The recently concluded Tehran meeting of four pivotal states is shaping West Asian security. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan have sent several positive signals for the Muslim world, regional security and global stability. The preference for de-escalation has also been echoed by China, Russia and much of Europe.
The October 26 meeting was only the beginning of a process. Its participants formally agreed to continue their dialogue on regional cooperation, peace and security. If sustained, that process could eventually expand the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, signed by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye in August 2026. For now, however, it has produced a historic opening: an unprecedented, homegrown, region-based approach to collective security.
Five outcomes are critical. First, at a moment when war drums were again beating in Tel Aviv and Washington, the region’s principal powers engaged Iran – the central actor in the conflict – to fashion a collective response to renewed threats of military action. Instead of allowing outside powers to dictate the region’s trajectory, regional states began assuming responsibility for preventing another destructive war.
Second, Iran’s suspicions and reservations towards the three states behind the Makkah agreement have begun to recede. Tehran’s participation does not erase disagreements, but it marks the beginning of genuine strategic dialogue where distrust had threatened to harden into confrontation.
Third, this Pakistan-initiated meeting showed how dialogue can become an instrument of effective pushback against kinetic pressure. Diplomacy here was not passive appeasement. It was the exercise of collective political weight to resist the threat of military action and its potentially catastrophic consequences.
Fourth, the Tehran dialogue can advance a smarter security framework for the entire region, including Saudi Arabia. By opening collective engagement on Yemen and the Houthis, it creates space to address Riyadh’s immediate security concerns without allowing them to trigger a wider Iran-Saudi or regional conflagration. Smart security recognises the kinetic dimension but gives primacy to sustained engagement, especially between adversaries.
Fifth, Tehran delivered a hard message to Israeli state and society: Israel’s genocidal and expansionist policies will increasingly encounter collective resistance from the Muslim world. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can claim some credit for producing precisely the strategic convergence Israel has long sought to prevent. Policies intended to fragment and dominate the region are now generating pressures for Muslim coordination.
Beyond these significant beginnings, the world may witness two gradual historical shifts. The first would reverse a familiar American method. After the coordinated Arab war against Israel in 1973 and the accompanying oil embargo, Henry Kissinger’s step-by-step shuttle diplomacy separated negotiating tracks and helped weaken collective Arab leverage. Critics described this broader divide-and-manage approach as ‘salami tactics’: isolating Arab states and issues, slicing away the possibility of a unified regional position. Washington had already relied upon Iran and Saudi Arabia as its ‘twin pillars’, while cultivating separate relationships across the Arab world.
If Kissinger perfected the fragmentation of regional power, Pakistan is now drawing upon decades of diplomatic experience to promote the opposite: connection, consultation and collective leverage. It is working within the grey zones of international politics – understanding competing interests, preserving channels and converting relationships into strategic outcomes.
The second historic shift is equally significant. The old, divisive Arab-Ajam binary is beginning to give way to a geographical and political Muslim response. Pakistan is uniquely placed to facilitate this evolution. For decades, it has worked with Muslim states within and beyond West Asia without ethnic or cultural partisanship, consistently advocating a unified approach while engaging rivals to resolve disputes. Since May-June 2025, that effort has become increasingly active and purposeful.
Partnering with its only genuinely strategic ally, China; engaging with its increasingly trusted friend, Russia, and its transactional friend, the US; and drawing on decades-old relationships across West Asia, including with its important neighbour, Iran, and reliable friend, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan with COAS-CDF Field Marshal Asim Munir at the controls, has exercised real agency. It has activated a distinct brand of smart security: one that acknowledges military power, yet treats continuous dialogue between adversaries as the more durable source of security.
The significance of October 26 therefore extends beyond a single meeting. In June 2025, Muslim states stood together at the OIC foreign ministers’ conference in Istanbul to condemn attacks on Iran and call for de-escalation. After the February 28, 2026 US-Israeli assault on Iran, however, regional states gradually drifted apart as the Israeli-US aggression continued and Iran expanded its defensive response to target US assets in the region. In some cases, active antagonism resulted, though Pakistan’s active diplomacy between KSA and Iran prevented direct confrontation.
In Tehran, under Pakistan’s initiative, that arc began to turn full circle. Representatives of Iran and all three members of the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement sat together and committed to continuing dialogue. No final security architecture emerged, nor could one have been expected from a first meeting. What has emerged, though, is the beginning of a process through which West Asia’s Muslim states may purposefully shape their own security environment.
The dialogue will continue. And Pakistan yet again helped bring the world back from an all-out confrontation between US-Israel and Iran, one that Trump and Netanyahu were continuously threatening to initiate.
The writer is a foreign policy & international security expert. She tweets/posts @nasimzehra and can be reached at: [email protected]
