Abraham offered normalisation. Makkah offers security

There’s a striking irony sitting inside this year’s diplomacy. Back on May 25, Donald Trump publicly pushed Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkiye, Egypt and Jordan to join the Abraham Accords en masse — part of a wider attempt to reshape the region while he negotiated an end to the war with Iran. Pakistan pushed back. Saudi Arabia wouldn’t move without progress on Palestinian statehood. The mass expansion Washington wanted simply didn’t happen. Then, less than three months later, something quite different did. On August 7, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye — three of the very countries Trump had wanted inside an expanded Abraham framework — met in Makkah and signed a defence pact of their own. Its logic runs almost […]