Larry Johnson correctly observes that the new military alliance in the Middle East is not a US-aligned one:
The Western commentariat filed the Mecca agreement under a comfortable heading. When Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement on August 7 — an armed attack on one to be treated as an attack on all — the reflexive label was “Islamic NATO,” a Sunni bloc, three of the Muslim world’s largest militaries welded together by sectarian identity. That reading was obsolete almost before the ink dried. What is actually taking shape is not a Sunni alliance against Iran. It is the first load-bearing beam of the post-American security architecture that Russia and China have been calling for — and Tehran is about to walk through the door…
The Mecca agreement was sold to Western audiences as a Sunni bloc and dismissed as a club of American clients. It is neither. It is the first pillar of the security architecture Putin and Wang Yi named this spring after sitting with Iran’s foreign minister — a regionally led, Russia- and China-backed framework that folds Iran in as a legitimate power and pushes the United States out as the indispensable one. The Americans built their Gulf position on keeping Sunni and Shia apart and keeping the dollar in the middle. Both pillars are being pulled at once — and the structure going up in their place was drawn in Moscow and Beijing.
I was very confused when I saw the mainstream media covering the Mecca agreement as something that was good for Clown World. It seemed very obvious to me that it wasn’t an anti-Iran association, since Pakistan is one of Iran’s closest allies, but rather, a post-US security arrangement.