The Mecca Pact Courts Iran: Containment Comes Full Circle

For nearly half a century, Iran’s adversaries have tried to isolate it, intimidate it, sanction it into submission and bomb it into irrelevance. Now, in a remarkable inversion of regional power politics, three countries historically invested in its containment have arrived in Tehran to discuss their security with the very state they were supposed to marginalise. The country they could not defeat is becoming the country they cannot afford to ignore. Yesterday, Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman, Pakistan’s army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir and Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalın met Iranian officials in an encounter whose diplomatic courtesies barely concealed its strategic significance. The Mecca Pact, the joint defence agreement that Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed […]