Remember that photo from Donald Trump’s first overseas trip as a president back in 2017?
The new president was in Riyadh. Instead of going to Europe or Japan or Canada, Trump was making his first presidential trip to Saudi Arabia. And there he was, at the opening of a new World Center for Countering Extremist Thought, flashing his trademark smirk as he put his hands on a glowing orb that represented the globe. Next to him, their hands also on the magic ball, were the Saudi king and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
The three leaders looked like they were in a film, playing an evil trio plotting to take over the world. Twitter lit up with comparisons to the three witches from Macbeth. It was a terrifying irony that Trump and company were inaugurating a center for “countering extremist thought” since they all three, in their own way, represented the promotion of extremist thought.
This appearance in Saudi Arabia was effectively Trump’s announcement that the liberal international order was over. The new president didn’t want to associate with European liberals or Japanese democrats or Canadian moderates. He preferred the company of a military strongman from Egypt and a religious autocrat from Saudi Arabia. Their hands on the globe symbolized their desire to spin the world in a different direction.
A decade later, Trump can still be judged by the company he keeps. He’s buddies with war criminals like Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s tight with autocrats like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman.
But, increasingly, even the autocrats are leery of Trump. Sure, no one wants to piss off Trump since, after all, he controls both nukes and tariffs. But the U.S. president is unpredictable and, frankly, erratic. Richard Nixon pretended, more or less, to be a madman in the 1970s so that the North Vietnamese would not be able to predict his next move in the war. Trump is probably not pretending. Other leaders are playing it safe by quietly treating him like a lunatic.
In 2017, the autocrats couldn’t wait to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago and then return the favor by inviting him to join their clubs, like the absurdly titled World Center for Countering Extremist Thought. But now, a decade later, some authoritarian countries like India and Russia haven’t even joined Trump’s Board of Peace.
More concerning, at least from the point of view of an American exceptionalist, are the clubs that have been set up to exclude the United States. And that’s where the new Mecca Defense Pact comes in.
It’s Our Party
Last week, Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia signed a mutual security pact in which they pledged to come to each other’s defense in the event of an attack. The new alliance is built on a bilateral agreement signed last year between Islamabad and Riyadh.
Two things are significant about this announcement. The first is that three U.S. military allies have decided that they shouldn’t rely overmuch on Washington for their security. Instead, they will increasingly rely on each other.
Second, this new pact won’t stop at three. The next member will likely be Egypt, which already consults with the other three countries in an arrangement called R4. Also likely to join at a certain point will be Gulf countries like Qatar and Kuwait.
This “Mecca Defense Pact” amounts to a strategic convergence of Sunni-majority countries. It also brings together three largely authoritarian countries, with Turkey subject to the whims of its leader, Pakistan dominated by its military, and Saudi Arabia functioning as a religious monarchy.
The current tripartite alliance is not targeting any particular adversary. But it’s not difficult to guess who they’re thinking about: the three Is of India, Israel, and Iran. These adversaries are a mixed bunch—one majority Hindu, another majority Jewish, a third majority Shia—with no likelihood of responding with their own military pact. They don’t constitute a unified threat even if you add the Houthis of Yemen to the mix. And none of these potential adversaries has identified the new pact as adversarial. It’s tempting, then, to dismiss the Mecca pact as just a Sunni friendship alliance, more declarative than substantive.
But if that were the case, the three countries wouldn’t be so eager to include an Article 5-like provision in their pact and, in so doing, challenge certain geopolitical realities. Turkey is a member of NATO, so now it will be committing to fight in wars on several continents? Pakistan is currently trying to mediate in the war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran, so will it now commit to intervene against Tehran the next time Iranian missiles fall on Saudi Arabia? Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has strong economic and military relations with India, so is it now willing to cede all of that to Israel?
All of these complications point to one conclusion. The three countries are willing to make some sacrifices to align against their adversaries, but the real aim is to protect themselves from their ally, the United States. Ever since his first term, Donald Trump has threatened not to uphold U.S. security commitments if countries don’t spend more on their own militaries (NATO), if countries don’t spend more on their alliance commitments (Japan, South Korea), or if countries look at the U.S. president the wrong way (Canada and much of the rest of the world).
Instead of just complaining about U.S. fickleness, the leadership of Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia have decided to do something about it.
Trump’s Version of Globalism
For a guy who has trashed internationalists and globalists, Trump seems to be spending a lot of foreign policy energy on creating new multilateral security arrangements. His Board of Peace, with its 27 members willing to pay the $1 billion entrance fee, is a rather anemic version of the United Nations, but it’s also clear evidence that Trump doesn’t want to go it alone. He wants other countries to follow behind him like ducklings in a row.
Then there are the purpose-built associations. Trump has created a Pax Silica to secure mineral access in friendly countries. This grouping only has 24 members, but they’re powerhouses, including the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India. The U.S. president continues to push forward with his Abrahamic Accords to integrate and elevate Israel in the Middle East. The Quad—India, Australia, Japan, and the United States—is designed to contain the ambitions of China in the Indo-Pacific region.
At the same time, Trump has pushed back against other multilateral efforts. He has pulled the United States out of a plethora of UN institutions, including UNESCO and the World Health Organization. He has threatened the BRICS with economic devastation if they have the temerity to issue a currency to compete with the dollar. He pulled the U.S. delegation out of the last G20 meeting in South Africa and ignored the last Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in South Korea.
The message is clear: it’s my multilateralism or no multilateralism.
So far, the Trump administration seems to view the Mecca Defense Pact as a friendly grouping that can implement the burden-sharing that the president has pressed on U.S. allies. It’s the same kind of tacit approval that the administration has shown the greater coordination between Japan and South Korea or the moves to expand the European Defense Fund.
As with so many things, the Trump administration is failing to read the room. U.S. allies are not openly defying the Trump administration, but they are also not following orders. The actions of these allies, from Europe to Asia to the Middle East, are more akin to family members telling a violent, dangerous, and unhinged father that they’re taking him to a lovely vacation spot when they’re really shipping him off to a lunatic asylum. Papa, still powerful in his dotage, needs his ego stroked and his suspicions allayed before he can be nudged off the stage.
In the global version of Succession that is currently taking place, everyone is making contingency plans. The Mecca pact is just the latest indication that the liberal international order is dying, Pax Americana is on its last legs, and the rough outlines of what comes next is just becoming visible.