The three most influential capitals of the Muslim world signed their names to paper in Mecca on Friday and the message was clear. The signing ceremony for the so-called 'Mecca Joint Defence Agreement', in which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif agreed that an armed attack on any of the three countries is an attack on all three, was attended by both sides.Both sides were present for the signing ceremony of the so-called 'Mecca Joint Defence Agreement', under which an armed attack on any of the three countries is deemed to be an attack on all three. It is the language that is generally reserved for NATO's Article 5, and it comes from three nuclear-adjacent or nuclear-armed countries at the crossroads between the Gulf, South Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, and it is a response to the region which has been at war for most of the past year.

The chronology says it all. Sharif and Pakistan's army chief, Gen. Asim Munir, both arrived in Jeddah a day earlier while Erdogan arrived for a short working visit. Nobody in the region is claiming this was a matter of diplomatic housekeeping, but a Pakistani foreign ministry spokesperson said the summit was of far greater importance than the situation that prompted it. Since the United States and Israel bombed Iran in late February, throwing the region into its worst crisis in years, Iran and allied militias have been shelling the Gulf states and disrupting energy supplies for months. Riyadh has been hit a couple of times: missiles fired by the Houthis in Yemen, drone attacks by Iran-backed militias in Iraq, and now, a Saudi official says, hopes for simultaneous attacks from the north and the south at the same time. Eleven civilians were injured in a Houthi attack on the Saudi city of Najran hours before the signing in Mecca, while the Houthis separately said they had attacked a Saudi oil tanker as it was crossing the Gulf of Aden.

All of this is not occurring in a vacuum. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan already have a bilateral mutual defence pact signed last September in similar terms. At the time analysts viewed it as a direct message at Israel, which it was, as it arrived in the wake of a strange Israeli attack on Qatar, and with Pakistan the sole nuclear-armed Muslim nation being constantly remembered. The addition of Turkey, the most capable conventional military power in the region, and an air force that has been a discreet instrument of ceasefire diplomacy in Gaza, elevates a two-country deal to one with tangible geographic and military impact, from the Bosphorus to the Arabian Sea. Gulf Research Center chairman Abdulaziz Sager said the political symbolism is important on its own merits, as three regional powers with Muslim majorities were working in tandem represents a far greater desire from the region's middle powers to take control of their own security instead of relying on Washington.

That hunger has an economic foundation that is not to be underestimated. In this normal year, about one fifth of the world's oil and gas transit pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and after the February strikes, the charter rates for tankers climbed from $37,000 per day to more than $177,000 in just a few days, with various insurance firms withdrawing cover for war risks and even the biggest shipping firms rerouting their ships around the Cape of Good Hope to circumvent the waters, causing tanker delivery timelines to lengthen by weeks. With crude futures below historic highs, diesel and jet fuel prices in Asia briefly hit $200 a barrel-equivalent, while nations with little direct interest in the conflict from Thailand to Vietnam to South Korea felt themselves rationing fuel and struggling with restrictions on exports. India, which imports nearly 2/3rd of its crude and half of its LNG through the strait, saw its import bill and inflationary fears directly challenged. Since then, prices have settled back to the low $70's per barrel as diplomacy has had fits and starts, but traders and analysts warn that shipping costs and insurance premiums are also high and that if the calm is interrupted by a new escalation, as Saudi officials are preparing for, it could just as quickly as it has come be the next flash point.

Overlaid on this is Israel's own outstanding issue in Lebanon, located only a few hundred kilometres from where the Mecca summit was held and arguably no less volatile. Israel is not planning any further withdrawal from southern Lebanese territory even after three days of talks this week in Rome, mediated by the Americans, that achieved no consensus on who should sit on a committee to verify southern motives are free of Hezbollah fighters and weapons, it is reported. The ceasefire framework agreed in Washington in June was fragile in practice, as evidenced by two Israeli reservists being killed and four more badly injured by an IED blast in south Lebanon days earlier, and it was a reminder of that fact. Hezbollah has never embraced the terms of the deal it was never part of, while over 800,000 Lebanese have been displaced and are now beginning to slowly return to their communities where they are stuck in a live conflict over verification and trust.

Combined, the image that is forming this week is that of parallel tracks: A long-term security architecture taking shape in the Gulf between countries that are intent on hedging their bets against Iran and against the continued regional unrest, an energy market that continues to factor in the risk of another Hormuz disruption despite the apparent ease in the numbers, and a Lebanese-Israeli file in which the diplomatic language of de-escalation outpaces reality. Whether the pact for Mecca is to be a real deterrence system or as critics would have it, a largely symbolic gesture with no meaningful military guarantees, will be seen during the next time the missiles, drones or tankers hit the targets.