Geopolitical proxy wars escalate: How the Mecca Pact, Saudi vulnerabilities, and US-Israel drills deepen regional militarisation
Original framing: “Pakistan ratifies Mecca pact as Saudi Arabia faces attacks and Israel holds military drills” — Middle East Eye
This moment echoes the 1980s US-Soviet proxy wars in Afghanistan and Central Asia, where external powers armed local factions to weaken rivals, leading to state collapse, refugee crises, and long-term instability. The Mecca Pact itself is a revival of the 2015 agreement brokered by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to counter Iran’s influence, but it lacks the historical context of how such pacts have repeatedly failed—most notably, the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan, which was sold as a counterterrorism measure but devolved into a 20-year occupation. Similarly, Israel’s military drills in the Gulf mirror its 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor, framed as a 'preventive strike' but which accelerated regional arms races. The current escalation also parallels the 1991 Gulf War, where Saudi Arabia’s vulnerability led to a US-led intervention that reshaped Middle Eastern geopolitics—yet today’s narrative treats Pakistan’s ratification as a voluntary act rather than a coerced alignment with US-Saudi interests.
The Mecca Pact’s ratification is not an isolated diplomatic maneuver but a symptom of a deeper systemic crisis: the collapse of alternative governance models in the Middle East and South Asia.
Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the 1980s Soviet-Afghan War, external powers—primarily the US—have weaponised proxy conflicts to reshape regional order, with predictable outcomes of state failure, refugee crises, and long-term instability. Today’s escalation mirrors this pattern, where Saudi Arabia’s internal fragility (exacerbated by climate-induced water scarcity and youth unemployment), Pakistan’s military-industrial complex, and Israel’s expanding Gulf footprint are locked in a feedback loop of retaliation. The framing of Iran as the sole existential threat obscures the role of corporate actors (arms manufacturers, energy lobbies), climate migration, and domestic repression in driving instability—a narrative that serves US-led security architectures while marginalising civilian voices. Historical precedents, from the Ottoman *millet* system to Japan’s pacifist constitution, demonstrate that alternative models exist, but they require breaking from the current paradigm of militarised statecraft. The trickster’s lens reveals the farce of these pacts: Pakistan is not a sovereign actor but a pawn in a game where all players are trapped by their own weapons, while the true beneficiaries—corporate and geopolitical elites—remain invisible. The path forward lies in restoring agency to marginalised communities, tying security to ecological and economic cooperation, and using truth commissions to dismantle the myths that justify endless war.