The Mecca Pact: A door has opened for Bangladesh. Should we walk through it?
Something unusual happened this month. On 7 August, in Islam's holiest city, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement (MJDA). The core clause is crystal clear: an armed attack on one signatory will be treated as an attack on all. Within two weeks, the invitation reached Dhaka.
Our Foreign Affairs Adviser (recently appointed as the State Minister for Foreign Affairs), Humaiun Kobir, told reporters that participating in a security arrangement among Islamic nations would not be unusual for us, that the matter is being viewed positively, and that the signatories are asking Prime Minister Tarique Rahman himself to come to Riyadh.
Across the border, India's Ministry of External Affairs said it was closely following developments. Of course it is.
I have spent the past few weeks reading everything I could find on this pact, from the Atlantic Council to Foreign Policy to the commentary pouring out of Delhi. And I keep coming back to one thought.
This may be the most consequential foreign policy question put before Bangladesh since the generation of 1971 chose non-alignment. The enthusiasts want us to sign tomorrow. The sceptics want the whole idea buried. Both camps, in my view, are arguing past the actual decision. So let me lay out my case on each side, and then say where I land.
Why we should say yes
Deterrence, finally, is on offer
Bangladesh has never in its history possessed credible deterrence against anyone. We sit wedged between a nuclear-armed India that borders us on three sides and a Myanmar whose Rakhine State has largely fallen to the Arakan Army, sending refugees, stray shells and instability across our southeastern frontier year after year.
Now look at what the Mecca pact combines: the world's largest oil exporter, the second biggest army in NATO, and the only Muslim-majority country with nuclear weapons. Even loose association with that bloc changes the arithmetic for anyone thinking about coercing us. Small countries rarely get a seat at a table like this one. Worth noting, too, that we did not lobby for this. The invitation came to us. That alone says something about how our weight in the region is now perceived.
We are half in already
Critics talk as though joining would be a leap into the dark. It would not be. Our army already flies Bayraktar TB2 drones and fields Roketsan's TRG-300 Kaplan rocket systems. We are negotiating for the SIPER long-range air defence system and T129 attack helicopters. There is serious discussion of a Turkish drone plant in Greater Bogura, and in June Dhaka and Ankara launched a joint ministerial mechanism covering defence and foreign affairs. Our Army Chief toured Turkish defence factories in July.
Also there's a strong possibility that Bangladesh will procure 24 Chinese made J10 CE fighters jets (already operational with the Pakistan Air Force) which over powered India’s mighty fighter jets during the recent skirmish, we have already received the full scale combat simulator from Pakistan, it would be safe to assume that our pilots would receive extensive training by the Pakistan Air Force once the procurement process initiates. So direction of travel is set, whatever we call it.
What the pact adds is an institutional roof over cooperation that exists anyway, and probably better terms under that roof: Saudi money, Turkish technology transfer, Pakistani training. For a military still limping toward its long-delayed Forces Goal 2030, that package is hard to assemble anywhere else.
Our economy already lives in the Gulf
Nearly 4.5 million (including undocumented) Bangladeshis work in Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom remains our single largest source of remittances, which together with garments keep our foreign exchange alive. Yet the trend lines are worrying. Inflows from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman have been softening since last summer.
Closer strategic ties with Riyadh give us the most direct lever we have to protect labour quotas, push for better treatment of our workers, and pull Gulf capital into our ports and power sector. Foreign policy follows the workers and the money. Ours went to the Gulf decades ago.
Dependence on one neighbor’s goodwill has failed us
Let us be frank about where things stand with India. Delhi shelters Sheikh Hasina & her cronies and has ‘kind of’ ignored our extradition requests over the last 20 months. Indian border forces have been pushing people into our territory. Border killings continue. The Ganges water treaty comes up for review in December with no guarantee of fair renewal, and the Teesta agreement never materialised at all, despite fifteen years in which we shaped our security posture around Indian preferences.
What did that deference buy us? Not much. A Bangladesh First policy, the phrase Adviser Kabir used, means building options. The Mecca pact is the largest option anyone has ever put in front of us, and even the credible possibility of our membership strengthens our hand with Delhi on water, borders and trade. That is leverage we have simply never had before.
The world has changed, and pretending otherwise is its own risk
Steven Cook at the Council on Foreign Relations argues that the Mecca Agreement is itself proof the American-led order in the Middle East has eroded. Egypt sat through four preparatory meetings and hesitated. Syria is now openly weighing cooperation.
Regional states are building their own security architecture because the old guarantees stopped working. A country of almost 180 million cannot conduct itself as if the 1990s never ended. Non-alignment was a strategy built for a bipolar world. In a multipolar one, coalitions reward the members who arrive early, while their presence still carries value.
Why we should politely decline
These are not our wars
Read the central clause once more. An attack on one is an attack on all. This pact was born amid an active war with Iran, ongoing Houthi strikes on shipping, and the standing hostility between Riyadh, Tehran and Tel Aviv. If Iranian drones hit Saudi oil facilities again, what exactly is Bangladesh obliged to do?
Our army's proudest modern chapter is UN peacekeeping, not expeditionary warfare five thousand kilometer’s from Chattogram. Analysts have also noticed something awkward: each signatory privately names a different enemy. The Saudis fear Iran, the Turks watch Israel, Pakistan faces India.
An alliance that cannot agree on its adversary will struggle to agree on anything when the crisis actually comes. We would enter as the smallest, poorest and most distant member, carrying concrete obligations in exchange for protections that remain, for us, entirely theoretical.
It would light a permanent fire on our only land border
Geography does not care about sentiment. India surrounds us. Strategic circles in Delhi already describe Bangladeshi membership as opening a second front on India's east, and some commentators there speculate that Pakistan might one day seek access to Bangladeshi territory or logistics in a future war.
The agreement grants no such automatic right, but perception drives policy, and Delhi's perception would harden overnight. India controls the upstream flow of 54 rivers we share. It dominates our trade routes and can complicate our lives in a hundred quiet ways involving transit, visas, tariffs and border management.
The Ganges review lands in December. Choosing this precise moment to join a Pakistan-anchored military alliance hands Delhi every excuse to treat us as an adversary rather than a difficult neighbour.
It gambles the model that lifted us out of poverty
Our prosperity rests on a simple, almost boring formula. Sell garments to the West. Send workers to the Gulf. Take infrastructure money from everyone. Belong to no camp. The geopolitical analysts warns that formal alliance membership could complicate our relations with India, China, Iran, Japan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Russia, the UAE and the United States. Read that list slowly.
It includes Gulf states outside the pact that employ millions of our people, and it includes the buyers of most of what we export. The UAE has already shown visible unease about the pact. If Bangladesh comes to be seen as party to a bloc aimed at Iran, or entangled in intra-Gulf rivalry, our workers in non-signatory states and our trade preferences in Western markets become hostages to quarrels we never picked.
The protections may be weaker than the price
Here is the evidence nobody in the pro-pact camp wants to discuss. Pakistan signed a mutual defence agreement with Saudi Arabia in September 2025. Weeks later, violence erupted on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Riyadh never once threatened to invoke the agreement. Foreign Policy's assessment was blunt: the Mecca pact boosts Pakistan's standing in the Middle East while delivering little in its own neighbourhood. Why would we fare any better?
Does anyone seriously picture Saudi armour or Turkish squadrons deploying to the Bay of Bengal over a crisis in Sylhet or Cox's Bazar? Alliances are tested by what members actually do under fire, not by what the parchment says. We could end up paying the full diplomatic price of membership for deterrence that exists only on paper.
Fifty years of consensus should not die in a soundbite
Friendship to all, malice towards none. That line was never naiveté. It was strategy, and it worked. It let us take Chinese submarines and Japanese loans, American trade and Indian transit, Saudi jobs and Russian reactors, all at once. Middle East Eye is right that joining would upend our standing as a country that stays out of the big geopolitical rifts. And military blocs are one-way doors.
Nobody leaves one without humiliation. Yet a decision of this permanence is being floated by a government only months into its term, with no white paper, no parliamentary debate, no public consultation of any kind. Even readers sympathetic to the pact should insist on this much: a treaty of alliance deserves a national conversation, not a minister's remark at a press briefing and my humble request do not collude holy city Mecca and Mecca pact with same trust.
Where I land: engage everything, sign nothing. For now.
Strip away the noise on both sides and the picture looks like this. The benefits of the Mecca pact are real, but nearly all of them are available to us without full membership. The costs are speculative, but if they materialize they are catastrophic and irreversible. That asymmetry should decide the question.
Everything we genuinely need is already flowing through bilateral channels. Turkish drones and air defence. Saudi investment and labour access. Training exchanges with Pakistan. None of it requires us to promise, in writing, to treat a missile strike on Jeddah as an attack on Dhaka. Full membership adds symbolism and deterrence by association.
What it risks is our relationship with the neighbour who controls our rivers, our standing with the markets that buy our garments, and the non-aligned flexibility that is the closest thing a small deltaic nation has to a strategic doctrine.
So my counsel is deliberate ambiguity, practised with intent. Accept the invitation to Riyadh. Attend as an observer. Negotiate economic and defence-industrial agreements under the pact's umbrella while declining, for now, its collective defence clause.
Adviser Kobir's own careful phrase, an economic or defence framework, suggests Dhaka already senses the distinction. Let Delhi understand that our patience has limits and our options are no longer zero, and spend that leverage where it counts: the Ganges review, Hasina's extradition, the killings on our border.
If, after all of that, India still insists on treating us as a subordinate rather than a sovereign, then the question of signing can return to the table. It should come back with a parliamentary mandate behind it and a public that understands exactly what it is choosing.
A door has been opened for us in Mecca. Wisdom is not rushing through it, and it is not slamming it shut either. It is standing in the doorway, visible to everyone, for exactly as long as that serves Bangladesh first.
--
Zulkarnain Saer is a Bangladeshi investigative journalist based in the United Kingdom