The Treaty Named Itself Deterrence: Catholic Teaching on the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement

Three heads of state signed a document in Mecca on Friday, and they gave it a name that contains its entire theory of peace. The Mecca Joint Deterrence Agreement. Deterrence. That word has a long history in Catholic moral teaching, and the history is not friendly. Saudi Arabia has taken Iranian missiles into its capital and drones into its refineries since February, so nobody should pretend the fear behind those signatures was invented. But the Church has been examining this exact arrangement, security bought with threat, since at least 1963. And three months ago Pope Leo XIV sharpened the examination considerably.

The News Story

Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed a mutual defense treaty in Mecca on Friday, binding three of the Muslim world’s largest states to treat an attack on one as an attack on all, the most consequential realignment of Middle East security architecture since the United States and Israel began striking Iran on February 28.

The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, also rendered in some official translations as the Mecca Joint Deterrence Agreement, was signed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, accompanied by their foreign and defense ministers. Its central clause states that “any armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all.” The parties said jointly that the pact is intended to “strengthen collective deterrence against any act of aggression” and to provide for “the enhancement of all aspects of defense cooperation among the three states.”

Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the agreement was “guided by the longstanding historical ties among the three states, based on the enduring bonds of brotherhood and Islamic solidarity that unite them, and building upon their shared strategic interests and longstanding defense cooperation.” Sharif, accompanied by army chief Asim Munir, had arrived in Saudi Arabia a day earlier and performed the Umrah pilgrimage; Erdogan traveled to the kingdom on Friday.

The three countries bring distinct assets: Türkiye fields NATO’s second-largest military, Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest oil exporter, and Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority state with nuclear weapons. A Turkish official told Reuters the agreement is defensive in nature, is not directed at any specific actor, and is open to other regional countries. Analysts cautioned against overstating its scope: Ozgur Unluhisarcikli of the German Marshall Fund said it is “a framework for closer strategic, military, and defense-industrial coordination among three influential regional powers and not a mutual defense pact that can be compared to NATO.”

Negotiations predate the current war, beginning after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and accelerating this year. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a bilateral mutual defense agreement in September 2025, days after an Israeli strike on Doha; the three countries’ foreign ministers discussed a joint security arrangement in Riyadh on March 19. Pakistan deployed roughly 13,000 troops and fighter jets to Saudi Arabia in April.

The signing came as Saudi territory absorbed repeated attacks. On August 7, Houthi forces and Iran-aligned Iraqi militias carried out coordinated strikes in southern Saudi Arabia that injured 11 civilians, with two further attacks reported near the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. Iranian and allied strikes since February have hit Riyadh, the U.S. Embassy, and Aramco facilities at Ras Tanura.

Iran’s leadership issued no official response. Iranian MP Ebrahim Rezaei wrote on X that “a paper agreement with Türkiye and Pakistan will not bring them security.” President Masoud Pezeshkian said Tehran seeks neither war nor territorial expansion but will not yield to “coercion.” Israel’s government did not comment.

Separately, Iranian state media reported that Tehran and Oman have agreed a framework on Strait of Hormuz shipping routes, with “a final decision to be made at higher levels.” President Donald Trump said a deal to reopen the strait “could be soon” and that the war “can’t go much longer.”^1–13

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

The Word in the Treaty’s Own Name

Most treaties are named for the place they were signed. This one is named for the place and for the theory. Outlets and officials rendered it both ways all week: the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement and the Mecca Joint Deterrence Agreement, and the second rendering is the more honest one.¹ The operative clause says that “any armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all.”² Nothing in that sentence stops a missile. What it does is raise the advertised price of firing one.

That is what deterrence is. You try to make an attack unthinkable by making the answer to it unbearable. And the three signatories bring very different things to that price tag. Türkiye fields NATO’s second-largest military. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest oil exporter. Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority state that owns nuclear weapons.¹ Analysts spent Friday arguing about whether the pact is a genuine mutual-defense treaty at all, and Ozgur Unluhisarcikli of the German Marshall Fund made the cautious case that it is a coordination framework rather than a NATO analog.¹ Grant him the point entirely. The name still says deterrence, and the arithmetic still runs through Islamabad.

I want to spend this piece on that one word, because the Church has a settled and increasingly sharp judgment about it, and almost none of this week’s coverage went near it.

What Pacem in Terris Already Knew in 1963

Saint John XXIII wrote Pacem in Terris seven months after the Cuban missile crisis, which means he wrote it with the machinery of deterrence running at full throttle outside his window. He described how that machinery works with a precision that reads like this week’s wire copy.

“There is a common belief that under modern conditions peace cannot be assured except on the basis of an equal balance of armaments,” he wrote, “and that this factor is the probable cause of this stockpiling of armaments. Thus, if one country increases its military strength, others are immediately roused by a competitive spirit to augment their own supply of armaments. And if one country is equipped with atomic weapons, others consider themselves justified in producing such weapons themselves, equal in destructive force.”¹⁴

Now read the last five months in the Gulf against that paragraph. Iran and its allies struck Riyadh, the Ras Tanura refinery, Prince Sultan Air Base and the American embassy. Saudi Arabia struck back inside Iran without announcing it. Pakistan moved 13,000 troops and fighter jets into the kingdom in April. On Friday, three states wrote the arithmetic into a treaty.^3,6 Each step is defensible taken by itself. Taken together, they are precisely the competitive spirit John XXIII named.

He also counted the cost before he counted the benefit. The enormous stocks of armaments, he wrote, saddle the producing peoples with a great burden “while other countries lack the help they need for their economic and social development.”¹⁵ Then he made the claim that governs everything that follows it. Lasting peace among nations, he said, “cannot consist in the possession of an equal supply of armaments but only in mutual trust.”¹⁶

The Church’s Standing Reservation

The Catechism took that judgment and gave it a permanent home. Paragraph 2315 is unusually blunt for a catechism: “The accumulation of arms strikes many as a paradoxically suitable way of deterring potential adversaries from war. They see it as the most effective means of ensuring peace among nations. This method of deterrence gives rise to strong moral reservations. The arms race does not ensure peace. Far from eliminating the causes of war, it risks aggravating them.”¹⁷ The same paragraph adds that over-armament “multiplies reasons for conflict and increases the danger of escalation.”¹⁸

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, which is the Church’s own organized summary of all of this, repeats those words on deterrence and then supplies a working rule. It calls the standard the principle of sufficiency, “by virtue of which each State may possess only the means necessary for its legitimate defense,” and says it binds “both by States that buy arms and by those that produce and furnish them.”¹⁹ Then it shuts a door the Cold War had left propped open: “Policies of nuclear deterrence, typical of the Cold War period, must be replaced with concrete measures of disarmament based on dialogue and multilateral negotiations.”²⁰

That sentence has been sitting in the Compendium since 2004, and this week’s news walks straight into it. An agreement that draws a nuclear-armed state into the security guarantee of a non-nuclear state is a policy of nuclear deterrence, whatever the drafters titled it and whatever the diplomats say about defensive intent. Extending an umbrella is still holding the umbrella.

Leo XIV Closes the Escape Hatch

There is an older Catholic move available at this point, and it needs to be set aside out loud rather than quietly. For centuries Catholics tested wars against Just War theory, much of it received through Saint Thomas Aquinas, and the test proved flexible enough that a determined government could nearly always pass it. In Magnifica Humanitas, published in May, Pope Leo XIV writes that “without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.”²¹ The most recent teaching of the Magisterium governs. So the old checklist cannot be wheeled back in to bless a deterrence pact on the reasoning that any war it triggered would probably have qualified.

Leo goes further, and he goes directly at deterrence itself. Writing about the major nuclear powers refusing to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, he says this refusal “has led to the widespread yet erroneous belief that nuclear deterrence is an indispensable prerequisite for security.”²² Erroneous. That is a strong word, and the Holy Father chose it deliberately. He is calling the security logic a mistake, not merely a regrettable necessity.

And then comes the paragraph that could have been drafted about Friday. “The mentality of armed equilibrium and deterrence appears to be reasserting itself. Today, however, in contrast to the two-sided dynamic of the Cold War, the proliferation of operatives and battlefields makes this mentality increasingly fragile.”²³

Deterrence assumes a small number of rational players who can read each other’s signals across a clear line. The Gulf right now holds Iranian regulars, the IRGC, Houthi forces in Yemen, Iraqi militias, Israeli aircraft, American carriers, and as of Friday a three-state bloc stretching from Ankara to Islamabad. Leo’s point is that the assumption quietly stopped holding while the doctrine built on it kept expanding.

What the Church Is Not Saying

Being fair to Riyadh matters here, and the Church is fair to Riyadh.

A state under attack has a real right to defend itself. The Compendium says so plainly: leaders of a state that has been attacked “have the right and the duty to organize a defense even using the force of arms.”²⁴ The Catechism adds that those sworn to serve in the armed forces, carrying out their duty honorably, “truly contribute to the common good of the nation and the maintenance of peace.”²⁵ Saudi Arabia has taken ballistic missiles aimed at Riyadh and drones aimed at Aramco. On Friday, coordinated Houthi and Iraqi militia attacks in the kingdom’s south injured eleven civilians.^4,5 Nobody writing from a desk in Nebraska gets to wave that away.

The Compendium even wants regional arrangements. “States do not always possess adequate means to provide effectively for their own defense,” it says, “from this derives the need and importance of international and regional organizations.”²⁶ But look closely at what it says those organizations are for. They “should be in a position to work together to resolve conflicts and promote peace, re-establishing relationships of mutual trust that make recourse to war unthinkable.”²⁷ Two jobs: settle the quarrel, and rebuild the trust that makes the next quarrel less likely.

An agreement whose entire operative content is a promise of joint retaliation does neither. It aims at making war unthinkable by making it expensive, which is a different mechanism with a different failure mode. Expensive things get bought all the time when someone decides the price is worth paying, or miscalculates it.

The Automatic Clause

Here is what troubles me most about Friday, and the trouble is structural rather than partisan.

“Any armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all.” That clause takes a decision out of the future. Whatever the leaders of Türkiye and Pakistan think in the hour when the next drone lands near Dhahran, the answer has already been given, in advance, in Mecca. Pre-commitment is the entire point of deterrence. It is also its entire danger. A pledge that cannot be reconsidered is a pledge that cannot be repented of.

Leo XIV names the cultural machinery that makes such pledges feel obvious. “What has also re-emerged is the temptation to forge a collective identity in opposition to an enemy, fueled by narratives in which each party portrays itself as a victim entitled to retribution,” he writes. “The reduction of complex issues into simplistic categories, ‘me first,’ ‘friend or foe,’ ‘us or them,’ facilitates decisions that are often irresponsible and undermine mutual trust among nations.”²⁸ Pakistan’s foreign ministry grounded the pact in “brotherhood and Islamic solidarity.”¹ Brotherhood is a good word, and solidarity is one of ours. Both curdle the moment their content becomes membership in a bloc rather than the good of an actual neighbor.

The Compendium’s alternative is unglamorous, and it has been on the books for twenty years. The Magisterium insists on the need to establish “some universal public authority acknowledged as such by all and endowed with effective power to safeguard, on behalf of all, security, regard for justice, and respect for rights,” an authority that must “arise from mutual agreement” and never be imposed.²⁹ Blocs are what nations assemble when that authority is absent or discredited. So Friday is a symptom of the collapse of multilateral guarantees at least as much as it is a policy choice by three governments.

Who Actually Pays for Armed Equilibrium

Follow the money, because the Church always does.

Leo XIV closes his paragraph on armed equilibrium with a sentence that ought to be read in Islamabad before it is read anywhere else. “In many countries, including those in the Global South, increased military spending is presented as the only response to an uncertain future or perceived threats. Meanwhile, the real cost falls on the poorest, who see resources for healthcare, education and social services being reduced.”³⁰

Pakistan has roughly 250 million people and one of the largest out-of-school child populations on earth. Türkiye has spent years fighting an inflation crisis that has hollowed out household savings. Saudi Arabia can afford whatever it signs, which is exactly why the financial weight of this arrangement will not be distributed the way the security promise is. John XXIII saw the same asymmetry in 1963, and the Catechism restates it in a single line: producing ever new types of weapons “impedes efforts to aid needy populations; it thwarts the development of peoples.”³¹

Leo is also candid about who profits. He describes the close link between economic interests, the military apparatus and political decisions, which produces what he calls an “armed nation,” one in which “war appears as a natural extension of politics, and the arms market becomes an autonomous driving force behind military decisions.”³² Read the Mecca pact in that light. Analysts noted Friday that it is expected to cover defense-industrial capacity building, with Saudi Arabia looking to reduce decades of dependence on imported American weapons by standing up its own manufacturing sector with Turkish help.¹ A treaty about safety is also a treaty about a supply chain, and the supply chain has its own appetites.

The City They Chose

They signed it in Mecca. Shehbaz Sharif performed the Umrah there the day before.¹

I raise that to make a point about the human heart rather than to score one against another religion’s holy city. Those men know that the deepest hunger in a person is not for equilibrium. You do not travel to a sacred place because what you want is a stable balance of threats. The instinct that brought them to that city on Thursday and the instinct that put their names on that document on Friday pull in opposite directions, and only one of the two has any claim on the word peace.

What does the other one look like in practice? Leo XIV gives it a name: the culture of negotiation. He quotes Giorgio La Pira’s hope that “the method of war be replaced by the method of peace: the method of negotiation, of encounter, of convergence, that is, the authentically human method!”³³ And he asks something specific of exactly the sort of men who signed on Friday. “Let us meet, let us talk, let us negotiate! War is never inevitable. Weapons can and must be silenced, for they do not resolve problems but only increase them.”³⁴

The striking thing is that the alternative was running the same week, in the same region, involving some of the same governments. Iran and Oman finished a framework on shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz, with Qatari, Pakistani and Saudi mediation.^12,13 Slow, technical, unglamorous work by foreign ministries, and it may reopen a waterway that five months of missiles could not. Pakistan brokering a shipping agreement did more for the security of the Gulf this week than Pakistan promising to answer a future attack.

The treaty named itself deterrence. Pacem in Terris answered that name sixty-three years ago, and the answer has not moved since: peace among nations rests on mutual trust.³⁵ Every arsenal built to stand in for that trust is a loan taken out against a fear. And the note always comes due on somebody who never signed.

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Notes

1. ↑ Priyanka Shankar, “Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan Sign Joint Defense Agreement: What’s in It?,” Al Jazeera, August 7, 2026, aljazeera.com.
2. ↑ Enes Abuomer, Yashraj Sharma and Ali Mustafa, “Iran War Live: Trilateral Mecca Defense Pact Signed, as Hormuz Deal Looms,” Al Jazeera, August 8, 2026, aljazeera.com.
3. ↑ “Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye Sign Defense Deal amid Regional Turmoil,” Al Jazeera, August 7, 2026, aljazeera.com.
4. ↑ “Saudi Arabia Turns to Muslim Military Heavyweights in Landmark Defense Pact as Iran War Closes In,” CNN, August 7, 2026, cnn.com.
5. ↑ “Live Updates: Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan Sign NATO-Style Defense Pact amid Escalating Iran Conflict,” CNN, August 7, 2026, us.cnn.com.
6. ↑ “Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan Pledge Mutual Defense as Middle East Turmoil Escalates,” Reuters, published via U.S. News & World Report, August 7, 2026, usnews.com.
7. ↑ “Trump Says Agreement with Iran to Reopen Strait of Hormuz ‘Could Be Soon,’” Fox News Digital, August 7, 2026, foxnews.com.
8. ↑ “Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey Sign a Mutual Defense Pact,” Foreign Policy, August 7, 2026, foreignpolicy.com.
9. ↑ “Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey Sign Joint Defense Pact amid US-Iran Tensions,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, August 7, 2026, rferl.org.
10. ↑ “Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan Sign Joint Defense Deal in Shadow of Iran War,” The Times of Israel, August 7, 2026, timesofisrael.com.
11. ↑ “Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan Sign Defense Pact,” Middle East Eye, August 7, 2026, middleeasteye.net.
12. ↑ “Iran, Oman Say Strait of Hormuz Talks in Final Stages, as Trump Again Teases a Deal Being Close,” CNBC, August 5, 2026, cnbc.com.
13. ↑ Barak Ravid, “US Nears Iran Deal to Reopen Strait of Hormuz,” Axios, August 5, 2026, axios.com.
14. ↑ Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1963), no. 110, vatican.va.
15. ↑ Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, no. 109.
16. ↑ Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, no. 113.
17. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2315, vatican.va.
18. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2315.
19. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 508.
20. ↑ Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 508.
21. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 2026), no. 192, vatican.va.
22. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 194.
23. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 204.
24. ↑ Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 500.
25. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2310.
26. ↑ Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 499.
27. ↑ Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 499.
28. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 202.
29. ↑ Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 441, quoting Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, no. 82.
30. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 204.
31. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2315.
32. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 193.
33. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 221, quoting Giorgio La Pira.
34. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 222.
35. ↑ Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, no. 113.

Books Cited

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• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Doubleday / Image, 2003