Iran cautiously eyes Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey pact as sign of waning US influence

Three countries signed a mutual defense agreement in Mecca on Friday that has set off a quiet calculation in Tehran. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey committed themselves to treat any armed attack on one as an attack on all—a pact that emerged more than five months into a war between the United States and Iran, a conflict that has already disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and left the region's security architecture in flux.

The three nations were careful in their language. They said the agreement was not aimed at any particular country, that it did not cancel existing relationships, and that it was simply the culmination of years of negotiation. But the timing matters. Saudi Arabia has spent months absorbing strikes from Houthi forces aligned with Iran—drone attacks on oil refineries, missile fire on ports. On Sunday alone, the Houthis claimed another successful strike on a Saudi Aramco facility in Jizan, and separately, their weapons hit the Saudi-backed port of al-Makha in Yemen, killing at least seven people and wounding fifteen, with severe damage to infrastructure. The question hanging over the region is whether this new pact signals a shift toward coordinated pressure on Iran across multiple theaters: Yemen, Iraq, and through economic channels via Turkey and Pakistan.

In Tehran, the official response has been measured. Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi did not directly address the trilateral agreement when he posted on social media about Muslims standing together against malicious outsiders. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs released no formal statement. Instead, a senior official, Hossein Noushabadi, told state media that Iran views the pact primarily as evidence of declining American security dominance in the region. He framed it as the beginning of a collapse of U.S. hegemony in West Asia, a sign that regional states are building their own security architecture independent of external powers. This reading—that the pact represents a post-American order rather than an anti-Iranian one—has become the dominant interpretation among Iranian decision-makers.

But analysts see deeper concerns beneath the surface calm. Hamidreza Azizi, a researcher at the Clingendael Institute, told Al Jazeera that while Iran is not immediately threatened, the long-term risk is real. The pact could strengthen Saudi deterrence and eventually enable coordinated action against Iran-aligned groups in Yemen and Iraq, or economic pressure through Turkey and Pakistan. Some Iranian hardliners are already skeptical. Ebrahim Azizi, a member of parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, warned that the agreement could be directed against what Iran calls its "resistance front"—the network of armed forces it backs across the region. He cautioned against miscalculation, arguing that balance is the only path forward.

Western experts offer a more sanguine view. Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, does not see the pact as an immediate threat to Tehran. He describes it as part of a broader post-American security order in the Middle East, as much a response to the Abraham Accords—the U.S.-backed normalization between Arab states and Israel—as a direct challenge to Iran. Mehran Kamrava, at Georgetown University of Qatar, agrees that Iranian decision-makers do not feel immediately threatened, partly because Iran maintains workable relations with both Pakistan and Turkey. He notes that the pact, for all its symbolic weight, lacks substance: neither Turkey nor Pakistan is likely to join Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, despite recent Houthi attacks on the kingdom.

The real question is what happens next. Azizi suggests that Iran's priority will be to prevent the pact from hardening into an explicitly anti-Iranian coalition, which means preserving individual relationships with each of the three signatories. He also notes that if the arrangement evolves from a balancing coalition into a broader regional security architecture, the question of Iranian participation could eventually arise—though that would require a sustainable end to attacks in the Strait of Hormuz and across the region. Some analysts have even floated the possibility that Iran might seek membership in a distant future, though that remains speculative. Egypt has been mentioned as a potential candidate for expansion, though Cairo would face complex political calculations in deciding whether to join. For now, the pact sits in a strange space: symbolically significant but substantively limited, a marker of shifting regional alignments at a moment when the old American-led order is visibly receding but no new consensus has yet taken its place.