Turkey Says Mecca Defense Pact Is Defensive, Won’t Send Troops Abroad

The framing matters more than the pact itself: by stressing that any troop deployment must follow constitutional and legal procedures, Ankara is pre-emptively capping the scope of its commitments. That is aimed less at external adversaries than at domestic audiences wary of entanglement in other signatories' conflicts. The open question is whether the agreement's mutual-defense language, once tested by an actual attack on a signatory, can stay as narrow as Fidan describes.