Heavy on Pomp, Light on Substance

The wolf in the sheepfold This vacuum, which the world’s press describes with one voice, did not stay empty for long. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey formalised, on 7 August, the Mecca defence pact — built on the mutual defence agreement signed a year earlier between Riyadh and Islamabad, which several officials from both countries have hinted covers a form of extended nuclear deterrence. Three middle powers find themselves allied here without Washington being either the pivot or even a witness: Pakistani nuclear power, Saudi financial and oil power, NATO’s second-largest army on the Turkish side. Nawaf Kabbara, in a sharp analysis published by our colleagues at Levant Time, offers an image worth borrowing as is: he had already, back in 1988, compared the Middle East to a joint-stock company, with the United States alone chairing the board. “The company still exists,” he writes today, “but the chairman of the board is no longer able to decide alone.” What the Mecca agreement signals, in his view, is not necessarily a fourth hegemonic project alongside Israeli, Turkish, and Iranian ambitions, but a project of balance: neither Iranian hegemony nor Israeli supremacy, but several powers that now refuse to let a single actor dictate the rules of the regional game alone — and which, notably, need not align with any major bloc to achieve this, moving freely between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow. In Europe, the movement is of the same nature, if not the same scale: the British press itself, as we have seen, is now pressing London and Brussels to build their own strategic autonomy rather than continuing to bet on an increasingly unreliable American umbrella. An ally seeking a new balance is an ally that has stopped trusting the old one. The paradox is complete: at the very moment when its own security and military apparatus is eroding — paralysed by vanity projects rather than strategic vision, disavowed even within its own ranks, forced into constant back-pedalling on diesel as on Iran — Donald Trump has thrown the door wide open to those America itself designates as its strategic rivals. He received Xi Jinping with great pomp, courted Putin, and let an almost friendly silence hang over North Korea. The wolf did not need to force its way into the sheepfold: the shepherd, busy admiring his own building projects, opened the gate for it himself.