The Mecca Pact is a step towards excluding Washington from the Middle Eastern defense and security architecture

Mohamed Lamine KABA, New Eastern Outlook, August 26, 2026 ─

Donald Trump’s chaotic isolationism is pushing Mecca to bury America. From Africa to the Caribbean theater, the American withdrawal leaves the field open to new Eurasian coalitions, consecrating the humiliation of Washington.

Even as Iran announces to the world its victory over the United States and is reportedly preparing its official withdrawal from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty – a withdrawal that will allow it to officially launch its nuclear program leading to the acquisition of nuclear weapons – at the same time, Washington, having failed on the military front, is launching an economic war calling on all countries around the world to boycott Iran’s economy, a call that has so far been ignored by all countries of the world.

Indeed, on August 7, Riyadh, Ankara, and Islamabad signed a short text. Its effects, however, will be long-lasting. The Mecca agreement binds Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan through a simple clause similar to NATO’s Article 5: an attack against one is an attack against all. Nothing new in form. Everything is new in substance. For this pact arose in response to Iranian reprisals against Riyadh, at the very moment when Washington was looking elsewhere, toward Tel Aviv. The Saudi kingdom’s historical ally was not consulted at all, not in the slightest. It was simply bypassed, royally.

Trump promised a pacified Middle East through the force of the deal. Paradoxically, he delivers a Middle East that is learning to do without him.

American hegemony is crumbling before our eyes, accelerated by a presidency that confuses firmness with brutality, alliance with vassalage, diplomacy with public relations stunts.

An ally who drives away his allies

Since February, Washington’s open confrontation with Tehran has had the opposite effect to that intended. Forced to choose sides, the Gulf petro-monarchies have chosen their own survival. Riyadh no longer wants to depend on an American umbrella that has become unpredictable, capricious, and transactional. The Trump administration negotiates by tweet, threatens by executive order, and withdraws on a whim. No serious foreign ministry builds its national security on such an unstable barometer.

The result is a cruel blow for Washington: three Sunni powers, one of which has been a NATO member and part of the American security apparatus for decades, are granting each other a mutual guarantee without consulting their historical patron. The symbolism far outweighs the letter of the agreement. It is not yet an integrated military alliance, lacking a common command structure. But the signal is unambiguous: the Middle East is learning to secure itself without Uncle Sam, who has been revealed, too late, as more of an enemy than a friend.

Iran, the only real winner of the day

Аnti-Iranian pact primarily benefits Iran. Warning against the temptation to transform this agreement into an “anti-Iranian” sectarian bloc, Tehran relies on the CRIC bloc – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – which offers it a strategic depth that no Sunni coalition without integrated command can match. While Riyadh, Ankara, and Islamabad celebrate their superficial pact, Tehran is primarily focused on one thing: America is retreating, and its mortal enemy is advancing under cover of this retreat. For Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, the pact validates the thesis of the obsolescence of the “American security umbrella” in the Gulf and the Middle East. Ebrahim Rezaei, a key member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, has openly downplayed the deterrent effect of the agreement. According to him, “no agreement on paper with Ankara and Islamabad will guarantee the security of Riyadh” if Saudi Arabia does not fundamentally revise its regional policy.

The real loser is therefore neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia. It is Washington, stripped of its status as ultimate guarantor, discovering with astonishment that peace, war, and deterrence can now be made without it.

A hegemony that is cracking everywhere at once

Mecca is not an isolated incident. It is one symptom among many of a methodical decline. In Ukraine, Washington has promised, hesitated, and bargained for support that varies according to its terms, leaving Kyiv to negotiate its survival with an ally that counts its ammunition like it counts favors. In the Indo-Pacific, in the South and East China Seas, Beijing is advancing its interests while Washington multiplies its bellicose pronouncements without any renewed naval power. In Taiwan, American strategic ambiguity looks less and less like a doctrine and more and more like a permanent hesitation. Facing North Korea, the threats are repeated, identical for years, while Pyongyang refines its delivery systems.

In Africa, French and American military partnerships are waning as the Russian and Chinese presence establishes itself, discreet but persistent. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the Monroe Doctrine itself seems to belong to another century, so rapidly has Chinese influence spread with little resistance from Washington. And between Israel and Turkey, the recent war of words illustrates the same rift: two historical partners of America, now at loggerheads, with Washington appearing incapable of mediating anything.

This is no longer a series of isolated setbacks. It is a line. It runs across all continents. It tells the same story: a power that believed its past strength would be enough to guarantee its future influence.

Each case, taken separately, seems anecdotal. Taken together, they paint a precise picture of the retreat. Kyiv negotiates without any certainty of sustained support. Manila and Tokyo are arming themselves more heavily, not out of renewed confidence in Washington, but out of growing distrust of its consistency. Seoul observes, calculates, and no longer rules out exploring its own strategic options. Each capital is drawing the same silent lesson: the American guarantee, once set in stone, is now being negotiated according to the whims of a capricious presidency.

1945 fades into memory; 2027 arrives

Since 1945, the world has lived with a useful fiction: American hegemony as a structural, almost natural, given of the international order. This fiction is crumbling before our eyes, accelerated by a presidency that confuses firmness with brutality, alliance with vassalage, diplomacy with public relations stunts. Trump did not invent the relative decline of American power. He is the most effective accelerator ever produced by Washington itself.

The difference between Sunni and Shia Islam, it was recently written, is minuscule compared to the distance that now separates the Middle East from America. This statement deserves to be taken seriously. It suggests that old regional divisions matter less now than the new question: who – Beijing, Moscow, or Washington – will still be able to guarantee anything tomorrow?

What should Africa read into the Mecca Pact?

The great upheaval in the Middle East is not just an Arab affair. It is a laboratory. It shows all middle powers, including African ones, that relying solely on a Western patron for security guarantees is becoming an increasingly risky gamble. Diversifying partnerships is no longer a diplomatic boldness. It has become a necessity for strategic survival.

In two to three years, we can expect to see other regional pacts emerge based on this model: minimal pooling of resources, no integrated command structure, but a powerful political message sent to a Washington increasingly focused on its own marginalization. Mecca is not an end in itself. It is a prototype. And the chaotic, dangerous world is already watching to see who can replicate it elsewhere, faster, further afield, without ever returning to Trump’s America.

History may well remember a simple date. On August 7, 2026, three capitals stopped waiting for Washington’s permission to ensure their own security. On that day, America didn’t lose a battle. It lost something rarer, and far more difficult to regain: the certainty, among its own allies, that it remains indispensable.

It is therefore clear that the Mecca Pact laid the foundation stone in the Middle East for a de-Americanized and polycentric international order. It should be remembered that Trump’s authoritarian ambitions precipitated the fall of American hegemony, reducing Washington to the status of just one power among others in a definitively multipolar world.