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The governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan have concluded the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, a mutual-defense treaty that explicitly mirrors the collective-security clause of NATO's Article Five. Their foreign ministries declare the pact a direct response to American and Israeli pressure on Iran, fresh attacks on Saudi territory, and the growing unreliability of Washington as guarantor.
These Muslim powers act not from abstract ideology but from the concrete recognition that the post-1945 American security architecture no longer protects their interests. The ceremony in Mecca therefore records the moment when three historic Islamic states concluded that the Atlantic power could no longer be trusted to keep its own promises.
Every sovereign realm possesses the natural and divine right to form defensive leagues when its survival is threatened. Scripture records kings entering covenants for mutual protection; the creeds of the undivided Church affirm that lawful authority may wield the sword in defense of the people entrusted to it.
The West once understood this principle when its own princes concluded the Treaty of Westphalia after decades of religious and dynastic war. That settlement recognized that external powers cannot impose perpetual order on distant peoples without eventually exhausting their own strength and legitimacy.
Today the same principle operates against the managerial priesthood that has directed American foreign policy since the Second World War. Its interventions have produced neither peace nor gratitude, only coalitions of necessity among those it once claimed to protect.
The faithful remnant in the historic nations of the West must therefore abandon the illusion that endless entanglement abroad secures order at home. They must instead demand that their own governments recover the same sovereign realism these three states have displayed in Mecca.
National survival begins with the recognition that every people answers ultimately to its own covenant with God and its own soil, not to the fading writ of a distant capital.
