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By Bradley Martin and Liram Koblentz-Stenzler
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The Middle East’s experiment with life after the American security guarantee has begun.
Turkey's ratification of its defense pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan has put into place the kind of regional security architecture that Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy, says Washington wants to encourage. Last month, he described America's retreat from its eight-decade role as regional guarantor as a "realignment," not an abandonment. Now comes the harder question: What happens when the new system is tested again?
October's renewed fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen exposed a vulnerability that ratification alone cannot fix. Washington does not want to own that war. Turkey and Pakistan have shown limits to what they will own. And Iran's proxy strategy is particularly well suited to exploiting the space between the two.
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This past week, the Houthis have launched a fresh wave of aerial and missile attacks targeting Saudi Arabia’s capital and energy infrastructure, including a strike on the Saudi Aramco Tower in Riyadh’s King Abdullah Financial District and a separate attack on the East-West oil pipeline in the Medina region.
A screen grab from CCTV footage shows what the Saudi-led coalition says was a Houthi attack on October 7, 2026, on Abha International Airport.
On October 20 at the Global Security Forum in Doha, Barrack said the kingdom was “in a very difficult position” against the Houthis and that American involvement in a ground battle “seems fruitless.” Washington has thus placed the Houthi problem outside its own role. The partners it points to have done the same.
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed in August, commits Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan to treat an armed attack on one as an attack on all, language modeled on NATO's Article 5. After repeated Houthi missile and drone attacks on the kingdom, the three governments activated collective deterrence measures under the pact and pledged rapid deployments. Turkey provided technical and defensive assistance, while officials said Turkey and Pakistan had supplied equipment used by Saudi forces in Yemen.
Yet while much of Turkey’s initial support was bilateral, its November 5 ratification of the pact has not produced a visible Turkish deployment and there is no reported visible addition to Pakistan's forces already in the kingdom. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan ruled out sending troops against the Houthis, explaining that the agreement obliges members to defend one another and stops short of offensive operations. The pact produced assistance. It has yet to demonstrate a coordinated defense at the scale Saudi Arabia needs.
The result is a war nobody owns. Washington treats the Houthis as a regional problem. The regional pact treats them as a defensive problem. Meanwhile, Riyadh keeps absorbing the strikes.
Iran has suffered serious military losses, yet it and its aligned groups retain the ability to threaten Gulf states and their critical infrastructure. That resilience is a product of design. Iran built its network of proxies to operate where collective defense commitments grow vague. A mutual defense treaty answers clearly what happens when a state's army crosses a border. It offers far less guidance when the missiles come from an armed group that Tehran arms and finances while disclaiming responsibility. Each member must then decide whether the attack counts, who the aggressor is and how much risk to accept on a partner's behalf. A proxy campaign is built to complicate those decisions, and that design explains why the pact's first test produced assistance in place of a coordinated defense.
John Sawers, former chief of Britain's foreign intelligence service MI6, told the same Doha forum that the Houthis are here to stay. Deterrence that depends on pinning every attack on its sponsor will struggle against an adversary engineered for deniability.
The realignment can still succeed, provided Washington defines what it keeps. The workable model is a division of labor by comparative advantage. Regional partners can increasingly carry conventional defense: protecting their own territory and airspace, fielding ground forces and bearing the political weight of their own wars. The U.S. holds capabilities that regional coalitions will need years to replicate: wide-area intelligence and surveillance, early warning integrated across borders, maritime interdiction of Iranian weapons bound for Yemen, and financial tools aimed at the networks that fund Tehran's proxies. These are the instruments that count against groups like the Houthis, and all of them operate without American ground troops.
Those capabilities rest on decades of American investment in the region: arms sales, training, intelligence cooperation and access for U.S. forces. They are working assets that serve current American interests, because they determine whether Washington can protect its own forces and partners. A deliberate transition would keep that network in place as the foundation on which regional defense builds.
Three steps would make that transition concrete. First, the Trump administration should declare that countering Iranian proxy forces remains an American mission, even as conventional defense passes to regional partners. Second, it should connect the Mecca pact's new command structures to U.S. early warning and intelligence channels, so that collective defense draws on the sensors that see an attack coming. Third, it should make interdiction of weapons flows to Yemen a standing priority, so that the pact faces a weakening adversary.
Barrack summarized the new bargain as “not to own but to tend, not to leave.” Staying in the region means owning at least one mission. The counter-proxy fight is the one America is best placed to carry and the one its partners have shown they will leave unclaimed. A realignment that assigns it clearly will deliver the burden-sharing Barrack envisions. His realignment is no longer a theory. The question now is whether its new security architecture can deter the next attack, rather than merely respond to the last one.
Bradley Martin is the executive director of the Near East Center for Strategic Studies. Follow him on Facebook and X @ByBradleyMartin
Dr. Liram Koblentz-Stenzler is the head of the Global Extremism and Antisemitism Desk at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) at Reichman University, Herzliya, and a visiting scholar at Brandeis University. Follow her on LinkedIn.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
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