The discussion of the Saudi-Turkey-Pakistan defence pact, inked in the holy city of Mecca, has moved from Riyadh's palaces to a set of conference rooms on Manhattan's East Side seven weeks after the three countries signed the deal. Prince Faisal bin Farhan, Saudi Foreign Minister and his Pakistani counterpart Ishaq Dar sat down on the sidelines of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly this week to discuss the status of the pact, and Islamabad reiterated its efforts to show "steadfast solidarity" with the kingdom and condemned the spate of attacks that it has faced in recent months.

Turkey wasn't in that specific room, but its hands are all over the agenda, as this question looms over every New York briefing on this file: will the Mecca Agreement hold together? It's whether Iran, the nation the deal is never supposed to involved, makes it into the tent.

The fundamentals of the deal are not difficult to outline. On August 7th, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a mutual defence clause based on the same principle as Article 5 of the NATO treaty: an armed attack against any one of the three states is considered an armed attack against all three.

It was an expansion on a narrower bilateral deal Riyadh and Islamabad had concluded the previous September, and it came as Saudi Arabia had just been hit by the longest ever missile and drone attacks from Iran, directly after Washington and Israel hit Tehran in February, and also from Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Since then, a secretariat has been established in Riyadh and foreign and defence ministers from the three capitals have been meeting regularly to flesh out what had so far been nothing more than a one-paragraph pledge.

The differences in the New York talks are the Iran question and it has proved anything but clean. Last month, an Iranian official close to the parliamentary press operation stated that Tehran had been invited to enter into the arrangement, which he called a "reward" for years of Iran's demand for a security blanket in the region. Iran's Foreign Ministry, however, never confirmed that any formal invitation ever came, and in another development, its spokesman has made a point to say the pact isn't a threat to Iran in the first place, but a safeguard against Israeli overreach and waning faith in American security guarantees.

That's not a coincidence. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has come out with the same statement several times, and he says it's more than two years old, predating the February war. Within Iran, the response has been neatly divided between the reformist camp, which has been promoting the deal as a “paper that should not be squandered” and the hardliners affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, who have called it a “paper guarantee” that provides Riyadh with "little more protection than a decade of dependence on Washington".

There's a much stiffer test below this diplomacy, and it's one the pact has already largely failed. In less than two days of the signing ceremony in Mecca, Houthis attacked a Saudi Aramco refinery in Jazan. Not a single army mobilisation was conducted by either country, and Islamabad just released this week that it would not be considering any military action under the agreement, even as recently as mid-September.

That's more of an explanation for the doubts about this deal than any New York communique. It is not a published text, there is no joint command structure, no standing force and no trigger for collective action. What it is is a political signal it serves as a statement, as a way of changing the mindset of capitals about deterrence but as yet it's not an instrument that compels anyone to take any action in a crisis. Initial reporting described it as a Middle East NATO, but that's all it is on paper we do not yet know what the three governments with vastly different threat perceptions and vastly different relationships with Washington have agreed to on paper.

The economic power behind the deal is genuine even if the military commitments are ambiguous. Together, the three states have almost 1.4 million active troops, and annual defence spending of nearly 124 billion dollars, supported by Pakistan's nuclear arsenal of approximately 170 warheads, the growing defence export industry in Turkey and the financial power of Saudi Arabia.

Pakistan has already deployed some 8,000 soldiers in Riyadh, along with JF-17 fighter squadrons and a Chinese-provided HQ-9 air-defence battery, funded by Saudi funds, since the original Riyadh-Islamabad agreement. Riyadh itself has been turning oil revenues into security at a brisk pace, with a new 6 billion dollar investment in air defence thrown in, just as its economy was taking on the biggest shrink in real GDP this year, the most obvious direct cost of a war it did not trigger.

Bangladesh has indicated that it wants to join, Egypt is said to be looking into it, and each other entry alters the equation of whether or not this becomes a genuine multi-nation, Muslim-majority security bloc or remains a ‘tightly knit' trilateral one with an open door that no one has yet walked through.

Washington's posture has been one of passivity. On its face, the pact is an American victory, as Trump publicly welcomed it, as he has long stated, the allies to take on more of their own defense burden. But from a wider view, three long-standing U.S. allies building a security parallel to Washington, without Washington in the picture, is a more telling indicator of how far away from the old order we've gone than any particular battlefield result of the Iran war. So what makes sense for India and other regional powers outside the pact is that a new Sunni bloc has emerged that is against Tehran, rather than that Iran will be taken into its embrace.