Saudi Arabia has spent years trying to get out of the war in Yemen. Now, with Houthi missiles and drones raining down on its territory, its most important ally, Washington, is declining to join its counterstrikes.
So Riyadh is turning instead to Turkey and Pakistan, putting a new defense alliance to an early test, and with it, the prospect of a Middle East where Washington’s partners take greater responsibility for their own security.
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, inked in August, was invoked on Oct. 5 when the three countries agreed to deploy additional forces and military capabilities to Saudi Arabia under what Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman called the activation of “collective deterrence measures.”
Five days later, a Houthi attack on Riyadh’s main airport killed 13 people and wounded hundreds more. It was followed by a strike on Saudi Aramco’s headquarters, upping the stakes for the new bloc.
U.S. President Donald Trump has turned down multiple Saudi requests for direct strikes against the Houthis, which the U.S. State Department has designated a foreign terrorist organization. He suggested this week, however, that he might ask Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to help.
“President Erdoğan, I think, would do as I ask,” he said.
Resources at the Ready
Turkey and Pakistan could bring considerable resources to bear. Pakistan has stationed thousands of troops in the kingdom under a 1982 agreement, and Turkey supplies some 65% of the world’s armed drone exports.
But both have also drawn clear boundaries on how they intend to help.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan insists the pact is “not an offensive agreement” and that Turkish troops would defend only Saudi territory. The country’s Defense Ministry also said Thursday that the trilateral agreement and any deployment of Turkish forces to Saudi Arabia still required parliamentary approval, with no final decision on what assistance Ankara would provide.
At an Oct. 9 press briefing by Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a spokesperson said Islamabad would also help defend Saudi territory, but its troops “would not cross the border into Yemen to launch attacks against the Houthis.”
April Longley Alley, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former adviser to the U.N. special envoy for Yemen, told MBN that Turkish and Pakistani support could help fill gaps in the kingdom’s defenses.
“Insofar as they can help defend against drones and missiles from the Houthis,” she said, “and also to help beef up the defense of Saudi’s southern border, which the Houthis have harassed in the past, I think that can be quite helpful.”
But Alley said maintaining the distinction between defending Saudi territory and being drawn into a cross-border war with the Iran-backed Houthis could be a struggle for Turkey and Pakistan.
Given the nature of the fighting, it is an open question how much of an immediate difference the Mecca alliance could make in the Saudi-Houthi conflict, said Ibrahim Al-Assil, a senior research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative.
“This is mainly a Saudi priority,” he said at a Middle East Institute briefing Wednesday. “What could Pakistan and Turkey offer beyond general support?”
“The Saudis are the ones who know Yemen,” he said. “They are the ones who know the Houthis. They are the ones who understand the terrain more than the Turks and the Pakistanis. I don’t think that this would be a game changer.”
At best, he said, the conflict could encourage the three countries to open “a new phase of a more serious discussion about what this alliance actually means and where it could go in the future.”
Primary Ally
The United States remains Saudi Arabia’s principal military partner. Its intelligence capabilities, advanced weapons and long-range airpower offer options that Turkey and Pakistan cannot readily match.
Tim Lenderking, former U.S. special envoy for Yemen, said the United States therefore needs to do more to support its decades-old allies in Riyadh, including providing more intelligence and direct military assistance.
“There are moments when your friends are in crisis and you need to help,” Lenderking told the MEI briefing. “You need to go the extra mile.”
However, that doesn’t include committing U.S. ground troops to Yemen, he said.
“That’s not going to happen; nobody’s asking for that,” he said. “But certainly for Saudi Arabia, our ability to provide military support behind the scenes, intel support — we have resources that could be brought to the fight.”
Yet even if Washington does decide to commit firepower, it remains far from certain that another American bombing campaign could end the conflict.
“The U.S. can do a lot of damage if they want to,” Alley said, pointing to U.S. capabilities to strike Houthi weapons facilities and military leadership. “But the bigger question is, does that change the outcome of this war?”
“Bombing to what end?” she asked.
The Houthis, meanwhile, on Monday threatened the U.S. military with a “swift and painful” response if Washington decides to intervene.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday condemned the Houthi strikes on Riyadh but made no new commitments. Asked about the Houthi threats to the United States and whether the Mecca alliance could lessen the need for a U.S. intervention, a State Department spokesperson referred MBN back to Trump’s and Rubio’s public remarks.
Defining Success
Riyadh first intervened in Yemen in 2015 to restore the internationally recognized government after the Houthis seized Sanaa. But more than a decade later, the group remains entrenched in the north and its opponents divided.
Houthi advances near the Bab el-Mandab Strait threaten oil exports through the Red Sea and Suez Canal just as the U.S.-Iran war has disrupted transit through the Strait of Hormuz.
In response, Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of Yemen’s Saudi-backed Presidential Leadership Council, last week launched the government’s latest offensive with a pledge to restore state authority across the country.
Recovering territory near Bab el-Mandab and stabilizing the front lines might offer Riyadh an attainable short-term result and strengthen its position at the negotiating table, Alley suggested. Lenderking added that decisive battlefield pressure might force the Houthis into talks.
“When one side [the Houthis] feels that it has the upper hand militarily, it’s less likely to negotiate,” he said.
But an ongoing rift between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates over the UAE’s support for a faction that rivals al-Alimi has weakened the anti-Houthi coalition, according to Alley, who argued in a recent paper that helping the two Gulf partners reconcile could be one of Washington’s most valuable contributions to resolving the conflict.
For Riyadh, Washington’s reluctance to intervene against the Houthis has reinforced its desire for other security arrangements, even as the Iran war has made it more dependent on U.S. weapons and air defenses.
“Their major ally initiated a war that they were not comfortable with in the first place, and were worried about,” Alley said of the U.S.-Iran war. “Now they are even more in need of U.S. military hardware and U.S. support.”
Whether the Mecca pact could lessen that dependence may be decided in Yemen.
“This is definitely the first test of it,” Alley said. “It probably came sooner than the countries would have wanted.”
