08 Aug 2026 9 min read Despatch

‘A shield of peace’

The weekend despatch: A new military alliance is taking applications. An unknown ancestor is in every human genome. + Who is Kurt Ballou?

—The District bureau

Haidan

Developments

Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan have just agreed that an attack on one of them is an attack on all. Now what?
In Spain, a five-man forensic team tries to identify 80 people who died in a single crossing from Morocco into Ceuta. … The Pentagon denies it’s short of missile interceptors, then moves to triple production. … & Geneticists find two long-lost human populations in our DNA.

From the files

What could disarming Hezbollah actually settle? Vali Nasr on the last time Israel occupied Lebanon.
How could an unexpected event transform a work of art? Bryan Singer on a secret monument in Southern Lebanon, its tangled politics, and his first film in seven years.

Feature

What happened to the “public intellectual”? Raymond Geuss on a role that lasted 70 years—and why he won’t really miss it.

Music

Who is Kurt Ballou?
& New tracks from Russian Circles, Danny L. Harle x Doss, Four Tet, Slint, & John Carpenter (yes, that John Carpenter).

+ Weather report

Sand from the Sahara is keeping the Atlantic quiet. It won’t last …

Developments

Consultations to follow

When gunmen seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, Pakistani commandos helped take it back. Pakistani officers built much of the Saudi air force and still serve in it. In 2023, the Saudis bought Turkish drones, in what the Turks called their largest defense export ever. And in April, with Iranian missiles hitting Saudi territory, the kingdom said Pakistani troops and fighter jets had arrived.

At the Al-Safa Palace in Mecca on Friday, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, with Pakistan’s military chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, standing behind them. Their statement says an armed attack on any one of the three “shall be regarded as an attack against them all.” Sharif called it a “shield of peace.” Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said it had been two years and eight months in the making, that it isn’t directed at Iran, and that it’s “technically the same” as NATO’s Article 5.

Turkey has the second-largest army in NATO. Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s biggest oil exporters. Pakistan has the only nuclear weapons in a Muslim country.

What are they doing?

Already on the payroll. Pakistan has trained Saudi forces for decades and kept its officers inside the Saudi air force. Turkey and Pakistan have been trading warships and training aircraft for years. Saudi Arabia pays for a good deal of it. Mansoor Ahmed, of the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, sums up the division of labor: Pakistan and Turkey bring the defense industries, and Saudi Arabia brings the money to spend on them.
The joining instructions. Fidan says the alliance will get a committee of ministers, on NATO’s model, and a general secretariat in Saudi Arabia; the first committee meeting will settle what the members can ask of one another. He also said: “We have started here as three countries and we have to take very humble but concrete steps.” Erdoğan says the agreement is open to any country in the region that wants in, and Fidan says Egypt could join once some technical matters are settled. The four of them have been meeting on the war since the spring, in a group they call the R4.
The television answer. The Saudis and Pakistanis signed a bilateral version in Riyadh last September, with the same attack-on-one language. On the day of that signing, Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Asif, went on Geo News and said the capabilities Pakistan has “will be made available” to Saudi Arabia—the first time a nuclear-armed government outside the Nonproliferation Treaty had offered its deterrent to another. Friday’s statement says nothing about nuclear weapons, and Saudi Arabia’s deputy minister for public diplomacy, Rayed Krimly, wrote that the agreement isn’t “linked to any nuclear ambitions or arms race.”

Iran hit Saudi Arabia repeatedly through the spring—energy plants, civilian infrastructure, American installations—and mostly stopped after the April 8 ceasefire; the militias it backs in Iraq and Yemen didn’t. The Houthis, who hold much of Yemen, have declared a blockade of Saudi ports. Last week the kingdom announced a 14-country coalition to guard its sea lanes, Pakistan among them. On Thursday, the day Sharif landed in Jeddah, a Saudi official said the kingdom was bracing for a coordinated attack out of Iraq and Yemen.

The Saudis have relied on an American security guarantee for decades. This year they’ve been asking Washington to end the war, and Washington has kept fighting it. Fidan says the new alliance replaces nothing. Ebrahim Rezaei, a member of the Iranian parliament’s national-security committee, wrote that “a paper agreement with Turkey and Pakistan will not bring them security, just as decades of one-sided dependence on the Americans failed to do so.”

Pakistan and Turkey both border Iran, and both have worked at staying out of this war: The Pakistanis have a large Shia population and a working relationship with Tehran; the Turks share Iran’s interest in containing Kurdish separatism. Turkey is also carrying a second mutual-defense obligation, to the 31 other governments in NATO. What any of them could be asked for, Fidan says, the members will decide among themselves—“the degree, form, and format of support”—when the time comes.

Meanwhile

Waiting in Tangier. A week after the crossing, the police in Ceuta, Spain’s city on the Moroccan coast, have named four of the 80 people whose bodies came ashore. The city will bury most of the dead this week. Spain’s youth minister, Sira Rego, says 1,342 children are in Ceuta now, and hopes to move them to the mainland within weeks. In Tangier, Jamal Bahloul is still waiting on word of his brother Mohamed, 22. … See “‘A reliable partner’.”
Made to order. On Monday, the Pentagon signed contracts to triple its production of Patriot interceptors. On Tuesday, CNN reported that American forces have used up nearly 80 percent of their THAAD interceptors, which stop ballistic missiles, and about half their Patriots. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X that the report is “NOT TRUE.” Jerry McGinn, a former Pentagon official, points out that Patriot interceptors aren’t “designed to be built like Ford trucks” but are essentially handmade, taking 24 months from contract to delivery. … See “The rate of fire.”
One percent of everyone. Berkeley geneticists have turned up two extinct human populations in the DNA of people alive today. Writing in Science, they describe one that parted from our ancestors about 800,000 years ago and had children with them in Africa, leaving up to a percent of the genome of everyone now alive—roughly what the Neanderthals left. The other goes back 1.8 million years and reached us through the Denisovans, an extinct human cousin. Priya Moorjani, who ran the study, says human evolution is starting to look less like a branching tree than “a complex web of populations connected by repeated episodes of migration and mixing.”