Mecca Defense Pact Isn’t Meant to Challenge Israel, at Least Not on the Battlefield

After Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed a mutual defense treaty in Mecca last week, a senior Israeli official sounded the alarm.

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“To determine the supreme commander is to determine hierarchy,” according to  Hussein Aboubakr Mansour of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.

“To place forces permanently in another regional country is to create political leverage inside it,” Mansour continued. “To decide which threat activates the common force is to decide whose definition of regional order prevails. To institutionalize an alliance is therefore to settle, or at least freeze, the struggle for primacy among states that have rarely accepted one another’s primacy.”

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