Senior officials from Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia begin a security meeting in Tehran.

By Junaid S. Ahmad | MEMO | October 27, 2026

For nearly half a century, Iran’s adversaries have tried to isolate it, intimidate it, sanction it into submission and bomb it into irrelevance. Now, in a remarkable inversion of regional power politics, three countries historically invested in its containment have arrived in Tehran to discuss their security with the very state they were supposed to marginalise.

The country they could not defeat is becoming the country they cannot afford to ignore.

Yesterday, Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman, Pakistan’s army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir and Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalın met Iranian officials in an encounter whose diplomatic courtesies barely concealed its strategic significance.

The Mecca Pact, the joint defence agreement that Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed in Mecca in August, was supposed to consolidate a formidable Sunni-led defence alignment. Yet its representatives have come to Tehran confronting an inconvenient reality: Iran cannot be excluded from regional security merely because Washington and its partners find its independence intolerable.

Apparently, the Islamic Republic has become considerably more respectable since demonstrating that it cannot be conveniently eliminated.

This is the distinction between military destruction and strategic defeat that Washington and Israel persistently confuse. Overwhelming firepower can devastate infrastructure, assassinate officials and inflict enormous suffering. It cannot manufacture political submission.

Iran has survived military confrontation, retained retaliatory capabilities and forced neighbouring governments to reconsider the potentially catastrophic consequences of another war.

Survival becomes strategic victory when your adversaries must reorganise their calculations around it.

For Saudi Arabia, the reckoning is particularly humiliating. Riyadh spent decades treating American military supremacy as an insurance policy against Iranian influence. Yemen exposed the bankruptcy of that assumption.

Ansar Allah, Yemen’s Houthi movement, demonstrated that superior arsenals cannot guarantee security against an adversary capable of imposing disproportionate costs. The Saudi monarchy possesses spectacular weaponry, immense wealth and powerful patrons. Yet none of these has eliminated its vulnerability to Yemeni retaliation.

Now Riyadh finds itself seeking Tehran’s cooperation to manage a conflict that its military superiority has failed to resolve.

Evidently, purchasing American weapons is considerably easier than purchasing strategic security.

Pakistan’s predicament is scarcely less revealing. Munir presides over a military establishment accustomed to presenting strategic dependency as diplomatic sophistication. Islamabad’s defence commitments to Riyadh now threaten to entangle Pakistan in confrontations with Iran and Yemen that serve neither its geography nor its national interests.

The Mecca Pact promises collective security. Its less advertised feature is collective exposure to somebody else’s strategic miscalculations.

Munir must now reconcile his obligations to Saudi patrons with the inconvenient realities of Iranian power. It is an awkward assignment for an establishment that has repeatedly mistaken proximity to foreign power for genuine strategic independence.

Türkiye confronts a different calculation but reaches a similar conclusion. Ankara understands that NATO membership, military capabilities and regional ambitions cannot abolish geography. No credible security architecture can be constructed by pretending Iran is dispensable.

The deeper contradiction, however, lies within the Mecca Pact itself.

Its members seek the reassurance of collective defence while attempting to avoid being dragged into another American-Israeli confrontation. An attack on one may formally constitute an attack on all. But such commitments become considerably less attractive when Iranian retaliation, Yemeni escalation and vulnerable Gulf infrastructure enter the equation.

Collective defence sounds magnificent until someone presents the collective bill.

Iran’s achievement is not that its neighbours have embraced its revolutionary worldview. They have not. Saudi Arabia remains deeply connected to Washington, Pakistan continues its elaborate balancing act, and Türkiye remains embedded in NATO.

The significance runs deeper: these governments increasingly recognise that excluding Iran from regional security may expose them to greater dangers than engaging it.

That realisation strikes at the foundations of the American security paradigm.

For decades, Washington cultivated regional dependence on American protection while organising strategic anxieties around Iranian power. Now those same governments are exploring cooperation with the country they were encouraged to regard as an existential threat.

The irony is devastating. Decades of attempting to contain Iran may have helped establish its indispensability.

And Tehran, displaying the composure of a state conscious of its diplomatic leverage, has welcomed its visitors graciously. No triumphalist declarations are necessary. The spectacle speaks adequately for itself.

The Mecca Pact arrived ostensibly to discuss regional stability. What it encountered was the strategic consequence of its own failed assumptions.

Iran did not have to join the alliance. The alliance had to come to Iran.

Machine tools and other equipment from seven countries, led by China, work at Russian plants that make ballistic missiles and their components, Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) said on 26 October. The 30 items are a small slice of HUR’s War&Sanctions portal, which lists 1,698 machine tools at 223 Russian plants.

Seventeen of the 30 were made outside China, in Germany, Taiwan, the US, Türkiye, Switzerland, and Italy. One of HUR’s proposals reaches past Russia and China, to the firms that supply parts for Chinese machine tools. The list comes two weeks after the EU blacklisted 1,569 Russian arms suppliers and executives. More than half of those listings hit the ballistic missile supply chain, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said. Sanctioning a company, though, does not stop the machines in its workshops.

A Chinese machine at the Iskander plant

HUR’s statement leads with a GX-650 five-axis machining center made by China’s Hyper Machine Tool. Such computer-controlled machines cut complex metal parts from several angles. HUR said it works at the Votkinsk Plant, which the agency described as the maker of 9M723 missiles for the Iskander-M system and the missile section of the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, an air-launched ballistic missile.

HUR has flagged Votkinsk before. In November 2025, it published hackathon findings showing that Russian companies supplied Chinese and Taiwanese machine tools to the plant after the full-scale invasion began.

Chinese Shtral turning and milling centers work at PEMZ Molot, which builds electronics units for Iskander-M missiles, according to HUR’s statement. At UPKB Detal, which makes altimeters for hypersonic Zircon cruise missiles, HUR found measuring equipment from Germany’s Rohde & Schwarz.

The portal entries paint a broader picture. Only four of the 30 entries list a ballistic missile among the plant’s weapons. Most of the rest list cruise missiles, glide-bomb kits, guided artillery shells, or Geran-2 attack drones. HUR did not publish its evidence, though the portal says partner agencies can request it.

Foreign parts inside Chinese machines

Russian plants use the equipment to make missiles and parts such as altimeters, control surfaces, and gyroscopes, HUR said. The agency noted a growing number of Chinese machine tools, including five-axis models. According to HUR, those Chinese machines contain European, Japanese, and Taiwanese components, from numerical control systems to precision spindles and bearings. In HUR’s assessment, Russia still cannot replace equipment from leading foreign makers with its own.

An animal stepped on a mudbrick while it was still soft and left its paw prints in the clay. The brick went into the wall of a house. The house burned and collapsed. About 4,000 years later, archaeologists pulled the brick out of the rubble, prints still visible. Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet […]

Ankara, 27 oct (Prensa Latina) El presidente del Parlamento de Türkiye, Numan Kurtulmus, afirmó que la causa palestina es justa y defendió el establecimiento de un Estado palestino libre con Jerusalén como capital, divulgó hoy la agencia Anadolu.

The post Un Estado palestino libre es imprescindible, afirma Türkiye first appeared on Noticias Prensa Latina.

La agenda oficial del encuentro abordó las consecuencias del conflicto impulsado por Estados Unidos e Israel, la situación en Palestina y el Líbano, así como el panorama militar en Yemen.