THE Mecca pact between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan — which Egypt is now being wooed to join — is a sign that for all Donald Trump’s bluster, the decline of US power continues.

Indeed, he is accelerating it, at least in the Middle East (the continuing advance of far-right politics in Latin America suggests a different story there). The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement is clearly a response to the failed US-Israeli war on Iran.

The war has forced a rethink of military alignments. The calculations that underpinned total subordination to US imperialism no longer add up.

Not only has the US shown its disregard for their security by recklessly starting a war they advised against, but it has proved militarily ineffective.

A no-holds-barred assault — whose very first day involved both killing Iran’s supreme leader and arguably the worst war crime of the century to date, the incineration of 156 people including 120 schoolgirls in bombing a primary school — has not shocked or awed Iran into surrender, and ferocious bombing has killed thousands of Iranians without apparent effect on its military capabilities.

The pattern will be familiar to Riyadh from its own brutal war on Yemen. The lack of success there led the Saudis to reconsider, re-establishing diplomatic relations with the Houthis’ ally Iran in 2023 in China-brokered talks which prompted a truce, though this has been periodically violated since.

The Mecca agreement follows the realisation that outsourcing security to the US fails on two counts. One, the US’s regional priority is Israel. It heeded Israel and not its Nato or Gulf allies in starting the war and it prioritised intercepting missiles aimed at Israel during it.

And two, its unrivalled firepower could not stop Iranian missiles hitting targets across the Middle East, and — though Trump loudly denies it — the forced relocation of air defence systems from as far afield as Korea, the sudden lack of available interceptor systems for Ukraine and public reports from US military analysts have exposed how fast its stockpiles are running low.

The stated aim of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan to boost their domestic military-industrial complexes shows they are nervous about relying on the US either to defend them or supply them with the wherewithal to defend themselves.

Turkey already diversifies its weapons sources, buying from both Russia and the West, while Pakistan’s major supplier is China, allowing the pact to avoid dependency on a single provider —one which is not only politically erratic under Trump but whose equipment remains dependent on US goodwill (through use of US software, targeting systems, maintenance and supply chains) after purchase, as Ukraine has discovered to its cost.

Some paint the Mecca pact as a Sunni alliance, designed to contain or deter Iran.

At least as significant, though, is its potential as a counterweight to Israel — with the genocide in Gaza, sharply accelerated ethnic cleansing project in the West Bank and expanding occupations of Lebanese and Syrian territory all rendering it a more alarming regional presence than before, even to US allies. Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif cited Muslim unity against Israel as his priority in the same week the pact was announced.

If so, this is a setback for Trump’s Abraham Accords strategy to normalise relations between Israel and the Arab states and reshape the Middle East around a Greater Israel. It suggests instead that the region is turning away from US influence — and may even, as Iran demands, move on to rejecting the US military bases that have proved so useless in security terms.

Not one of the governments involved is anti-imperialist, nor can they remotely be regarded as progressive. Saudi Arabia could take the prize for the world’s most reactionary tyranny.

But their detachment from the United States is a sign of the times, of the shift to a multipolar world which all socialists should welcome.