Tehran Does Not Want to Join the Makkah Pact. It Wants to Rewrite It.

Tehran Does Not Want to Join the Makkah Pact. It Wants to Rewrite It.

EDITORIAL · WEST ASIA

Iran's price for entry is founder status and a hand in drafting the documents. That is not a request to sign an agreement. It is a request to replace one.

Aalimi Nation

Reporting by BBC Urdu this week has laid out, more clearly than any official statement has, what Iran actually wants from the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement — and why the three countries that signed it are unlikely to give it.

The sequence matters. On 22 August, Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and a senior adviser to the Supreme Leader, told a state news agency that Iran could become part of the pact only if it were recognised as a co-founder, with a role in preparing the agreement's foundational documents. Iran and Egypt, he said, should not be left outside regional arrangements of this kind, and their participation would have to be as founding parties whose ideas shaped the signed texts.

He was blunt about what he would not accept. It was unacceptable, he said, for "friendly countries" to conclude an agreement among themselves and then ask Tehran to endorse or support it afterwards.

Two days later the picture became murkier. Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, told a press conference on Monday morning that Tehran had received no invitation to join the Makkah agreement, though proposals for talks on regional security had been made. That contradicted a report by the Lebanese network Al-Mayadeen, citing an unnamed Iranian official, that an invitation had arrived and was under consideration.

Earlier, on 10 August, Baghaei had taken a broadly neutral line, describing the pact as evidence of changing security thinking in the region, noting that Iran had been in contact with all three signatories and informed of the initiative, and declining to rule out eventual Iranian participation.

Three positions in two weeks, from three different offices. That is itself informative. It suggests a debate inside the Iranian system rather than a settled policy.

What "co-founder" actually means

Strip away the diplomatic vocabulary and Rezaei's demand is straightforward: Iran will not accept a document it did not help write.

The former diplomat Aqil Nadeem, speaking to BBC Urdu, made the obvious objection. The founder-member demand is impractical, because the agreement has already been concluded and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye are its founders. You cannot found something that exists.

But Nadeem also offered the more interesting reading of what Tehran may be reaching for. Iran, he suggested, may want the pact's scope widened beyond military attack to cover economic pressure and sanctions — so that members would coordinate a joint response when one of them faces economic coercion rather than only armed aggression. He was careful to call this speculation, while noting that Iran's recent positioning makes it difficult to dismiss.

That reading fits the circumstances. Iran is under intensifying American economic pressure. A mutual defence clause that triggers on missiles is of limited use to a state whose principal wound is sanctions and a closed strait. A clause that triggers on economic coercion would be worth a great deal.

Which is precisely why it will not be granted.

The three founders' problem

The analyst Hasan Askari Rizvi put the difficulty plainly to BBC Urdu. If Iran wished to join without conditions, he said, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye would probably have no objection. But Rezaei's statement indicates Tehran wants substantial changes to the framework — changes the three are unlikely to accept.

His central point deserves emphasis. Iran's target, whether it joins or not, is the United States, and any Iranian conditions would likely include provisions touching American installations and bases in the region. Were such provisions written in, Rizvi argued, the agreement would visibly become directed against a particular country — and the signatories have insisted repeatedly that it is defensive and aimed at no one.

That insistence is not decoration. It is the pact's entire diplomatic viability. Türkiye is a NATO member. Saudi Arabia hosts American forces and depends on American systems. Pakistan is negotiating its own economic relationship with Washington. An arrangement that could be read as an anti-American bloc would cost all three more than it delivers.

Rizvi also corrected the premise underneath Rezaei's argument. American presence in the region has diminished somewhat, he noted, but has not disappeared, and Washington will be watching this closely.

Rezaei's own framing was less restrained. The pact, he claimed, is a consequence of America's weakening position — that Pakistan, Türkiye and Saudi Arabia acted because Washington told them, in his words, that it was leaving.

There is something to that. Confidence in American guarantees has eroded across the Gulf, and the Makkah pact is partly a response. But Rezaei's conclusion does not follow from his premise. States hedging against an unreliable patron do not thereby seek an adversary of it. They seek insurance — which is a different product entirely.

What this tells us

Read together, the Iranian statements describe a country seeking to convert a security arrangement it was not part of into a platform it could use.

That is rational statecraft, and Tehran should not be criticised for attempting it. But it is not a request for membership, and the three signatories will read it correctly. Nadeem's alternative suggestion is the more realistic path: not Iranian accession to the Makkah agreement, but a separate future arrangement in which member states coordinate against economic coercion as well as military threat.

For India, watching from outside a security architecture in which Pakistan sits inside, the episode carries an unexpected reassurance. A pact whose founders must repeatedly insist it targets no one, and which cannot absorb a fourth member without changing character, is a looser and more constrained thing than its announcement suggested. Alliances that cannot define an enemy struggle to act like alliances.

The more consequential question is the one Rezaei asked and answered wrongly. Regional powers are indeed building their own security arrangements because the old guarantees look thinner. But the states doing so are hedging, not choosing sides — the same instinct that ought to guide New Delhi.

Tehran's demand for founder status is not a bid to join that trend. It is an attempt to bend it. The founders will decline, politely, and the pact will remain what its three signatories say it is: an arrangement among themselves, open in principle to others, closed in practice to anyone who wants to rewrite it.

Reporting in this editorial draws on BBC Urdu, which carried the interviews with Dr Hasan Askari Rizvi and former diplomat Aqil Nadeem, and reported the statements by Mohsen Rezaei and Esmaeil Baghaei. Al-Mayadeen's report of an invitation is cited as it appeared. The views expressed are Aalimi Nation's own.