Shafaq News
As a new security order takes shape across the Middle East, Iraq has stayed outside the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement signed on August 7 by Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, and Pakistan, despite sitting at the geographic center of the region the pact is meant to defend. Baghdad's absence raises a question its own divided political class has yet to answer: is this deliberate neutrality, or the drift of a state no longer able to act as a reliable partner?
The pact did not emerge in a vacuum. It is a direct product of the war that erupted when the United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28, and of the retaliation that followed: Saudi territory was hit repeatedly by Iran, by the Houthis in Yemen, and by Shia armed groups operating from Iraqi soil. That last detail moves Iraq from the margins of this story to its center: the territory of a state professing neutrality has already been used to strike one of the pact's architects.
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What the three signatories built in response is a mutual-defense guarantee of unusual weight. The agreement commits them to treat an armed attack on any one as an attack on all —a NATO-style clause binding a top oil exporter, NATO's second-largest military, and the only nuclear-armed Muslim state. Together they field roughly 1.4 million active personnel, some 3,400 aircraft, 6,000 tanks, and more than 340 naval assets, according to the 2026 Global Firepower Index. Nor is the pact a one-off: it builds on the Saudi–Pakistan strategic defense agreement signed in Riyadh in September 2025, the product of nearly a year of negotiation.
Riyadh has separately backed a multinational maritime initiative to protect shipping through the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb. Iraqi crude does not travel those routes; its exports leave through the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, but the distinction only sharpens Baghdad's exposure: the Hormuz corridor sits squarely inside the Iran confrontation, and disruption along any of these waterways moves the global oil price that funds the overwhelming majority of Iraq's budget. On none of the arrangements now forming to protect them does Iraq hold a seat.
Iraq confronts these arrangements from a position of institutional fragility that is more than rhetorical. The government of Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi was sworn in on May 14 as the youngest premier in Iraq's history and the first non-politician to hold the office. It took power with only a partial cabinet: parliament could not agree on the interior and defense portfolios, leaving the country weighing whether to join a collective defense pact without a confirmed defense minister to assess it. The symbolism is difficult to overstate.
Not everyone reads Iraq's absence as a failure. Amer al-Fayez, head of the Iraqi Parliament's Foreign Relations Committee, sees no cause for alarm. "Every agreement has its own circumstances and reasons," he told Shafaq News, noting that the Mecca pact concerns its three signatories, who did not invite the wider region to join. Baghdad, in his account, can pursue security and economic cooperation with neighbors on its own terms without binding itself to any bloc, and prefers arrangements that lower tensions to alliances that force it to pick a side.
Given that Iraq maintains working ties with Iran, Turkiye, the Gulf states, and the United States at once, joining a collective defense structure could carry consequences well beyond the treaty text.
Political researcher Khaled al-Ardawi argues the reality is less flattering. Iraq, he told Shafaq News, still lacks a coherent foreign policy it can implement consistently, leaving it in a "gray zone" of international relations. "The Iraqi government is not fully capable of making an independent foreign decision on political, security and defense issues without taking into account the positions of external parties."
He traces the constraint to internal division, institutional weakness, corruption, and the presence of weapons outside state control —a reference, above all, to the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the Iran-aligned paramilitary umbrella whose factions the government does not fully command. Those same conditions, he notes, make regional and major powers reluctant to sign long-term defense agreements with Baghdad in the first place. The paradox is sharp: Iraq may avoid alliances to preserve flexibility, yet its divisions are precisely what deter others from treating it as a dependable partner.
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Political researcher Adel al-Ghariri locates the roots deeper in the past. The US-led invasion of 2003, the collapse of the security system in 2014 and the rise of ISIS, and the long contest over the shape of the state pushed Iraq away from its Arab surroundings and hollowed out its capacity to act as a central player in regional security. The drift toward sub-state loyalties and the spread of arms beyond state control, he told Shafaq News, "have made Iraqi political decision-making more complicated." He sees possibility in the al-Zaidi government, but frames the objective carefully: positioning Iraq between competing regional poles rather than inside any one of them.
Turkish analyst Jawad Gok notes that entering a collective military framework now could drag Baghdad into conflicts it has no interest in joining, at a moment of acute friction involving the Gulf and Iran, and Turkiye and Israel. "Iraq currently tends toward bilateral agreements of a developmental and economic nature rather than collective military strategies," he said, adding that any decision to join new security arrangements "requires time to assess their future and whether they will serve Iraqi interests."
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Abu Bakr al-Deeb, director of the Arab Thought Development Forum for Research, reads the same caution as the product of overlapping US, Iranian, Turkish, and Arab interests inside Iraq, a crowded field in which any visible tilt invites a reaction, and in which armed factions add a further layer of sensitivity.
Non-alignment buys diplomatic room, but al-Deeb is blunt about its price. Integrated air defense, intelligence sharing, maritime coordination, and large-scale joint exercises are increasingly being built without Iraq, and staying outside those networks “risks leaving Baghdad to develop its defenses more slowly than its neighbors, and to react to regional shifts rather than shape them.”
The cost is not abstract in a region where security now travels with energy and trade. A single disruption in the Red Sea or the Gulf can move oil markets within hours; Saudi Arabia's July agreement to supply the internationally recognized Yemeni government with up to $150 million in oil derivatives for electricity and essential services shows how tightly security, energy, and development have fused. Iraq's absence from the security layer does not exempt it from the economic consequences.
Yet distance is not the same as irrelevance. A recent assessment by Pakistan's Institute of Strategic Studies casts Iraq not as an arena for others' competition but as a diplomatic actor, an energy player, and a bridge across the region's economic map —a country whose ability to keep channels open to Tehran, the Gulf, Washington, and Ankara at once could be turned into leverage and even a mediating role.
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What most analysts agree on is that the choice cannot be deferred indefinitely. Al-Fayez holds that Iraq can strike security and economic agreements based on national interest; Gok counsels patience before committing to untested alliances. For al-Ardawi, none of it is possible until Baghdad rebuilds its decision-making from within: addressing the divisions, institutional weakness, corruption, and unregulated weapons that keep partners at arm's length. Al-Deeb offers not membership in any bloc, but "flexible security partnerships" with Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, and Turkiye across counterterrorism, border security, cybersecurity, and energy infrastructure —cooperation that stops short of anything that could read as aimed at a third state— paired with sustained investment in Iraq's own forces, air defenses, and military industries.
The trajectory suggests the window for that kind of deliberate, à la carte engagement is narrowing as the region's blocs harden around it. Iraq can still choose to make its neutrality a tool. But a state that cannot yet name its own defense minister will struggle to persuade anyone that its absence from the region's new alliances is a strategy rather than a symptom, and the longer the question goes unanswered, the more the answer is settled by others.
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Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.