The Mecca pact goes recruiting, and the two who volunteered each bring a war

Three at the table, and the empty chair

When Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed their defence pact in Mecca this month, they wanted a fourth. Turkey pushed for Egypt: a large army, a serious state, a weight that would have made the promise heavier. Egypt would not come. The three signed without it.

Three weeks later, two others are at the door. Bangladesh says a Saudi invitation is being viewed positively. Syria, days after Israeli jets hit one of its airbases, has started to look at the same door.

Nobody planned this order. It is what an open invitation does.

The promise has one price and many risks

A mutual-defence pact makes everyone the same promise: attacked, and the rest come. That promise costs the club nothing on the day it is signed and everything on the day it is called.

Here is the awkward part. The club cannot charge each member for their own risk. There is no way to say “you may join, but if your neighbour is the one who attacks you, only half of us will come.” The clause is the clause. So the promise is worth a modest amount to a country with no live quarrel, and an enormous amount to a country that expects to be attacked this year.

That difference decides who applies.

Eagerness is a measurement

Bangladesh’s interest is not idle. It is asking India to hand back the prime minister its protests removed, and India will not. Syria’s interest arrived within days of a foreign air strike on its territory. Egypt, meanwhile, is mediating between Washington and Tehran. It also calls a water dispute with Ethiopia an existential threat. That is precisely why it cannot afford to sit in anybody’s bloc.

Read those three together and a pattern falls out. The keenest applicants are the ones with the most live trouble. The one the founders wanted most is the one whose job requires staying out.

So the club learns something without being told it. How fast a country reaches for the promise is a rough measure of how soon it expects to need it. Nobody has to lie. The eagerness itself is the disclosure.

Every pool you are in has this shape

You are inside several versions of this. Health insurance is priced knowing that the first people through the door are the ones who already feel unwell. Extended warranties are bought by people who know how they treat their things. A bill split evenly rewards whoever ordered most, so the person who ordered most is the loudest for splitting it.

None of that makes the eager person a villain. They are doing the sensible thing with what they know about themselves. The pool simply ends up carrying more risk than its founders imagined. Everyone in it pays a little of that, including the quiet ones who joined for nothing more than the company.

The clause was somebody’s choice

“An attack on one is an attack on all” reads like a law of nature. It is a drafting decision, and it decides who subsidises whom. A pact that graded its promise, or screened applicants, or made members wait, would spread the cost differently and attract different people.

The founders picked the simple clause because simple is what deters. A promise with conditions attached is a promise an enemy will test. So they may end up wanting the exposed members anyway: more names on the paper can mean the promise is never called at all. That is the honest counter-argument, and it may be right.

What nobody in Mecca can do is choose which countries find the offer irresistible. They set the terms three weeks ago. Since then the terms have been doing the choosing, and the people at the door are the answer to a question the founders never asked out loud.