and Tehran alike, complete this interesting geopolitical evolution from the exterior. Abu Dhabi lingers at a careful distance, still competing with Riyadh for post-oil economic primacy and Israeli security cooperation. For the UAE, there are good reasons to join this format, but also good ones to stay out and watch, particularly considering the overall volatility of the situation. Beyond the decades-old Saudi-Pakistani cooperation, what binds this group is not deep friendship - Turkish-Saudi relations were poisoned for years by the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul - but rather a convergent, pragmatic calculation. Each capital has independently concluded that neither an Iranian proxy war nor an Israeli-American iron-fist/Israel-first order underwritten by force alone offers viable long-term stability and an acceptable status quo. Joint exercises have multiplied this year: Saudi-led drills bringing in Turkish and Pakistani air assets, Egyptian-Pakistani special-forces cooperation, and multilateral planning cycles involving all four militaries. None of this amounts to an “Islamic Nato” - at least not yet, the binding defence clause notwithstanding - and scepticism about its cohesion is warranted. Turkey and Saudi Arabia remain rivals for leadership of the Sunni world, and Pakistan’s enthusiasm has visibly cooled as Ankara’s role has deepened. But even as a prospect rather than a settled fact, the bloc is already reshaping calculations in Tehran, New Delhi, Tel Aviv and Washington. What distinguishes this axis from its predecessors is precisely its refusal to offer a grand normative alternative. It does not claim to represent political Islam the way Iran claims to represent “resistance”, nor does it offer the deterministic promise of integration into a US-led order, as the Abraham Accords did. Realignment by risk management Its members hedge simultaneously: Saudi Arabia is keeping a channel open to eventual normalisation with Israel, while building a nuclear-armed security guarantee against it, and avoiding being dragged directly into a damaging escalation against Iran. Turkey is expanding its footprint in Syria and Iraq as Iranian influence recedes, without breaking economic ties to Tehran, and preparing to match Israeli hegemonic ambitions in the region. Egypt and Qatar continue to function as mediators, precisely because they are uneasy with any single patron. This is realignment by risk management rather than by conviction - a hedge against both an unreliable American security guarantee and a discredited Iranian one. But that pragmatism is also a chief source of durability, as the axis aims to contain Iran’s remaining proxy capacity, deter Israel from striking their countries unilaterally, and preserve enough strategic autonomy from Washington to avoid being drawn into confrontations that do not align with members’ interests. None of this means the region has found stability. Gaza’s reconstruction remains contested, Lebanon’s ceasefire is fragile, and Iran - weakened but unbowed - can still destabilise through what remains of its proxy network. Within the axis itself, there are also internal rivalries to contend with, from the Turkish-Saudi competition to the UAE’s studied distance. Yet as an organising concept, it represents something genuinely new: not the victory of one axis over another, but the emergence of a third way - regional, transactional, and explicitly hedged against Tehran’s revisionism, Israel’s messianic expansionism and Washington’s clumsy commitment. It will compete to define what stability in the Middle East will actually mean over the next decade. For now, the Mecca deal performs the peculiar role of enabling actors to project their wildest dreams onto it. Israel and its vanishing supporters in Washington will see it as a welcome effort to further constrain Iran in the region; Tehran will see it as evidence that major regional actors are organising to escape the unreliable American security umbrella, and to counter Israel’s messianic, hegemonic ambitions; and Turkey might view it as a useful framework to address soaring tensions with Tel Aviv. For Saudi Arabia, this alliance might be the only option to preserve the status quo that it wishes to keep intact, while for Pakistan, it is a good opportunity to boost its international standing, with an eye on its most important strategic challenge: India. Whatever the outcome, the Mecca agreement could do more to determine the region’s trajectory than anything decided in Washington, Tel Aviv or Tehran. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.